Lots of exciting developments in the past few weeks! Allison has been working diligently on a variety of projects, and making great progress. It’s the author’s responsibility to contact the owners of intellectual property that he or she has put in the manuscript (direct quotes, for example) in order to gain permission to use it. Allison has been working her way through the list we made her of all the instances in the manuscript that require permissions, and, as I said, she’s made a lot of headway.

The other thing she’s been working on is a second revision of the manuscript itself; we sent her an outline of possible edits we thought would benefit the manuscript, and she was so on it that she incorporated all of those edits, plus some more of her own, and got it back to us ahead of schedule! I’m confident that both the edits we suggested and the ones she added herself will take us a long way in refining this (already very good) manuscript into a bright, shiny, publishable diamond.

Now that we have Allison’s revisions back, we’re going to dig into the process of reviewing the whole manuscript again, to see if there are any more areas we can identify that might benefit from changes. This stage of the editing process is a slow, deliberate push-and-pull, and it requires an acute sense of the goal of the story and a willingness to tweak it, twist it, and whittle it down to achieve that goal in the best possible way. It can be challenging work, but we’re here because we love it.