Category Archives: Editing/writing life

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Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: what to consider before you start looking for editing help

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It’s a tough world. Suppose you self-publish a novel. You do it right, or so you think: hire an editor, pay for respectable cover art, and so on. Comes to about $3K including a final proofing, any special formatting you have to hire out, etc. Unlike most fairly shortsighted first-time self-publishers, you’re thinking the long game; you have the good sense to price your work appealingly to build a base. Your profit on your novel is $6 per print copy and $3 per e-copy. Let’s consider those equivalent in terms of your profit, so $3 per copy.

One thousand book sales later, you’ve covered your basic costs and may officially begin Turning A Profit. Hallelujah. Other people, who had less pride and principle, had someone off Ninerr or wherever “put an edit on it” for $300, used amateurish cover art done by their aunt (or an AI) for nothing, and figured why pay for proofreading if someone has “put an edit on it”? They started turning a profit on their half-assery much more quickly. There you sat wondering how to sell a thousand copies while the half-assery got lapped up by a public with decreasing standards and literacy.

In essence, you’re the boutique grocery store that lost out to MansonianPriceSlasher MegaCheepcheapcheep Grocery. Your work and products are beautiful, inviting, well cared for, free of the Honey Boo Boo crowd, and making less money. Only a limited percentage of the reading audience was your realistic target market. The rest could not read well enough to see your added value. Declining taste and literacy suck–just watch TV to see what dominates.

This is the scenario that might obtain for perhaps the majority of my clients. I can’t control most of that. The naughty m-word is the main factor, and the Venn diagram overlapping ‘people who love to market’ and ‘people who love to write’ has a rather small intersection. I can tell people they have to do their own marketing until I’m hoarse, and their lips will still say “yes, yes” but their eyes will still say “FOAD, FOAD, FOAD.” What I might be able to influence is how they employ an editor. The best way I can devise to do that is to give them some free advice on how to hire editors. Most people hire us before gaining the slightest real understanding of our roles.

That’s a good percentage of the publication cost promised to someone without knowing what they really do. If I pay a mechanic $1800, for example, I want to get the desired result. I don’t want to find out later that the mechanic is charging me that sum to give me a result that I maybe needed but did not seek. (“Yeah, we came in below your budget so we tacked on some body work in addition to your brakes.”) What if I expected the mechanic to throw in detailing? That’s about what it’s like when one expects the editor to proofread after editing.

Okay, so it’s difficult. Fine. What to do is to educate yourself about who does this, what they do, and what their insecurities are. And those are legion.

