(More about preparation for A Memory of Light .)
Let’s see. Well, probably the most significant thing that’s happened is we are all working on the same version of Word right now. We had some difficulties in the past.
Last year we had three.
Three different versions.
And it caused some really interesting things.
Yeah. What we would do, you can see how much of a pseudo-nightmare this is. So, in order to speed things up last year, and it actually did speed things up despite the chaos, was we went all digital for edits.
Yeah.
One of the tricks of working with this is, I basically have five editors, with Harriet at the top, and then there’s Maria and Alan right below. And then Moshe my editor is giving us reads…because we can’t use my normal alpha readers for this, which are my writing group, because they’d all have to be part of the NDA and that’s just too many people. And so instead we brought on Moshe to just give me an alpha read, a dry alpha read. And then my agent also gives me dry alpha reads, because they all are interested professionals and part of the NDA and things like that.
But basically, even looking only at Harriet, Maria, and Alan, what would happen is on The Gathering Storm , I would send in some scenes, and then I would start working on the next ones. And I would get deep into the next ones, and then some papers would come. I’m like, oh revisions. So I’d go back and start doing revision. And then another group of papers would come from another one of them that had revisions that were different. And then another group of papers would come that were a third group of revisions. And in some cases, they’ve all caught the same typo, but then I have to end up searching for it three times because I can’t remember if I’ve changed that typo or not. And then I can’t find it. I’m like, oh I guess that’s one I caught, but really sometimes I didn’t catch it, I’m just on the wrong page or something. Anyway, I have three sets of paper all from different people making different revisions, and sometimes they disagree with one another on what should be changed, and they’re not seeing each other’s revisions.
Meanwhile, I’m on tour trying to fly around and carry all of these. You should have seen me on the airplane one of these days where revisions were needed the next day, and I’m flying on a six-hour flight in coach. And I’m cuddled like this between two people in the middle seat, with six hundred pages around me, trying to find all three pages that are editing the same section, and realizing that one’s in my suitcase. This was absolutely a nightmare to do.
And so this time, I’m like, let’s go all digital, I’ll have them all on my computer, it will be so much easier. But Harriet had never done digital revisions before. None of you had, I don’t think. And so the idea was we would have one person do a revision, and then they would hand the file off, and that person could go through and a revision and add their comments, and then the next person would be able to do it. And that would have been wonderful in a perfect world. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time for that because we were so crunched for time. And so what would happen is they all would be working on their own machine because they all needed to be reading at the same time, they couldn’t wait for the other person. And so then they would all three send me documents digitally, which is easier to work with than trying to dig out all fifty pages of each. But at the same time, then I have four documents: my document, and three documents with revisions in it, from different versions of Word or Wordperfect or Open Office or whatever it is. I basically would just send them all to Peter (Peter Ahlstrom, Brandon’s assistant) and say, “Peter, meld these somehow.”
Peter was a real hero.
Yeah. Peter was the unsung hero in that one because he really went through, he would work for hours and then send me a document back. But this would introduce lots of typos and errors, because the different revisions were different programs and would not stack up. And so we ended up with many more—you may have noticed—many more typos in Towers of Midnight , and it’s due directly to this process, where one person would change something, another person would change it slightly differently, and the computer program would get confused. And what you would end up was like a word with an extra letter on it or something like this. And we caught most of them, but it added a lot of extra editing errors for this. We didn’t cut corners on the really important stuff in Towers of Midnight , but when push came to shove, getting the extra proofreads, there wasn’t time for, which is why there are more errors in Towers of Midnight . It’s because we took the time we needed for revision, but we didn’t then have any time for proofreads. Peter, you proofread—did you even get the whole book done? You were up till 6 AM several nights proofreading.
After I told you I was done, I realized that I had skipped three chapters.
Peter, why don’t you stand up and just wave, so everyone can see you?
Peter deserves kudos.
I would like to say, at the beginning of the editing process on the last book, Brandon was 7 feet, 3 inches tall.
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