Tag Archive for Liz Szabla editor

New Book, SHAKEN, Is Coming Along (Fall, 2024)

I’ve been slowly, methodically going through the final edits for SHAKEN, my upcoming middle-grade novel (Macmillan, Fall 2024). The book involves a soccer-obsessed 7th grader, Kristy, who suffers from post-concussion syndrome. It’s a story about identity, anxiety, panic attacks, art therapy, new friendships, making mistakes and, finally, coming true to one’s ever-evolving self. Anyway, it’s a great relief to read through all these words once again, months later, and still feel like, yeah, I like this — I’m proud of it — this is what I hoped to say.

I’m grateful to my editor Liz Szabla and, always, Jean Feiwel, for the opportunity and the steadfast support. True story: I published my first book 38 years ago . . . and Jean was there for that one, too. She’ll never learn. Grades 5-8. 

Copyediting Process: The Final, Final, Final Edits

The only thing that matters is the final book

in the reader’s hands.

Nobody cares how you got there.

If it was on time or three years late.

If the first draft sucked.

If the edits were massive or minor.

Nobody reads a crappy book and thinks,

‘Yeah, but wow, he really nailed the deadlines!'”

 

I have not been as all-in with ye olde blog as I used to be when I began it back in May of 2008. Part of that has to do with the general trend away from blog readership to shorter, faster, dopier forms of social media (I am not on InstaGram or Twitter; only Facebook). 

But I remind myself of this blog’s central mission: To pull back the curtain on one writer’s career and process, which I still hope is a worthwhile endeavor. 

To that end: Below, please find an exact copy of my “final, final, final” corrections for my upcoming middle-grade book, Upstander, as emailed to my editor, Liz Szabla. This is the last chance to get things right. 

By this point, the editing process has already gone round and round, back and forth, up and down. Liz tends to concentrate on the macro, the big picture; a team of talented copyeditors bring it down to the micro level. In this book, for example, I had some troubling issues with tense. Somewhat embarrassing, since I pride myself on producing fairly clean manuscripts. We had to sort through that mess. Back and forth, back and forth. Finally, I got my last-last-last chance: speak now or forever hold your peace. We are in Microland. The nitty and the gritty.

Weariness sets in. A part of me doesn’t feel up for yet another painstaking read-through. So the task is to summon that energy, put myself in that space once more, and read once more with that critical eye. Hard because I thought I’d already done that several times before. At the same time, I don’t want to over-think things and foul up perfectly good work. 

Anyway, for this round, I mostly concentrated on deletions. Finding words I could cut, fussing with pronouns, one last search for any typos or repeated words. Minor stuff, and not a lot of it. For Upstander, I quietly waged war on commas, since I’m sometimes prone to an excess of pauses. By this round, however, that mission was more or less accomplished. All good except for the fact that I was hating on Chapter 6 [Ghosts]. It was too slow, too interior, too wordy, too much — and maybe too clever. So I took an axe to it, chopping away sentences, paragraphs, pages. Rare for me at this late stage, so I did it apologetically, knowing that I was giving the designers more hassles than they might have expected. Don’t get me wrong: I like this book a lot. Very proud, in particular, of the substance use disorder theme. There are things I wanted to say, with compassion and sensitivity, putting a face on the impact of this terrible disease. But Chapter 6 was bugging me.

Side Note #1. These edits, and an earlier round, are NOT represented in the Advance Reader’s Copies that are available in digital form at NetGalley. (Educators and reviewers may request a copy directly at NetGalley; contact me if you have any problems.) 

Side Note #2. Here is one absolute truth that I have learned across 35 years as a published author: The only thing that matters is the final book in the reader’s hands. Nobody cares how you got there. If the book was on time or three years late. If the first draft sucked. If the edits were massive or minor. Nobody reads a crappy book and thinks, “Yeah, but wow, he really nailed the deadlines!”

Is it perfect now? Ha, ha, ho. Heh-heh. That’s funny. Well, no; not perfect. But for now, all things considered, the best we could do. 

Here’s the note I sent to Liz, an author’s last attempt to get it right . . . 

 

UPSTANDER FINAL, FINAL, FINAL EDITS

10/2/20

16, Line 9: DELETE “a while of”

17, Line 2 : REPLACE “boys” with “Griff”

22, Line 20: DELETE “and tightened.”

26, Line 8. DELETE “, she said,. NOW READS: “Stop. Just stop.”

