Whiz Kid. (Well, not a kid, really)

Cousin John has three talented sons. Corey is the eldest and he's my copyditor. He's amazing. With over 6000 projects to date, he's astute, decisive, and quick. Thriving on a Riff is one of the forty-two nonfiction books that he has copyedited.

I can't say enough about his work. He would edit me if I did.

What does a copyeditor do? He polishes gems until they sparkle. Here is the description from his website: 

Copyediting is the process of editing copy for accuracy, clarity, style, consistency, and formatting, and correcting errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, subject/verb agreement, etc. Copyediting also may include fact-checking, checking references, and making alterations to a text for proper adherence to the preferred style guide.

Focus: correction. Deliverable: a piece of writing that is exponentially more effective at communicating its message and engaging its target audience.

He and Lil were a one-two punch. 

And dang, he's quick. Four weeks in his hands, and it's done already.

Check him out at https://coreymccullough.com/. Tell him that I sent you. And buy his books, especially the novel Rust on the Allegheny.  It's a slightly fictionalized story of the town where my mom grew up. 

In fact, the cover of his novel is a stylized image of the theater where she heard Louis Armstrong play.

It's all in the family.

Sometimes you find a brilliant helper

Finally - the edited manuscript is in hand. Or rather on my hard drive. My marvelous editor has liberated my turgid prose. Now it sings. And it sounds like me, not her. I'm stunned at the help she has provided. The wait was worth it.

What a learning experience! I've published journal articles, with complete sentences, paragraphs of similar length, carefully documented footnotes, and one inch margins. I was well schooled, and it's hard to get Princeton Seminary out of your soul. 

My Preaching 101 professor insisted, "Always prepare your sermon manuscript as if it's ready for publication." OK, check. But a decade or so in pulpit, and I realized I was talking with folks, not reading to them. So sermons became necessarily looser. Thoughts had to be organized, so they were written down. Rhetoric helped people listen, so thoughts were sequenced so they could follow them. When I began to post them on a blog (http://billcartersermons.blogspot.com/), I added a disclaimer: 

These are the "scripts" for what Bill Carter prepares for his weekly sermons. But remember: he is a jazz preacher, so there's a good chance he will verbally improvise on what he writes. Because he's often on the go, these sermons have not been edited, scrubbed, or tidied up. They are offered in the hope that they will be helpful to whoever reads them.

Fair enough. That's preaching.

Writing a book - a full book, with a logical progression of chapters - that's a whole other beast. What Lil has done is spruce up those sections where I got stuck in my head. When I wrote to impress my Princeton professors (all of whom have retired), she took a chainsaw to my prose. "A book about jazz should sound like jazz," she said.

She's right. And we collaborated to get it there. Whew.

Now, it's time to get it to the copy editor. More later.