  • Sneak onto some editors’ forums. Yes. Pretend to be one. Don’t say anything; just read. See how they talk and act among themselves. Notice that a not inconsequential percentage are more than a bit neurotic. Freelance editing is great for shut-ins, and the modern world enables them to refuse vocal and visual contact. And while it might seem like I’m scoffing, I get that some people have serious traumas, disabilities physical and psychological, and deal with issues the world doesn’t comprehend. I can’t know. What you can know is how their conversations go with their colleagues. You’ll learn the repellent term “edi-buddies,” see many people pleading for help with where to put a comma under Chicago (or whatever style guide they’ve been told to treat as Scripture), and so on. You will be less awed by us when you see that the bar’s fairly low. I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this, but I’m the Editorial Maverick, and mavericks gotta mav now and then.
  • Read up on editing modes. Editing modes are how sophisticated editors guide their working focuses. There is valid question how many modes should be on this list, and I saw some with more options. Run a search on “editing modes,” ignore all the references to Word and forms of editing that have nothing to do with book editing. Mine had to go four pages deep. (I have a list on my site, but I wanted to suggest an external perspective. That’s a fancy way of saying I thought it was a bad look to use my own list to support my definitions. Don’t just take my word for them.) A capable editor will examine your work, and ideally your goals and wishes, and suggest an editing mode that will guide that work. Maybe if you have some idea in advance of what mode would best help you–which can’t occur if you have never heard of them–you will get a better outcome.
  • Think about your goals. Serious question to answer honestly: Do you not really care about the quality but want to be able to say it was edited? There are plentiful starving humanities BAs who are working 2.5 jobs and have decided that they r editors, and many of them will do it for low three figures. If cost is the main concern and you plan to be labor-intensive, think in terms of a flat fee so that you can really milk them. That’s why some of us no longer do flat-fee work at all–because people used us too much, to the point of abuse. So the logical people to do this are the ones who will actually go along with it, and who have not yet learned that lesson. There are always some. I think every freelance editor ends up way undercharging early in the process. Find one who hasn’t learned. Be their lesson.
  • Decide whether you are comfortable with (or can at least take) constructive feedback. Do you really even want that, or have you been on too many writers’ forums where you learned that it was a virtue to “fight for my words”? In other words, do you want to argue, or do you want to learn and improve your book? When most people want to bicker, they pay zero. They go on BegsDoor or ZuckBook and find them for free, virtually anonymous, no need to hold back, both barrels, any subject. I knew one prospective (and basically gifted) writer, long before I started doing this, who was mainly looking forward to arguing with an editor. I’m not surprised he has never yet actually published. But there’s no need to hire a sparring partner. Anyone good enough to whip you in the debate probably won’t bother. We’ll just say something that ought to chill your soul: “Okay. If you’re going to ignore much of my guidance, no problem. It’s your book. I’ll simply exercise my option not to be credited.” That’s an Alan Smithee, and it means the editor thinks you refuse to accept salvage of this train wreck. If it doesn’t chill your soul, you shouldn’t even have bothered hiring any editor at all.
  • Get a referral. This is where writers’ groups can have benefits (not a thing I say that often). Ask someone who has used one; see if they’ll tell you what it cost and what editing mode was in use. If they don’t know what you mean by the latter, they might not have gotten the education they should have. What you hope to hear is something like “a substantive edit.” This leads into…
  • Find out what the real thing costs/requires. Some editors charge by the hour, some by the word, some quote flat fees. The longer your work, the more editing costs, but not proportionately. There is no economy of scale; there is extravagance of scale. The general view is that 70,000 words is novel length. (Always words. Never pages. Telling them how many pages it is announces “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”) All right, so your novel is a Michenerian epic of just over 200,000 words. If people said a given amount was reasonable for 70K, does that mean triple that is reasonable for 210K? No. The reason is that there is so much more information to hold in the brain: keeping names, stories, side stories, plotlines, and images in mind. You should at least know what a seasoned professional costs before you go with cheep cheap cheep.
  • Aunt Nelly or her equivalent? Most people have some relative who thinks she can edit. In some cases perhaps she can; in the majority, her only qualification is that she reads a lot. (Based on what I am seeing from novice editors coming up, that might make her competitive with some.) Here there can be issues, because whether or not Aunt Nelly is competent (unlikely), she will be very hurt if she is refused. If she is not, you probably will get what you pay for. Hopefully she doesn’t promise to “put an edit on it.” But if you are realistic, you must at least consider this possibility and either pursue it (abandon all hope in most cases) or rule it out for compelling reason (as in you’ve seen from Aunt Nelly’s notes to people that she cannot refrain from writing things like “Your a great neice.” A cynical and arguably deceitful way, if Aunt Nelly all but insists, is to let her “edit” it but don’t use that copy. Some would say that’s absolutely awful. What’s worse? Letting an unqualified, well-meaning and well-loved relative ruin your ms? Hurting a well-loved relative’s feelings when she meant nothing but kindness? Maybe I’m influenced a bit by life near cultures in which kindness and face-saving count for much more than blunt force truthiness.

The question you should probably be considering in the background would be: What’s the point of a cheap cheep cheap editing job? Is it even worth $300? What do I get for that? Even a proofreading job at that price point is probably going to be terrible for a novel-length ms. It happened to a client of mine. Here’s the tale:

I have known this current client since college. His name is Mike Cook, and he wrote quite a good book. (I feel comfortable talking about the kitchen where we made the sausage because I always write a post about that when a book goes gold, but only if the client is okay with it. Mike was. Cat’s already out of that bag.) Our lives diverged since the mid-80s but touched base again via a mutual friend from back in the day, who is also a client. Now, Mike’s genre was medieval fantasy and he had some enormous strengths. He didn’t want cheap cheep cheap; he wanted to perfect his craft and produce a quality book he could be proud of.

One amazing aspect was his medievalist vocabulary, which sent me to the dictionary a dozen times. I’m not used to running to the dictionary more than once or twice per job, and usually it’s words like “irony” or “to comprise” that I have to keep reminding myself don’t mean what most people mean by them. Impressed as hell.

