What Copy Editors Do

Hello, everyone. April is upon us, the sun is out in Northern California, and our latest notable earthquake (4.7) shook the house but didn’t do any visible damage.

I have a book update—it has been a minute! I’m not a fast writer (obviously). My pace tends to be glacial, no matter how many promises I make to myself to write faster.

During the last couple of months, I did one final rewrite on a novel that has been five years in the making, turned it in to my publisher, and got the all-clear. The book, an espionage novel set in Paris, inspired by my years there as a “trailing spouse,” is now slated for publication in early 2027. It’s a sequel to The Wonder Test.

I’ll get the copyedit on the Paris novel back later this month. Copy editors are the unsung heroes of publishing. They catch a thousand little things that, through dozens of revisions, have gone unnoticed. One biggie for me is syncing the story to a calendar: was it February in Chapter 6 but suddenly we’re back in December in Chapter 7, even though the narrative is linear?

The most complicated edit I ever put a copy editor through was for The Year of Fog, which begins with a child disappearing on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and then ticks down the days since the disappearance as the search unfolds. With the copy editor, I had to decide on an actual year, and then she meticulously checked every day in the book according to that calendar year.