Editing and being a continuity cop

There's a simple but perfect quote about writing, which is "Writing is rewriting" (originally attributed to EB White, it seems, but it's been stolen ever since). I'm not actually at the point yet where I sweat bullets over my fiction... I just feel happy getting it done. What I do religiously though, is edit.

Editing is something I used to do for a living, so I'm in the habit now, and once you start you can't stop. If I'm presented with a piece of text on a screen or in print, I see spelling mistooks first, often immediately. (Gotcha.) So I can rarely read through anything I've written without wanting to mess with it a little bit.

On a continuing series like Spider-Girl though, what becomes interesting about the editing process is that I have to start looking out for the dreaded continuity. I get nutty about this. I constantly go back through and check things like whether or not a character was holding an item (and in which hand), which door they entered through in the last scene, what they were wearing last time I mentioned it, which piece of clothing they just took off or put on... and so on. But that's internal, inside one issue continuity - it's flowing things from scene to scene, the literary equivalent of avoiding those movie continuity gaffes. It might not mean a heck of a lot to you, but it matters to me, and often I find myself adding stuff or rewriting to get around some tiny point of internal continuity.

Besides that, though, I worry about series continuity, and with 10 issues finished now this is starting to get a little harder. What's even more crazy is trying to deal with Marvel Comics' own continuity, particularly the screwed-up early continuity you find in Amazing Spider-Man.

For example; in issue #5 I introduce Liz Allen, who I originally wrote down as Liz Allan, because I was sure that was the right way to spell her surname. (I know, it's just one letter, and it's still a vowel and it doesn't change the way the word sounds... but this is what being an editor does to you, folks.) Finally I checked the original comics, and guess what? Stan Lee managed to spell it as both 'Allen' and 'Allan' in different issues of ASM. So I made my own choice.

Next, I was sure in my mind that J Jonah Jameson was Editor of the Daily Bugle. I mean, he sure as hell acted like the editor. Then I went and checked, and he's the publisher... always has been, right from his first appearance. That took quite a bit of find-and-replace to fix.

Finally there were the Susan Storm variants. Once I start referring to a character in one way, I try to keep calling them the same thing over and over. In other words, I'll call Peter Parker 'Peter' and not 'Petey' or 'Pete'. (The exception is when I'm dealing with Betty/Spider-Girl; I call her 'Betty' when out of costume and 'Spider-Girl' when in, because in many ways, they're different personalities, almost different people.)

(The reason I do this, by the way, is that I follow a tip I read years ago, which basically said that people stop consciously reading character's names when they're reading a piece of fiction over a long-ish period of time (eg a novel or a series). They just see the 'shape' of the word, and the first letter. So the advice was: try not to have two characters with the first initial, and always call them the same thing, consistently, so they don't get confused who's talking at any given point.)

So back to Susan Storm. Or Sue Storm. Or the Invisible Girl. Or the Invisible Woman... Sue or Susan were both perfectly reasonable alternatives, but I wanted to stick with one, so 'Susan' it was. What got confusing was writing dialogue for the FF, where Ben would call her 'Susie', Reed would call her 'Susan' and Johnny could call her anything! As for the Invisible Girl/Woman thing, I only messed that up once. (She only became the Invisible Woman after John Byrne's excellent 'Malice' storyline. And thanks to Steve Zink, that particularly kinky moment for Susan (clad in black leather playing the evil dominatrix...) is stuck in my ideas file as a future possible plotline.)

Of course, there are occasions when I need to bend or break Marvel's continuity for my own purposes. I mean, we're working in a 'What If' inspired universe anyway, so no biggie, right? Apart from the major breaks that you all know about ("What, Betty Brant isn't heavily into disguise and kinkiness in the real Marvel U?") I had to tweak a few other things. Like, I gave Susan Storm force fields a lot earlier than she was supposed to have them; I also ignored the fact that she eventually managed to use her invisibility powers to make other stuff invisible. Because, you know, that would have made issue #4 kinda boring, wouldn't it?

Also, in the first version of issues #3 and #4, I had Reed and Susan already married (arguably, if we're assuming this series is at the start of Spider-Girl's career, they should have been single). Which was fine at first; it made the stakes higher and the dramatic tension of Susan and Betty getting together was increased. But then I started having so much fun with the two of them as a couple, I decided to revert Susan and Reed to just being girlfriend and boyfriend. With things like that, Susan can feel a little less guilty about seeing Betty (Yep, it happens again) and I also get to do a potential Susan-Reed marriage plot further down the road. Because everyone knows superhero weddings never go off without a hitch. Especially when the bride's been engaged in some hot action with one of the bridal party. F'r instance....

So those are a bunch of examples where editing and continuity either got me out of trouble, or got me into it. It makes writing interesting, that's for sure. But I tell ya, I'm going to have to start a series index pretty soon just to keep all the details straight in my head....