Editorial Feedback

This week I received detailed editorial feedback from my amazing editing team -- my two sons.

You can probably imagine that this is a somewhat scary process. Bill is a filmmaker and director, and has a degree in (among other things) film criticism. Ben's college education and degree is in English. I'm a retired computer geek. What could possibly go wrong?

Fortunately, they both liked the book in general, but also fortunately, they both had suggestions for improvements. Ben read the manuscript over a period of several days, and took the "high road", offering alternatives for a couple plot lines, observations on characterizations.

Bill took notes as he was reading, and presented me with a hundred or so impressions and ideas, as he came across them, in the text. Some of them are going to be easy to deal with (e.g. the full moon always sets at sunrise!), while others are going to require a subtle but important re-work of one of the relationships.

Oddly enough, after meeting with them, I have a sense of relief and exhilaration. I had confidence they weren't going to say, "dad, this book is terrible, you should give up on it", but now that I have their specific comments, I can get busy and do a modest re-write, and get ready to publish this thing!