So one by one, I looked up his terms, one of which was “gong farmer.” I looked it up; it also came as “gong fermor,” and it meant the people who used to shovel out the latrine pits at night. Not a glamor job, I reckon. All right. I’d told Mike that while I was the best proofreader going, I never took money to proof anything I’d seen before because only when seeing it for the first time can I do the job to my personal standards. I recommended he hire one, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. I don’t know a bunch of other proofreaders. He ended up going to Eighterr or someplace and hiring an idiot for the $300 range, if I recall.

Such a miscarriage of editorial justice. She looked up none of his words. It was obvious that she simply ran spell and grammar checkers, accepted everything, congrats 2 me i prufed. The most obvious fail was that “gong farmer” had been globally changed to what spellcheck suggested: “young farmer.” In essence, she took money to use the primitive AI proofreading built into a word processor.

If it were up to me that would probably have serious consequences.

Mike came to me with the result. I was appalled; I was also partly responsible, because he’d done everything I suggested and trusted my guidance. I felt like crap. There was only one thing to do, which was proof it myself. It would not be to my normal standards because that was no longer possible given that I’d edited it with a couple passes. It would still be far better than Elevener or Twelver’s lower tier. I couldn’t charge him, and I didn’t. I wanted him to have justice, not to pay me more money.

Anyway, there’s one of the banana peels. Some people will “put an edit on” a manuscript of any length for any amount of money. The question is: Is a $300 edit worth $300? If you rejoin that well, at least I’d get proofreading, which I do need, the question is whether the proofreading will be worth $300. I’m telling you I’ve seen where it wasn’t worth $3. Or where people should be fined for it.

If you are at least realistic about the question of cheap cheep cheap editing and proofreading, that’s the main objective of this piece. The question that’s most germane would be, assuming my kind are absolutely off the table and outside your price point: Should I just go without, pay $300 for crappy work, or accept Aunt Nelly’s offer to proof it for free ‘because she reads a lot’?

I see why people go with Aunt Nelly. And if people want to look around for free or inexpensive options, here you go. This is where you might find them, and how to empower your plans so that you make the best decision for your ms. Obviously, I won’t compete with either Aunt Nelly or someone going bargain basement flat fee, so I might as well help people process those options if that’s the only way I can be of service.

If I were you, I’d be wondering why I have put all this effort into telling people about the alternatives to hiring me. It’s because they are going to (or should) come up anyway, and one of two things will happen. Either people will say great, I’ll go with Sixerr, thanks, and their outcome will hopefully be better than some because they educated themselves. Or people will say great, this tells me what the cheapo alternatives are. Now I know what I’m missing and why I’m missing it. At peace.

I’ll take that.

Editing/writing life, Social comment, Technology

The state of the AI from an editor’s perspective

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As a believer in labeling one’s biases and then letting rip, let us begin with mine:

I despise AI. There is nothing I like about it. I don’t like the data centers, I don’t like the plutocracy behind them, and I don’t like the pliant municipalities who just bend over and drop trou for plutocracy. Not even at bayonet point could you get me to use AI to write my words for me. I take delight in watching it display the mindless trends that are its tells, sneering at its never-life.

I’m a snob. I would rather read the tortured constructions and bad spelling of the world’s worst real writer than technically correct AI.

In the many cases in which AI use is simply laziness, what my mind says is: It was so much easier than using your actual mind, wasn’t it?Today, Konrad Kujau wouldn’t have to author a phony Hitler memoir ms; he’d just feed the question to an AI and out would come the Dolfiness.

AI is here to stay, unless (as I hope) the proliferation of AI-genned content becomes recursive in that its outputs get stupider and stupider as it is increasingly its own unvetted (except by itself!) source material. It already generates fictitious references. I do not see evidence that it employs discernment on its sourcing. I think if enough QAnuts published enough wackiness, and at least made some effort at originality while not labeling themselves openly, AI would refer to them as if they were Stephen Hawking, or E.F. Hutton (ask your grandparents).

With those understandings, let’s talk about where this phenomenon is. AI goes beyond what I’m describing, of course; it can do at least something that looks like editing. In time it will probably be capable of more, unless it worsens its trend of eating its own children.

