The Prodigal Hour, Edited

Yesterday, just the day after my birthday, I got the copy-edited manuscript of The Prodigal Hour back from my editrix.

She had let me see some of the pages before she’d finished, so I’ve already started the final polish–which is basically what this is. A couple outright grammatical errors–I think every manuscript has a few, and Gaiman’s law, of course, states that the first time you open your newly published novel you will do so to the page that contains the most egregious type–but otherwise it’s a fairly clean edit.

Makes sense, of course.

The Prodigal Hour was originally called A Different Tomorrow, and then All Our Yesterdays (which is referenced in Meets Girl) before I went to LA and USC and the title finally came to me. Up until then, I’d been working on a draft of it for several years, but it was only when I got into workshops and began adapting the novel into a screenplay that I really started to make headway on it and improve it.

Kersh helped me reduce the technical gobbledygook, which can become a problem when one is dealing with time travel and attempting to be, if not scientific, at least credible about it. My adviser, Sid Stebel, helped me figure out structure and beats and really carry it off, hewing closely to genre while at the same time allowing breathing room beyond it. It’s always tough when a project outright refuses a simple genre and starts crossing them and uncrossing them and meeting them back around again.

So this week, I’ll be revising, and then I’ll code the book for Kindle for proofreading.

And advanced copies.

Stay tuned for some news on that, and details on how you can get your very own Kindle copy of The Prodigal Hour weeks ahead of its release date.