I've completed the edits requested by my editor Lisa. They included turning chapter 1 into an introduction, combining the male and female genital piercings chapters into one big (whopping!) chapter, and so on. I combined some sections and changed them around to eliminate redundancy. It is hard to do because so much of the content is interrelated! She added cross references, and so on. We worked on it together, bouncing it back and forth several times over the course of a week. Now the manuscript has been sent to the copy editing department.

Lisa said that the manuscript came in longer than expected. I offered to edit out more, but she didn't want me to. In fact, she even added one thing back in that I had edited out. So, while it is longer than they wanted, they seem to find the information important enough to leave in. So that's good!

Now my awesome illustrator Jennifer and I are working together on the drawings of piercings that are going in the book. I send her photos of piercings with written instructions. She sends me back a draft. Sometimes we talk on the phone, sometimes I print the draft, and use white out and make suggestions for her. We bounce it back and forth (sometimes there are as many as 10 drafts of a body part!) and once it is done, she shades it in. That's when I can really see what an awesome job she's doing. She is fantastic with the shading. How lucky am I to find an artist to do this who has experience both tattooing and piercing, too! Yay Jennifer!