This morning I sent the Battle Lines manuscript off to be copyedited.

It’s almost the end of the process – the (brilliant) copyeditor that HarperCollins uses worked on The Rising as well, so she will go through the whole text for consistency, continuity, repetitions, timing problems, and simple bad writing. When she’s done, I accept or reject (mostly it will be accept!) her changes, and it goes to be proofread, the final spelling and grammar and style check before the text gets designed and the file is sent off to the printers.

I don’t know how I feel about this one, to be honest. I’m very proud of it, and my editor (whose opinion I generally trust more than my own!) thinks it’s the best of the series, which is lovely to hear. But right now I’m so deep into it that I can’t see the wood for the trees, and I just want it out there for people to read.

It’s a long book (although the final edit has made it a few thousand words shorter than The Rising, which I’m sure the HarperCollins production department will be delighted to hear!) that has taken a long time to write, and has been undoubtedly the hardest of the three books I’ve written so far.  Maybe when I’ve got a bit of distance I’ll have a look back at the process and write something about why, but for now I’m just absolutely delighted that it’s done…

Anyway – here, for no other reason than that I think they look cool, are screengrabs of the whole Battle Lines manuscript at 10% size! This is the final version, with tracked changes visible – and anyone who has used them will know exactly what all that red means. Click on them for bigger versions, but don’t bother enlarging them – you can’t see anything :)

 Thanks to everyone who has sent messages and Tweets telling me they’re excited about Battle Lines. Give it a few days, and I will be too…

Now I’m going to get some sleep.