Growing Toward the Sun (comes home from the editor)

​There are four basic levels of editing:
 

• big-picture edits
• paragraph-level edits
• sentence-level edits
• word-level edits

 
I’ve had a hefty amount of the first one, thanks mostly to my online critique group. Growing Toward the Sun has been slashed and eased and folded and twisted into something that actually resembles my original dream. This wonderful group also did a lot of paragraph-level edits to my later drafts, suggesting ways to change up my sentence structure, make the paragraphs flow, and etc.
 
My editor has taken care of the rest. I hope...no, I pray...No, I trust.
 
She offered some big picture help, made suggestions for flow and clarity, but mostly she nitpicked my grammar, spelling, and punctuation and did fact checks and etc. Thanks to her, I will no longer have the name of the girls' detective club spelled three different ways in three different chapters. Thanks to her, I don’t spell gray with the American spelling in one section and the British spelling (my fave!) in the next.
 
A daunting stack of papers with an overwhelming amount of red and black and blue ink rest on my desk. A million “to-do’s” flutter through my head, but excitement flutters there as well.

Maybe this book will happen yet.