Congratulations if you're publishing with us. You've passed the initial screening process, and the editorial board has selected your manuscript: your dedication will finally be rewarded, and you'll see a dream come true. But this is just the beginning; now comes the most fun part.
COLEMAN Style Notebook
Remember that your story, the one you needed to tell, was like an empty grocery bag on the kitchen counter. To get there, you developed the recipe, selected the best ingredients, and brought everything home from the market. You knew there was one last step left: cooking it. Two hours or months later, you had a piping-hot manuscript in your pot.
It was time to offer it to your testers or beta readers, and you might have gotten a majority approval, with or without qualifications. The next step was to implement all the suggestions from your most qualified beta testers, without disparaging the others. Dorapíldoras , bless them, and get the stew ready to serve in restaurants. In our case, to submit your manuscript to competitions or publishers. Let's go back to the present, because all that is in the past and today you're publishing with COLEMAN.
Welcome to the publishing world
Open your mind and put your ego aside; in this house, we care about polishing your texts and we don't want them to reach the reader in an experimental phase, but rather refined and with all the quality certifications. Readers deserve to enjoy them on a platter, as if they were peeled fruit, without cutlery, devouring them with their hands. If you force them to eat unpeeled avocados or kiwis, you're not going to look good.
Even if we've selected your manuscript as publishable, it won't reach any of our proofreaders' desks until you read, reread, and understand this text, then review and self-correct yours based on our recommendations. It's not a very tasty dish, but we prefer a potato omelet without chorizo, with onion, and rare. And avocados without skin. We also don't publish any novel that doesn't include an "E" in the title, and we know this may seem like nonsense, but it's the house rule.
The self-correction process
It will take you weeks or months to complete it. Breathe. You need energy, and we'll recharge your batteries whenever necessary. We'll assign you a proofreader who'll always be by your side.
Below, we've outlined some tips we call your "Style Notebook." When you review your work, or better yet, when you hit the pen or type again for new creations, make sure you have them handy.
1.— Simply:
Avoid adverbials of manner ending in "mente" as much as possible, except in dialogue. They usually have five or more syllables, slow down the text, and generally contribute very little, making them easy to eliminate. Try it, don't be shy. You can replace them with other expressions to improve the text. As Gabriel García Márquez said in Live to tell the tale :
"Practice eventually convinced me that adverbials of manner ending in mente are an impoverishing vice. So I began to punish them wherever they crossed my path, and I became increasingly convinced that this obsession forced me to find richer and more expressive forms. It's been a long time since there have been any in my books, except in the occasional direct quotation."
Here are some examples of simple substitution:
Currently: nowadays; excessively: too much; undoubtedly: doubtlessly; simply : get rid of this one shamelessly; initially : at first; finally : to finish; logically : logically; formerly : before; clearly : clearly (but better delete it); evidently : it is evident that; frequently : often, frequently; slowly : little by little; naturally : clearly; recently : recently; quickly : quickly; permanently : always; necessarily : by force; literally : word for word; mainly : above all; solely : exclusively : only , nothing more; periodically : often, from time to time; completely : definitely , totally : entirely; provisionally : momentarily , eventually : for the moment; obviously : better not use this one; your brothers-in-law and children will take care of repeating it ad nauseam.
2.— Magnificent stumble:
In Spanish, the norm is for the adjective to follow the noun, except in possessives, demonstratives, or numerals like "mi gato," "ese gato," or "tres gatos," or others that change the meaning of the sentence, such as "viejo amigo" vs. "amigo viejo," "pobre hombre" vs. "hombre pobre," and "buenos días" vs. "días buenos." Aside from these uses, prefixed adjectives are a very powerful resource that you can use when the narrative needs a lyrical contribution or when the adjective is more important than the noun. With a few exceptions, when you overuse this resource, you distort it and the text can become cloying.
Read:
"The main avenue was crowded with old vehicles with noisy engines that produced a stinking atmosphere."
Against:
"The avenue was crowded with old vehicles with noisy engines that created a foul atmosphere."
The second version touches the ground much more, right? Don't try to fly so high; compared to the first, the second version is amazing at low altitude.
Remember, you've probably had the experience of reading unreadable novels saturated with prefixed adjectives as a result of poor translation, usually from English. Surely, or almost certainly, the novel wasn't bad, just poorly translated, but you threw it out the window because you felt the author didn't write well. Translation is an art; not everyone can do it well, even if they're bilingual.
Here's a link to an article from the School of Writers that addresses points 1 and 2:
https://escueladeescritores.com/blog-adjectives-preceded-and-adverbs-finished-in-mente/
3.— Layout designer in crisis.
Never attempt to layout your work in your word processor; the layout designers will thank you for not even trying. So, it's best to send your manuscripts in plain text or without formatting. Below are some examples that make our layout designers sweat:
a.— Bloodletting.
A first-line indent isn't eight or ten blank spaces that the typesetter will have to delete thousands of times, no exaggeration, in each manuscript. Define a style in your word processor that automates this process, or better yet, do nothing at all.
This is what you see:
This is my first paragraph and I'm going to make it really nice so it's easy to read.
This is the second one. The sangria is brilliant and looks really nice.
And this is what the layout designer sees:
………This.is.my.first.paragraph.and.I.am.going.to.make.it.very.pretty.so.that.it.is.very.easy.to.read. ↵
………This is the second one. The sangria thing is great and looks really cool. ↵
b.— Page break.
To turn the page, you don't have to press the [↵] key eighteen times, but (in Word, for example) use [Ctrl + ↵]. Since you want to tell stories, let the layout designers do their work and limit yourself to capitalizing the next chapter title. We can't illustrate what you see vs. what the layout designer sees because that would take up multiple pages.
c.— English and Latin quotation marks.
These are English quotation marks: “”.
These are Latin quotation marks: «».
Good Spanish layout will always use Latin characters. For the health of our proofreaders, we recommend that you always use them. Here's an article from FundéuRAE that expands on this topic and tells you how to use them on different operating systems:
https://www.fundeu.es/recomendacion/comillas-uso-de-este-signo-ortografico/
If you keep these simple points in mind, you'll make life easier for your readers and avoid tormenting our proofreaders and layout artists.
In future posts, we'll cover more topics like: "Cacophonies: That music you never noticed, but can't stop humming."
Health
