Every inch between my neck and my tailbone is mad at me. Four 14-hour days.
It was SO MUCH WORK.
And of course it didn’t help that I had all kinds of annoying little timeline/chronology issues that had to be addressed. I thought I’d addressed them all in THE PREVIOUS TEN DRAFTS… but I guess not. Thank God for copy editors. This process has totally been a crash course in writing.
And so now, without further ado, here are the top ten things I learned this past weekend:
10. The difference between further and farther. (Gee, I suspected there was a difference, but since nobody’s ever called me on it, I never bothered to learn what that difference was… till now.)
9. Cameltoe is one word. (And should you decide to click on this link to Urban Dictionary because you don’t know what cameltoe is, just know that this Jenny does NOT have cameltoe with her new leather pants!)
8. Jello should be written as Jell-O. (And I have to say, I was alarmed to see that I had used this word three times… in a story that has nothing whatsoever to do with gelatin-based food products.)
7. Italics are not the enemy.
6. “Excess dialogue tags are,” he said.
5. You cannot partially make up a college football Bowl game that took place in 1980. You either make it up all the way, or you stay true to what really happened. Because your copy editor will LOOK IT UP and NAIL YOU ON IT, including notes on the actual players’ names and the final score.
4. There is no Nike Cup at USC Irvine. It’s at UC Irvine.
3. Bum-fuck has a hyphen.
2. Batshit does not.
1. The same character cannot wake up in a bed AND a leather chair at the same time.
Like I said, copy editors rule.