I got copyedits of my book today. I made the mistake of hitting some button that provided me with a summary of all the changes, and in a roughly 90,000-word manuscript, there are over 5100 insertions, 5200 deletions, and 130 comments. All of which will require my attention.

via flickr

If being confronted with a 1:9 word-to-edits ratio isn’t enough to make you believe that The Onion’s recent headline “4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence” could have been real.

Not that I’m complaining. It’s just another stage on the way to this thing being real, and being out in the world.