It is not that new, as far as I can see; it’s just more interactive. In essence, it’s the modern evolution of Altavista (ask your parents) or Google. What is a search engine algorithm but a form of AI? Is a word processor’s grammar check and spell check not some form of AI? Some games pit the player against relatively decent AI, which computer game designers have been trying to improve for decades. In the old Steel Panthers days, we’d sometimes delegate a trial setup to computer control just to get its sense of the position. (Andy Gailey will never see this, but those words began as his, and so was the idea. And unlike ChatGPT, he’s a person.) What’s new is that one can get it to do the work of writers and editors, at least in some ways. It takes a pretty sophisticated reader to tell it apart, which eliminates the vast majority of the modern US public.

My theory about the impact on my profession is that it will have the greatest impact on the people who don’t hire someone like me, and the people that they do hire. Consider: One is a stereotypically lazy ‘nap-my-way-through-college’ student who takes one look at the concepts of research and composition and replies: “Oh hell no. That’s actual work. I’d rather get AI to do it for me, then I’ll go through and edit out some of it so the prof can’t tell.” After muddling though, the alumnus* learned almost nothing about writing. Except, perhaps, that which would be learned by reading a few syntactically correct history papers (which isn’t enough; try reading voraciously from ages 3 to 22 if you want it by osmosis and Kodak childhood memory). Now he’s stuck. Take away his AI and his literacy is spavined.

*I think women are less prone to let a dumb computer program supply their words, probably because on balance the evidence indicates they’re slightly brighter than we are, and because I believe they are less interested in letting a computer talk over them than they are even in letting men talk over them.

So Slacker Alum, living with his parents because getting jobs is hard and might even require him to leave the house, has always had some ideas for novels. He starts having AI write the story for him, and in the process he at least becomes better at using AI. His AI novel is no worse garbage than a fair percentage of the self-published material out there, and not a little of the trad-pubbed. Does he hire an editor? Not a real one; that would take money. If he had money, he wouldn’t be doing any of this. He either hires one of the self-anointed Starving English BA Editors who thinks s/he’s qualified, or he accepts the AI editing and congratulates himself on creating moneymaking content while maintaining his slacker image. Either way, he was never going to hire me. He’s not my market and I’m not his. The Starving English BA Editors are already doing it for almost nothing because of $250K in student loans, which means they must have the money. Their sad revenue streams are likely to take hits.

I’m not mocking the plight of today’s 20something, attempting to navigate a world in which their elders ate up the whole buffet. (I’ve been cussing those elders for it since our twenties during the Reagan administration. They ignored me. Still do.) I’m only mocking the lazy ones with low to no standards or pride, or who assert for themselves unreasonable qualifications. I am making the point that for those who want to loaf their way by, and who feel better about doing that and then playing Galaxy of Mortal Annihilationcraft: Total & Utter Eternal Damnation & Destruction all day, AI is not merely the crutch. It is more the self-driving vehicle.

Would I use AI to help me edit material people paid me to work on? You can guess that answer. I doubt that anyone who does would ever admit it, so you can believe me or not. Those who know me well have no trouble taking it at face value. But in case anyone needs to hear it, I would sooner make homebrew napalm and drop flaming globs of it on my body.

Would I reject working on a novel partly or wholly written by AI? It’s unlikely I will ever see one, because those who don’t want to write (but want the appearance of having done so) are unlikely to want to spend money. A part of me can see that. To them, what the AI wrote is grammatically okay, and isn’t that the only use for a damn editor anyway? I’m not going to pierce that perception and won’t try. It’s unlikely they understand the breadth of my work, but that’s okay; in most cases I think they’d be shocked to hear that it costs more than $300 to “put an edit on it.” (That could be one of the most unpalatable and ignorant turns of phrase I ever encounter. Take it from me: Anyone using it knows little about actual editing.) Thus, I’m not their target vendor and I’m not that vendor’s competition. You all have fun.

Is there a place for AI in the work of writers I respect? That depends on what they are writing about. In non-fiction, such as (stop laughing) business reporting, I can see at least reasons to think of letting it handle a first draft. I think this because business reporting is not a passion project, and the live workforce every year is demanded to do more–with less people, in less time, for less compensation. A first draft can also be edited, reviewed, and its odder fancies corrected by someone who could have written that were they given the time to do so. There is a canyon separating those who can’t actually do it themselves in a competent way, and those who could but for life circumstances (deadlines, kids, delusional boss) eroding their time and mindshare. Those who could have done it themselves can certainly spot and correct flawed material. I get it.

