The Husk Chronicles, Episode Two — Waiting for plastic surgery

No, I am not get­ting lipo, but thanks so much for going there first.

No, what I’m wait­ing for is my next edit. Cur­rently, I’m in standby mode until the copy edit of Husk arrives.This is the edit between the sub­stan­tive edit — when your edi­tor tells you that you are a genius, but you’d be even more of a genius if you’d only change the gen­der of your pro­tag­o­nist, and set the story in the old west instead of the planet Retic­u­lope — and the proof­read edit — where you sud­denly for­get how to spell every sin­gle word in the Eng­lish language.

So, I eagerly await the next phase, copy edit. Then, to work! Fix­ing all the lit­tle details, chang­ing cer­tain words, adding/deleting phrases, excis­ing, cut­ting, slic­ing, dic­ing, and all in all man­gling up what was once a per­fectly pre­sentable manuscript.

In med­ical pro­ce­dure terms, this is known as plas­tic surgery time. To con­tinue the anal­ogy, my ini­tial man­u­script was both birth and ele­men­tary school, sub­stan­tive edit is puberty and mat­u­ra­tion, and copy edit is that spe­cial time in every young boy/girl’s life when s/he real­izes that genet­ics can only take you so far. So, under the knife you go! Nip, tuck, replace, suck out here, inject in there. Proof­read­ing then becomes the cos­metic patch-up jobs on crow’s-feet and male pat­tern bald­ness. Spray hair in a can, your day will come!

(By the way, I was going to put in a photo exam­ple of plas­tic surgery gone awry to illus­trate my point, but a quick google image search for “bad plas­tic surgery” made me feel so bad I just couldn’t do it.)

Will Husk need plas­tic surgery? Most def­i­nitely, like Mickey Rourke after a box­ing match. Much of it will be trim­ming of the fat (i.e. I go on way too long, giv­ing Husk a bit of a muf­fin top), but some will be recon­struc­tive. There’s a sub-plot or two that need flesh­ing out (lip injec­tions), and there’s always a need to add a new descrip­tive phrase or two (hair implants).

And then, soon enough, the surgery will be over, and Husk will be trans­formed from this:

to this:

Much bet­ter. Although the orig­i­nal still has its charms.