26, Line 9, REPLACE “She” with “Mary”

CHAPTER 6: Yuck.

LIZ SZABLA, Note: I just feel like this is a weak chapter and too long. It’s been a problem from the beginning. How about these cuts? At same time, I don’t want to create huge headaches for the designers. This is the only chapter where I do this to you guys.

27, Line 4-9: DELETE: “The same tug . . . zoning out.”

28, Lines 11-12: DELETE: “The real brother . . . for good.”

28-29, Line 17: DELETE Paragraph that begins, “Mary could tell.”

DELETE Next Paragraph that begins, “Ghosts are weird.”

29, Line 11: DELETE “At least . . . a shower.”

31, Line 23: DELETE “, Mary mused,”

32, Line 8-10: REVISE AS: “Their father’s death was harder on Jonny, though he never said much about it.”

41, Line 6: REPLACE “she” with “her mother”                 

73, Line 2: INSERT “old” between “his” and “friends”

121, Line 5: DELETE “for two weeks.”

122, Line 6: DELETE “two-week”

130-131: Line 21+: DELETE “Sometimes Mary felt . . . happening?” THEN REPLACE “She” with “Mary.” NOW READS: “. . . woods beyond. Mary longed for . . . .

151, Line 2: REPLACE “thin” with “insincere”

151, Line 14: DELETE “The deep freeze.”

152, Line 19: INSERT: “the day ended and” between “was glad when” and “the final bell”

157, Line 1: REPLACE “like” with “as if”

162, Line 5: REPLACE “usually” with “had”

166, Line 9-10: DELETE “, and after a pause finished”

174, Line 18 : REPLACE “He’s” with “He was”

227, Line 19: REPLACE “tomorrow” with “the next day.”

235, NOTE: After Line 16, place add BREAK SPACE – not sure what you call that, though we’ve done it a few times in book – so we can push handwritten note to top of page 236. Think it makes sense, the shift, and will look much better.

Look Who’s Illustrating My Next Book

Yeah, this artist, the great Mary GrandPre. Maybe you don’t know her name, but I’m pretty sure you know her work.

So. How does that happen? How does it work in publishing, the writer-illustrator connection? I get asked that a lot.

Though there are exceptions and variations, my book with Mary followed a well-established pattern. Back in 2016, I submitted a manuscript to my editor which was accepted for publication. Just words on a page. In this case, interconnected haiku.

Looking back on a my original submission to Liz Szabla, my editor, dated 4/22/16, I laid out my basic vision:

 

 

This collection of haiku celebrates the first day of school and a vision of community. It provides a loose, flowing narrative that carries readers through the multi-faceted moments in a school day as it touches a diverse variety of characters while they move from the bus stop to the morning pledge, to recess and lunch and the final bell.

The poems offer the illustrator opportunities to show a rich variety of children –- wild and brave, silly and earnest, friendly and a little frightened. Through the artwork, illustrations should highlight recurring characters and allow readers to see happy interactions and first steps toward friendship. We are witnesses to the beginning of a new, diverse, and open-hearted community.

There’s flexibility here. The final number of poems depends entirely on layout and editorial’s vision for the book. There are 39 included here (which strikes me as slightly high, compared to other haiku collections of this nature), whereas it could be decided to go with as few as, say, 23 poems –- allowing room for effective double-page spreads for a single haiku. 

Later in 2016, or possibly early in 2017, I was informed that Mary GrandPre had agreed to illustrate the book. I did not immediately recognize the name. The look of the book would be up to Mary, the art director and designers at Feiwel & Friends, as overseen by Liz. Often, that’s the beginning and end of a writer’s communication with the illustrator. My manuscript did not come with notes to the illustrator, as many do, beyond what I shared above.

To my delight, I did receive a lovely, complimentary email from Mary, asking for my thoughts about possibly cutting some haiku. There was a conflict where the weather described was inconsistent. We went back and forth — Mary was gracious and lovely — and I was very happy to eliminate some, because that was always my intention. I had individual haikus that highlighted the statue of liberty, a student in a wheelchair, and a teacher in a hijab. We realized that since those images would be reflected in the book visually, we were able to cut those haiku in order to make room for others.

For example, I believe everyone hoped there might be at least one spread where there was just one haiku. It turned out to be one that centered on the school library. I wrote:

 

LIBRARY

The library door

Opens: Hear the whoosh and thrum

Of the school’s heart beat.