As for ‘lancers, the market that wants to write its own words and hire a real editor will continue to do so, because it values the journey and the education at least as much as it does the  outcome. Those are my market. Them I can help. They are why I keep doing this.

Am I concerned about AI? I wouldn’t need to be, except for the climate that made it acceptable. I am much more concerned about the decline of literacy, attention spans, and critical thinking in that climate than I am about AI itself.

After all, I obviously didn’t mind it when it was trying to give me stress trying not to get my experienced Panther crews blown to hell in Steel Panthers by US P-47Ds firing 5″ rockets, or when it was helping me look up why my stupid fitness watch wouldn’t pair. I only started taking a leak on it when it started moneylending in my temple. And when that came, it was time to get to work on scourging.

Editing/writing life

A reading holder design for readers like me

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If you are reading this, you probably read real books. If you are at all like me, you don’t like to break the spines or crease the covers of paperbacks. This is all fine, until you are sitting outside on a beautiful day enjoying a book on revolutionary France that weighs about two kilos (all modern books on France seem to weigh about that much). That’s a lot of book for aging arms to hold up. Some elders might find it uncomfortable even with both hands, and then there’s the tendency to lose one’s grip.

After searching high and low for a designed solution, I solved it with my own homebrew design. This is my gift to you.

Needed:

  • Vendor snack tray made of light wood with adjustable strap. I bought one online that was billed as being for theme parties and showed a woman in ballpark vendor drag with a tray full of popcorn bags. Cost about $30–like what you would spend for one large new book.
  • Velcro patches x 4, typically sold in little packets for ~$5
  • Thumbtacks x 4, cost probably $0
  • Hammer (you surely have one)
  • Tape measure (if you’re as fanatical as me about alignment; you surely have one)
  • Strap pad like the ones for seatbelts (optional, cost roughly $10-15)

Method:

  • Sit down and adjust the strap on your neck so that the tray resides where you would like to have the book rest. For me it was about 12″ from my face, so I could read without reading glasses.
  • Take four of the small rough velcro patches (you won’t need the soft fuzzy sides; do as you like with those). Measure the center of one side and stick the four patches where they will press against your clothing. I spread them over about a 6″ area.
  • Put the tray somewhere that you can pound against, like the overhang of a sturdy counter, with the patches up so that the counter backs up the tray’s rim.
  • Since adhesives never hold reliably, knock a thumbtack into each velcro patch. Obviously, excessive force is neither desirable nor needed. My granny could have done this. You got wood rather than plastic so you could do this.
  • Get a big thick book you like, sit down, put it into the tray, and see how you like the fit and feeling. Some people have neck issues (for example, maybe they had spinal cord surgery between C2-C3 with partial vertebrae loss and still get sore muscles; feel free to ask me how I know this) and a heavy book would be hard to support with a strap roped over the back of your neck unless you had a soft pad for it. If so, get the pad mentioned in the ingredients. The only people who can’t really use this are those whose necks simply cannot support the weight of book + tray.
  • Adjust the fit, alignment, and every other factor in play until it comfortably holds a book so that your hand can hold the pages open without effort.
  • Happy reading.

The end result is you’ve got a wooden tray suspended from your neck, held in balance by common sense and kept from moving about by friction from the velcro. If you avoid putting your page-holding hand on the edge of the tray, it’s lighter. There’s room to lay a bookmark, a pen if you like one, or a little reading light if you find that helpful.

  • Cost: $35-45 plus about five minutes of effort.
  • Payback: immediate and lasting. Experiment as you like, use whatever works best for you, and enjoy your books anywhere you sit.
Editing/writing life, Social comment, Technology

Editorial Maverick: Can it about the em dash and AI, please—right now

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I had heard about this, but did not imagine I would encounter it from a highly literate, educated person. How naïf I can be.

All right. Time to stand our ground.

The word on the editorial street is that some people have decided the em dash* (the longest dash we use; —) is associated with AI writing. It seems some fairly non-thinking people have darted from  basic notice of that computer-generated habit to: “OMG never use an em dash, or they’ll think you used AI.”

