Shunga-Satori: The Big Red Pencil

By Serdar Yegulalp on 2023-03-18 18:00:00-04:00 No comments

Briefly: I'm almost done with editing the proof copy of Shunga-Satori, and I found ... well, a fair number of things that somehow managed to elude me in previous drafts. This is not a show-stopper, merely a show-delayer. I might have to write a few things, and do some close checking for a few things, but the book is 99.5% there as far as I can tell.

Editing with the proof copy is a radically different feeling than editing even on regular paper. It feels a lot more like being handed someone else's work and asked to weigh in on it without reservations. I found myself raising questions I'd completely missed before — not normative ones that would have forced a full rewrite, but ones still big enough they deserved close attention before the book went into other hands.

I am not an absolute perfectionist, although I'm close enough to one sometimes to play one on TV. There's some things about the book I've gone back and forth about — certain aspects of tone or voice, for instance — but at the end of the day I've decided those things are the way they are for a reason. If they turn out to be a bad idea, then I'll just have to keep that in mind next time around.