Sunday 12 July 2015

1st to 3rd

Well, the weekend is drawing to a close and my highlight today was having a beautiful french lamb rack.

My local supermarket had packed them up and frozen them, and then something terrible had happened and they'd defrosted and had to be sold at a knock-down drag-out price.

While I was looking at them, certain all the while that they couldn't be frozen because it was on labels all over them, I started to calculate how many I could buy and freeze for a future date.

I know, right? Personally I think we're arriving at the supermarket far too early. My brain needs time to wake up long after my body has put in the hard yards.

The rest of my weekend, aside from the work I was complaining about bitterly yesterday, was tied up in doing the fantastic task of editing.

A task that is usually full of thrills and chills (yeah, where's my sarcasm mark when I need one) was rendered even more intolerable by the decision to change my beautiful 1st person manuscript into third person.

The best advice on this was proffered by my current editor who noted that people don't read books all at once, and when they pick them up it's easier for them to orient themselves if it's written in third person.

I get that. It wasn't really necessary that my manuscript be in 1st person. I'm quite happy to make my reader's lives easier.

I am no longer happy to do that.

It is too late to stop now.

All of the 'I' changes to 'she' and 'my' changes to 'her' are driving me mental. Not to mention that I got sick of doing them individually so used Word to find and replace. That means all the dialogue has to be turned back the other way, and I haven't managed to turn every possible punctuation source into every other possible punctuation result so there's still many, many changes to make.

There's also the problem that 'me' occurs inside a lot of other words. I asked word to change only the 'me' formats that had a space after them, but this also left me changing the theher back to theme and the meher back to meme.

Couldn't I hire a child to do this for me her? Apart from the work regulations and me her not having any, I she meant.

4 comments:

  1. Not sure whether I agree with your editor or not. There are a lot of first person books that do really well. :)
    @dino0726 from 
    FictionZeal - Impartial, Straighforward Fiction Book Reviews

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  2. My first two were 1st person, but this one is multiple PsOV so I took his point!

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  3. Been there, lol, do you prefer first to third? It makes it much easier to address the internal as it avoids all awkward transitions into thought and feeling.

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  4. I do prefer it for most of my characters because I like to hear what's going on inside their heads, and that's the easiest way in.

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