Poppycock, horseshit, baloney, and a load of crap. Furthermore, the stance of a writer showing minimal confidence in their craft.

Details:

  1. While I will go to war with cheerful ruthlessness to eradicate overuse of the em dash, it’s a valid and useful part of the language. I will not stand still while people throw it away because they heard that someone who doesn’t know much about writing might think negative things about their writing because they saw an em dash. No. Stand up and fight. You are ceding this ground to AI, which is not a person and has no rights.
  2. Who so greatly cares about fairly slow people’s evaluations of their writing that they will trash a helpful device just in case the slow people might think a naughty thought about them? Don’t spend so much time caring what knee-jerk critics have to say. Spend more time caring how well you are communicating with your chosen audience. (Although I guess that if your audience is dumb, maybe you better abjure the symbol so you don’t act upon them like the doctor’s little rubber hammer.)
  3. AI will evolve, improve. Think its makers haven’t heard about the em dash hyperdependence tell? Perhaps you underestimate them. It won’t be this way for long. While they are busy trying to make AI writing less stupid—and we can expect them to succeed by degrees—they’ll also start throttling back the tells. The em dash will be among them. Em dashes were not invented by AI; they were here long before the computer.
  4. If you write better than AI, it follows that people will realize you wrote it yourself and have some modest chops.

This sort of little ad hoc rule is no more than another form of conformity. Not a fan. All my life I have watched herds of non-thinking people let the world dictate to them the obligatory current views. The thinking people didn’t ask anyone’s permission to have viewpoints, nor did they ask for approval except perhaps from their educational and intellectual peers. I have seen fad after fad, trend after trend, come and go and fade into memory. All represented voluntary conformity for the sake of conformity, which is perhaps the filthiest language I have used in a month.

Nonconformism neen’t be stupid. Conform because a conforming act makes independent sense? Certainly. Conform because power has a weapon pointed at you? Very well; they can order you to obey but they can’t have your soul. Conform because you need to keep a job? Fine; work isn’t a place to be yourself, and one is a fool or a saint to think so. But conform for the sake of wanting to be like others, to receive gang approval, strokes from bullies who would be gutless without someone to tell them what they think? Give away your soul for the sake of a fickle approbation? Throw away a useful piece of punctuation for fear of what others might think?

Not sure whether I react more with contempt or pity.

Now let’s edit/writing coach like we mean it. Em dashes are a useful part of the language. Used in excess, they are bad writing, a lazy crutch to avoid recasts. The same is true of ellipses, italicized emphasis, adverbs, passive voice and other deprecated-but-not-rejected options that too easily become bad habits. Be judicious, save the tool for when it pays its way, and you are in control of your writing. Be lazy—use the tool because it’s so much easier than quality writing—and you’ll hear about it the first time you show your work to a competent editor.

If you want to stress over something related to AI, try focusing the energy on being a better writer than an algorithm. That’s more productive than placating people who don’t write as well as does an algorithm.

 

*Why the hell are we calling it that? The em dash is so called for typesetting reasons that no longer bear resemblance to the way contemporary printing occurs. It’s supposed to be the width of an m; the en dash an n, and the hyphen: —, –, -.

Editing/writing life, Entertainment and music

Names and attachments

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Been watching old episodes of Jon Taffer’s Bar Rescue with my wife. Sometimes it’s pretty entertaining, and it’s a great way to learn about the bar business by seeing how people foul up what they imagined was a self-driving business vehicle.

If you’ve never seen the show, Taffer is a New Yawka who goes about the country helping failing bars and taverns to succeed. Can’t tell whether his antics are playing the stereotype to TV or his real reactions, because reality TV is unreal, but he can have a shouting match one day and come in calm and cool the next segment/day. He often shows a heart of gold, especially when it comes to establishments failing due to external, unavoidable impacts (death, cancer, hurricane, accidental ownership).

He is direct, vocal, and pretty hard to ignore. Good marketing. Worked on us.

His success rate seems to be about 50%. Considering that (taking claims at face value) nearly all of the bars he saves were about to faceplant and take the invested capital with them, that’s big. That means half the people end up paying off lenders, keeping houses, retaining staff. It’s a worthy social consequence. He’s helping the little guys and gals, who sometimes compete with well-funded chains.

