Every year, in March, I go away on a writers retreat with a group of eight or nine other writers. We’ve been doing it for years — thirteen, to be exact. Not everyone can come every year, but most years we manage seven or eight of us.

It began as a way of breaking down isolation — most of us only ever see each other once a year at the annual Romance Writers of Australia conference, and that’s always so busy, it’s hard to find time to really talk. When we started, not all of us knew everyone, but of course, now we’re all firm friends.

The very first retreat was in Queenscliff, overlooking the beach, but when that place became unavailable, the second year we went inland. It was a beautiful area, but we decided we needed to be near the beach. And for the last eight years we’ve settled on this place — in south-east Queensland.  

As we’re all professional writers (ie earning our living by writing) and all have impending deadlines,  we can’t afford to simply let  a week by the sea be a social occasion, so we spend the mornings (and some of the rest of the day) writing. And staring out to sea . . .  This was the view from my room this year.

The sea and sky offers an endlessly changing vista and as well as gazing, I took more than a few photos. I have quite a few of this sunset, for instance, which came after a blustery, blowy day.

We also do some professional development, and plan and schedule lunch-time and evening sessions. Those sessions are not simply a way of keeping up with the latest developments in publishing, they’re also a way of refreshing the muse, and trying new things. I posted a list of this year’s sessions here, on the Word Wench blog, where I blog every fortnight.

I should also confess that there’s also a wee bit of shopping done. I’m not much of a shopper in general, but my friends are, and once enticed into a local shoe shop with a sale that most of them had taken advantage of, I came away with these very comfy new boots. I have a fondness for red shoes — I suspect it’s a lifelong rebellion against the message of the story The Red Shoes, where a little girl was horribly punished for the sin of wanting pretty shoes. Bah humbug to that, I say, as I don my red shoes!

In March, Queensland is still very  warm and summery. But when I return to Melbourne, autumn has very definitely arrived, as my Virginia creeper gloriously demonstrates. Every year this plant swathes my garden in gorgeousness and gives me such pleasure as I watch the changing colours.

I’ve just sent off the page proofs of Marry In Secret — Rose’s story.
I find page proofs agonizing to do. This is the final step in preparing the manuscript for publication — my final step that is, not the publisher’s. It’s the last time I get to change anything. 

The stages in writing for publication go like this:

1) I send my manuscript to my editor at Berkley.

2) She reads it and makes comments, tells me the bits she likes, points out areas she thinks aren’t clear or that I could strengthen or tighten or expand on — that kind of thing. She doesn’t change my sentences or anything — these are just general comments about the story. It’s called a structural edit — concentrating on how the story unfolds.

3) She sends her comments back to me, and I go through the manuscript again and make any changes I want to, keeping her comments in mind. It’s usually been a few weeks since I read it, so I can see it with a fresh eye. 

4) Then I send it back and she reads it and if she’s happy with it, it will be sent to a copyeditor.

The copyeditor edits on a word and sentence level. She will correct typos and apply house style to things such as hyphenated words and the use of commas. Copyeditors are wonderfully picky — they will spot that the timeline doesn’t quite follow — mine actually prepares a day by day calendar for each story — or spot that someone’s eye color has changed, or a butler had been renamed. Continuity things.

They also spot grammatical errors, and the words that I’ve forgotten to change to American spelling — Australian spelling is the same as English spelling, so my people go travelling not traveling, and move towards the door, when apparently Americans would say toward. A copyeditor also spots when water gurgles nosily down a pipe instead of noisily. She will query expressions like “walking in a crocodile” (the way school children walk in a line, two by two) in case readers might not understand, and “the wee small hours” which could be a tautology. (It is, but it’s also a common expression.)

5) The copyedited manuscript then comes back to me to go through again, so I can approve  or reject those changes and make any other changes I want to. It’s the last time I really get to change anything. As well as the small things the copyeditor has flagged, I might decide to delete a scene, or add one in — I did both this time around. 

6) Then it’s back to the main editor for a final read through, and then it goes to be laid out exactly as it will appear in the final book. 

7) This then comes back to me in a pdf for a final final read through to spot any mistakes. I find this stage in the process excruciating. By now I’ve read the story I don’t know how many times and I’m usually sick of it. But I have to read it, not for story, or expression or characterization, but for tiny little mistakes, a comma in the wrong place, or a typo that everyone has missed — really nit-picky stuff.  Because if I miss something, it’s certain that a reader will pounce on it. This time I found 7 small mistakes — to instead of so, that kind of thing. I might have missed some but by now I’m practically cross-eyed.  The next time I see this book will be as a real book, published, bound, and when it’s too late to change anything.

8) I send back my changes — I list them in a document, but I also print off the pages affected, mark the changes clearly with a pen and take a photograph of each page and email that to my editor. That’s how it’s done these days — all electronic.

So now Rose and her story has gone. I always feel a bit sick when the final final version has gone. There’s nothing I can do now except hope people will like the story. And get cracking on the next story — George’s story.

Hi all, just a quick post to let you know that I’ve been having problems with my website. I’m hoping to get them sorted in the near future, but in the meantime, I wanted to apologize for the apparent lack of blog posts in the last month.

I have been writing blogs, but the website problems have meant that they didn’t get sent out to all you who have subscribed to my blog posts. I have reported and reported the problems, but my current website hosts have been very lackluster in their responses, so I’m now in the process of changing servers. It’s very disappointing as I’ve been with the same host since 2001, but when the problems of the last two years outnumber those of the previous fifteen, you know it’s time to go.

I’m hoping the changeover will be pretty seamless, but feel free to email me if you encounter any problems or have any questions.