So Leah, my redoubtable editor at DAW Books, has just sent me her suggested final edits for Braking Day. “Polishing” she calls it. She has a couple of asks. Both are small in terms of words to be written, but one is significantly trickier to accomplish than the other. Doing edits gets harder as a book progresses. It’s like dressmaking, I suspect. When you just have a bolt of cloth you can cut it pretty much anyway you like, but when you’re taking needle and scissors to something that’s practically ready to wear, you are very much constrained by what you’ve already done. You don’t want your last piece of work to look like your last piece of work: like something you just tacked on at the end. It has to look seamless. Not easy!
On the other hand, like virtually all of Leah’s suggestions, I have no doubt it will make Braking Day a better book. I remember the first time I spoke to Leah how shocked I was at how deeply she’d read it. She’d given far more thought to the words I’d written than I’d ever given – or could have given – to writing them in the first place. It was a genuinely enthralling experience. Followed by four months of heavy lifting.
I also remember telling her that while I was presently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plans were afoot to move to Edinburgh, Scotland, on account of the day job, at which Leah mentioned she was working with two American women who now lived there. I thought no more about it until I was browsing the SF section of my local bookstore the other day and I came across a DAW hardback with two female authors from California who had settled in the Promised Land. Clearly, sunlight can have no appeal for either of them. Further digging confirmed that Leah had indeed edited the book, which has the following opening line:
“Eris got the call from her commander while she was killing a man.“
How can you not buy a book that starts like that? Seven Devils, by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, is an unabashed, fast-moving space opera, chock full of some very angry women, who, believe you me, have a lot to be angry about. It’s published by DAW here in the US and by Gollancz, I think, in the UK. It has a very high body count. Honestly, I had no idea the redoubtable Leah was so bloodthirsty. Did she suggest that the authors kill more people, or less, I wonder? Enquiring minds want to know!