After a couple of seasons, I started seeing analogies to my own field. There are key and major differences, starting with the fact that no one is at physical risk from reading a novel (consuming it might be another story). And one trend I have seen in bar owners is smack down the middle of my own experience:

Names.

Taffer usually alters the bar’s name. The bar owner will so often insist on the fig leaf of originality by going right back to the old name not long after Jon’s off to Tucson or Tallahassee. A world-renowned expert just told them they needed a new name, and they said “Meh.”

Not kidding. Of all places, that’s where they dig foxholes and prepare to die for it.

Want to know what’s hard in my line of work: Telling someone that the name they chose for their novel is ridiculous and counterproductive, but without being so blunt and cruel that one guarantees non-listening.

I have yet to figure out a good way to do that, but I can tell you that I find many book titles poorly considered, and I don’t know why they even chose them. For one thing, you don’t have to christen the thing in final form until printing. If you sell it to a publisher, they’ll probably reserve the right to change it. If you take it through  to publication yourself, you have until you push the buttons to set up the listings, post the blog posts,  create the blurb, and so on. You have months or years to think. Until then, a working title will more than suffice.

All right. What if your editor tells you, tactfully or brutally, that your novel’s name is not well chosen?

If you’re like most writers that’s an instant negative reaction. Rarely have I ever gotten the response: “All right. What do you suggest?” I have come to realize that the naming is so personal that nothing I know to say will crack that connection. It’s almost like an addiction, in which the addict must hit bottom before making a priority of seeking help and confronting the misery in order to get life back.

Not faulting anyone for that, either. I get its deeply human and not always practical nature, so this addiction seems to me something to just let go of once the subject is raised and blown off. Otherwise all it’ll do is alienate my client and then my advice will still be dismissed. “He didn’t believe in my work.” “This is the name it’s had in my mind for twenty years, and that’s that.”

What I’m hearing is: “I have to fight you on one key point or I will have surrendered myself. This is the hill I die on.” And a part of me even gets that. I’m the person who would rather have customer service calls take three times as long to get to a person because I refuse, point blank, to have verbal conversations with robots. That admitted (and I do have a purpose to it), they’re dying on a worthless hill.

It’s worthless because a title that doesn’t make sense doesn’t help to sell the book. That’s fine if it’s a vanity project and the au doesn’t expect to recoup the costs of editing. Nothing against vanity projects; in a way, they are very liberating. That said, it’s my job to render the best guidance I can, and if one has a deep need to fight for some aspect of their writing, that’s one of the bad ones.

If you’re a writer, and your editor is trying to tell you that your title is ill-chosen, hopefully at the very least you give it fair consideration.

Editing/writing life, Homeownership, Social comment

The fine art of being a great customer: enlightened self-interest

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If you want a tl:dr, scroll to the bottom.

This wasn’t inspired by my editorial work, but by life as an American consumer. That doesn’t mean it can’t apply, but it does mean it isn’t written from my vendor perspective. It stems from my time on the other, paying side.

Most of us 1970s kids were raised with a great falsehood. Some of us still believe it a factual selling principle in spite of all evidence to the contrary:

The customer is always right.

No. They’re not. They can’t be. The very statement is obvious baloney. The act of making it is a red flag big enough to sell to China.

In fact, some customers are stupid and wrong, and they are rarely if ever right. Nearly every customer who tries to quote that fiction is either harboring a delusion or using it as a club to beat the vendor into submission. A fair restatement from a vendor perspective would be:

The customer is right as often as we can arrange for them to be without giving away the store.

Until we accept that reality, we begin from a place of unrealism. It’s not that all vendors always do the right thing. Some never do, and some are outright criminals, but let’s at least assume that most vendors adopt a public perspective of enlightened self-interest. While they do want business, they don’t want to make enemies in the process because that’s bad business. (Ask Ziply Fiber.)

It follows that they’d like to keep good customers happy: those who pay on time, treat them decently, appreciate good things, and don’t raise hell over trivial stuff. Some more entitled vendors might add a few clauses designed only for their benefit, and most of those vendors have a problem.