 

Note on the haiku, which followed the traditional 5-7-5 syllable/line count: a haiku does not usually come with a title. But for this book, because it was intended for very young readers, I cheated a little and gave each one a title in the original manuscript. Somewhere along the line I fretted about that, it was a little impure, and asked Liz if maybe we should eliminate the titles. Liz replied that she liked them, believed they worked, and that they also added a visual element to the pages. I said, as I recall, “Okay!”

At a certain point in the process, it’s the only answer available. 

All Welcome Here will be published on June 16, 2020. I’m so eager to hold it in my hands — I’ll probably receive a printed copy in early May, best guess — but I’m more excited to visit schools and, perhaps, even develop some haiku workshops for students of all ages.

So, yeah, Mary GrandPre. How cool is that? How lucky am I?

Can’t wait.

 

Epigraph Page: BETTER OFF UNDEAD

Today I thought I’d share the epigraph page from my upcoming middle grade novel, Better Off Undead (Macmillan, October 2017, grades 4-8).

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The top quote was with me during the years of writing this book (yeah, it took some time). That sense of outrage and astonishment over the state of things, “What a world, what a world!” Early on, I decided on a minor sub-theme where this story mirrors certain key scenes with the Wizard in the classic film, “The Wizard of Oz.”

The second quote came later, around the time of Leonard Cohen’s passing. I’ve long been a fan. And this quote gave me exactly what I needed, the darkness but also the light. The world does feel cracked and broken, particularly where it concerns environmental issues. But as Cohen beautifully reminds us, “That’s how the light gets in.”

What precipitated today’s post is that I’ve been going through the typeset proofs for the book. It’s already been shaped into an “uncorrected” advance review copy (an ARC, in the parlance), and these pages represent my last chance before letting it fly.

IMG_2298

I’ve slowly, slowly read through these 275 pages two more times, pen in hand, making mostly minor edits. A slashed word here and there, done with a flick of the wrist, like a blade across a neck. But also, there’s a couple of sections where I’ve taken a blunter axe to the proceedings. Second thoughts! Third thoughts! Tenth thoughts! I hope my editor — Hi, Liz! — doesn’t mind. We have a phone meeting set up for next week, where we’ll go through it all, page by page, comma by comma. Yes, we enjoy walks on the beach and long, romantic conversations about punctuation.

That famous Oscar Wilde quote, “Books are never finished, merely abandoned.”

Ah, you see, getting a book published is a long process. Across almost 9 years, this blog has always been motivated by the idea of pulling back the curtain to reveal the inner workings of how a book is made. In this case, as in all cases, yes, please: pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Here’s the arc that will go out to various book review services:

IMG_2295

Looks like fun, right?

For more on epigraphs, click here.

SNEAK PREVIEW: Three Rough Sketches from the Upcoming Jigsaw Jones Book!

The book centers around a note found in a book at a Little Free Library.  I love those libraries -- they are sprinkled all over my town -- and I'm glad to spotlight the idea in my book.

The book centers around a note found in a book at a Little Free Library. I love those libraries — they are sprinkled all over my town — and I’m glad to spotlight the idea in my book.

 

Fans of Jigsaw Jones know that it has been some time since there’s been a new book in the series. Even worse, the old books have been slowly going out of print. All of that is changing in a big way, come the summer of 2017. Four previous titles will be re-released by Macmillan, plus a new book — the 41st overall! — will be published. (Click here to read a short sample from that manuscript.)

The process has been a pure pleasure for me. I loved revisiting those characters and the classic “Jigsaw Jones” brand of humor and mystery. Writing this story, The Case from Outer Space, was a rare joy. And I hope that pleasure comes through in the story itself. It’s a happy book, intended to make readers smile.

Last week the book’s gifted illustrator, R.W. Alley, sent along 27 rough-sketch illustrations that will eventually appear in the book’s interior pages in refined form. I’ve received permission from my fabulous editor, Liz Szabla, to share with you a few of those rough, unfinished sketches. I think R.W. has done a masterful job, capturing the humor and essence of these characters. I’m feeling grateful all around — and excited, too. Jigsaw Jones is back on the case!

Jigsaw's brother Billy, reading on the couch, tells Jigsaw to answer the door. The door opens and the case begins.

Jigsaw’s brother Billy, reading on the couch, tells Jigsaw to answer the door. The door opens and the case begins.

Joey eats, Jigsaw listens, and Danika explains the mysterious clue.

Joey eats, Jigsaw listens, and Danika explains the mysterious clue.