As a freelancer, I try to follow two simple rules about my time:
1. Never send e-mail to a client at an off-hour, or they will think they can own your evenings for no extra charge.
2. Never send e-mail to a client on a weekend, or they will think they can own your weekends for no extra charge.
For the most part, these rules work for me. Rarely is anything so rushed that I can’t wait until morning (or Monday morning) to ask a question or respond to a query. If I get work done over the weekend, it’s my choice. The client doesn’t have to know about it. They’re paying me by the page, not the hour; If I have nothing to do and I want to get ahead, sure, I might knock out a few more pages. They don’t have to know when I did them.
There’s one exception that I make to these rules. It’s not something I set out to do, but it’s something I’ve done enough anyway that I’ve begun to notice it as a pattern. I call it the home stretch exception because it happens when I’m working in the last fifty pages or so of a really engaging manuscript.
When I edit a first pass, I like for the material to be completely fresh to me. I know that the eye has a tendency to see what it expects to see instead of what’s actually on the page, and going into a passage with no preconceptions about what I’ll see there is the best way for me to combat that. I can catch typos and grammatical errors and see things from the first-time reader’s perspective more easily when I’m reading something for the first time.
When I’m in the home stretch of a novel, then, I don’t like to read ahead to see what happens next. If I’m reading in the manuscript, I’m editing in the manuscript. Otherwise, when I go back to edit those passages, I know what happens in them. There’s more of a chance that my mind will fill in any missing or incorrect words, and I have to work that much harder to see what’s really on the page.
If an especially gripping novel is gathering speed and tension toward a big finish, this becomes something of a battle of willpower. I don’t want to read ahead, but I want to see what happens! If I try to walk away from the manuscript at the end of the normal workday, I’ll find myself tempted to sneak back to it. It’s always at about the thirty or fifty page mark, somewhere around there, that I completely lose the battle against suspense. I’ll keep going until the book is done, because I have to see what happens next.
Keep in mind that editing is not like pleasure-reading. It’s slower and more meticulous. It involves pausing to correct things, to query and comment, to take notes, to look things up. Managing about ten pages an hour is more or less standard. For a manuscript that needs a lot of intense suggestions and corrections and research, I manage about five. And I’m not a slow reader.
With that in mind, now think about what those fifty pages mean in terms of time. They mean that I occasionally inflict a rather late night on myself, all because I’m fortunate to work with good storytellers who weave tales that manage to hook even me, even while I’m focusing on the technical.
And considering that, not only can I not complain about an occasional self-inflicted late night, but I also always feel as though my conscience won’t let me keep it to myself. It’s the highest praise I can give an author—that their writing kept me up at my desk because I couldn’t stop turning pages—and if they’ve earned it, they deserve to hear it.
Now that I’ve said it, though…excuse me if I sneak off for a nap!
