Ice Castle copy editing is finished

Today I received a copy-edited draft of The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music, which is the sequel to Lost in Lexicon. Here's the blurb:

Their return to Lexicon is not all that Ivan and Daphne imagined. For one thing, Aunt Adelaide is deathly ill. For another, their musical younger cousin, Lila, has stumbled into their secret land.
Instead of rejoining old friends in the Land of Morning, Ivan and Daphne find themselves tracing Lila through a wintery landscape where what matters most is how well a person sings.

Sorted by musical talent and consigned to different lives, the cousins face cold, illness, and attempted murder. Slave, servant or fine lady, each has to escape a kind of imprisonment before they can find one another, foment a revolution and restore spring to the Land of Winter.

We have a beautiful draft cover with Ivan and Daphne in swirling blue and green cloaks and the Ice Castle in the distance, but I'm not allowed to show that yet.

To my delight, the copy editor used a light hand. I'm always happy to learn if a compound word is really one word, two words, or a hyphenated word. (The word "copy-editor," for example: I'm not really certain.) Copy editors pick up double periods or places where I've used a word twice in one sentence. Apparently we no longer put commas before "too," as in, "He insisted he was coming too." When I was in grade school, that had to be "He insisted he was coming, too." So I always learn a few things, like whether to put spaces between the dots in ellipses. But I'm happy to say the copy editor did not make many changes that affected meaning, so I won't have to fight back much. I will argue some wording.

Meantime, Joan Charles is converting sketches into fully realized drawings. She really brings out feeling, detail, and texture in her final drawings. I just sent Scarletta Press a sketch of the layout of one of the towns the cousins visit. We think we'll use an aerial view of that town as a frontispiece. The book is a fun, exciting one, and I'm thrilled to see it taking shape.

Illustrating Lexicon: Joan Charles and The Ice Castle

Last night I met Joan Charles, the wonderful illustrator of my Lexicon books, for the second time. Meeting with her is one of the main delights of coming to the annual Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators in Los Angeles, because Joan lives nearby. Last year we met for a brief drink. Joan was in the throes of finishing the artwork for Lost in Lexicon, and she confessed she had hardly poked her nose outside in weeks. She was pale.

This year, we're ahead of schedule. The Ice Castle will come out about a year from now, and Joan negotiated for a much more reasonable number of illustrations this time. She has completed sketches based on the book's second draft, and I've just sent both her and my Scarletta editor, Ian, the third draft, which has no plot changes substantial enough to require changing the artwork. That left us free to bond and converse.

We talked about the book, what happens emotionally with each of the kids, and what their individual growth arcs are. We discussed atmosphere (menacing? magical?)and clothing. Often I defer to Joan's visual sense. If she thinks a uniform would bring out the character more, we add a uniform. If she thinks a certain seating arrangement of characters around the dinner table would create more tension, I make sure not to contradict that in the text. On the other hand, I will sometimes tell her that I see a certain character as more imposing, funny-looking, or noble.

What made me really happy is that Joan feels this new draft is deeper and sharper than the first one, which she already loved. She sees the characters growing, and she's truly excited about creating their world. She confessed to me that she was doodling at a conference when she suddenly realized she had created one of the characters, Fort. The world of the book has invaded her subconscious, so she's in that wonderful creative state where she's working on it even when she doesn't mean to.