The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [67]
When I’m finished with the revisions, it’s another trip to Kinko’s on a Thursday evening, pulling a Night of the Living Dead in sweats again. Usually my editor and I do only one revision cycle, not because I’m a miracle worker or a genius, but because I’m really critical about my own work and beat the hell out of the material before she gets to see it.
Next up are copyedits. After my editor reads the book through again and approves it for publication, the manuscript goes to a copy editor, who checks it for dropped words, grammatical issues, trademark spellings, continuity glitches between scenes, and time line stuff. She also puts in the typesetting notations—which are like a Morse code of dots and dashes made in red pencil.
I should probably confess that I don’t think I’m a joy to copyedit. In my books I use a lot of vernacular. Personally, I think so-called “common language” is more interesting and apropos than “proper English”; it’s passionate and powerful in ways that “wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow” just isn’t. I’m very grateful to the copy editor we tend to use because she doesn’t try to beat me over the head with The Chicago Manual of Style (the reference bible for grammatical propriety).
When the copy edits come back, I go through the manuscript, answer any queries on the margins, stet or accept any word additions or subtractions (stet is the word you use to reject what the copy editor has done), and address any issues that my editor and I have come up with on the revisions. Usually my manuscripts are pretty clean, but I still manage to find things that bug me. When I read my writing, it’s like running my hand down a cloth that should be seamless. Things that aren’t smooth irritate the ever living hell out of me, and I have to work and rework the words until I don’t feel rough spots anymore.
After I send the copyedited manuscript back, the next step is galleys. Galleys are an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven printout of exactly what will be in the bound book—think of opening a book up to any page split, and the galleys are the left and right sides reproduced. I go through the whole thing in this form, and I always want to fuss over and change too much. I’m truly never satisfied.
So that’s my process, and I’ve got to say it was complicated by Zsadist, because some of the scenes in him I didn’t want to write, much less edit. Even for this compendium, when I’ve pored through all the other books picking out passages for the dossiers . . . I can’t do that with Z.
Which is kind of weird, because out of all the males and men I’ve ever written about, he’s my favorite. Bar none. But there’s a lot in his story that’s really upsetting.
What scenes got to me? They’re still in my head so vividly I don’t need to open Lover Awakened to remember them. One of the hardest for me to write was the sequence where Z is led down into what was going to be his cell for the next hundred years by the private guard he used to serve ale to when he was a kitchen boy. He’s just been raped by the Mistress for the first time and is so innocent and hurt and terrified. None of the males will look at him or touch him or take pity on him. They think of him as unclean even though he is a victim. As he walks along, crying, with the remnants of what the Mistress had used on him still on his body, my heart absolutely broke.
It’s just awful.
Another scene that absolutely killed me was when Bella finds Z on the floor of his shower, scrubbing at himself, trying to get clean enough for her to feed from him. He’s rubbing his skin raw, but no matter how much soap and friction he uses, he still feels absolutely filthy.
Then there was the scene where Z forced her to hurt him so that he could finish sexually.
But there are also sections I don’t want to read over again that aren’t about Z.
I knew going into the book that Wellsie’s death was going to be hard on readers.