Your call is not important to us anymore, and how I know

Be a bad enough customer long enough, and they stop trying to please you in hope that you will just stop calling. (There are other ways of dealing with this. I know an attorney who charges what he calls the “asshole tax.”) Habitually bad customers have alienated everyone within reach, and might have no other choice. They’re the people who called the nurse a stupid bitch one time, but are now stuck with her in the ER and she has to treat them even if she still quite rightly resents that insult. As a pro, she will do what is needed and correct, but there’s more she might do if she felt motivated.

I know these things because I have worked in sales, and I also used to be a bad customer. I was raised to imitate many bad things, including a horrible sense of snobbish pretension. I was raised by observing what I later realized were serious Karen stereotypes. Once I hit my thirties I realized that this was misguided and selfish–and highly counterproductive.

The mental workings I had used to justify this to myself were that I never wanted to be deprived of the slightest bit of fair value. The world was a damn ripoff and by God, I wasn’t taking it in silence. I didn’t get what I wanted? I demanded some form of compensation. I had to wait too long? Same. Suck service? I’d learn them with a dime tip.

On some level I was right in some of those cases, at least from a purely pecuniary tactical standpoint. From a strategic standpoint I was losing the war over pennies and nickels. I had to learn the principle of enlightened self-interest. I had to realize that, as Venita van Caspel taught us back in the day, that I should look at what something or some situation paid me rather than what it cost me.

Okay, I was an ass. Now what?

I changed. I never again sent back an entrée, stopped talking to managers about bad food or service. If I didn’t like the service at a restaurant, I still didn’t tip; I just paid my bill and never went back. Ever, ever. Why would I want to help people doing bad business? Go on BegsDoor (a place that will help you understand how this country got into the state it’s in) and you’ll see armies of people saying “you should tell the manager about it.” Why have a negative interaction when I’m already not very happy and never coming back? Faaaa. I’ve already accepted that I got poor value, and it’s the management’s job to prevent that, so I assume they are doing their jobs and approve of this. Let them manage their outfit without free consulting from me.

Pay without a word, then leave. Not my problem. Feedback is for valued vendors.

Obviously, I still believe in fair value. My view of fair value expanded. My psychological state also has value, and I’m not going to screw it up because the restaurant charges premium pricing for cheap ingredients. I’ll go do something more enjoyable.

It’s not too smart to let past negatives screw up your present (that’s how old people become grumpy old people), so I tried my best to start each new relationship with a positive and open-minded outlook. Without that, it’s pretty hard to lay the groundwork for what  might become a great relationship. Where it went from there was up to the vendor.

It started to work. Having removed myself from the problem side of the equation, I gained better outcomes. I stopped re-using bad vendors–but if the vendor did fine, I would treat them right. I might dicker a bit over a price, especially where they expected it, but if I got a discount then I considered I had a higher duty to them. They wanted to charge me less? Great; I would make sure they weren’t sorry they’d given me a good deal. If I sensed that the discount might cost me more than it saved me, I would not ask. Some discounts are not good discounts.

There is a concept in Theodism (a branch of Germanic heathenism which I respect, though I’m not a member) called “right good will.” Simply put, it means that you treat your friend, sibling, etc. better than expected. The idea is that you don’t have to watch your value equation because they’re watching yours. They are fine with doing that because you are watching theirs.

This also influenced me. It reminds me to see the world through other eyes. What would make the vendor delighted to hear from me? If I value that vendor, I ask myself that question.

For example…

The dividends the overall approach has paid are lasting and warming. Let’s take the best of the local Mexican restaurants here (which sadly isn’t saying a lot). Most of their waitresses don’t speak a lot of English. I speak just enough Spanish to empathize, and have lived my entire life in the American West. Hispanic culture is a part of our region’s heritage. Experience with the language and culture showed me that in Spanish-speaking cultures, to speak badly can be embarrassing. I noticed this because the staff members were always praising my truly awful Spanish, and I came to understand the unspoken message: I am a courteous person who will not humiliate you.

Well, I wouldn’t be embarrassed, but I see what you’re doing. Muchas gracias, Señorita.

I adopted that rather civilized outlook as my own (at least in those restaurants; definitely not when editing, where I simply have to tell the client the truth). It’s certainly more civilized than bullying a newcomer who is doing her best, as a percentage of people would earn my contempt by doing. So when the waitress spoke to me, I would say something nice about her accent, or how well she spoke. Every time I did so, I watched the tension drain from the server’s features. She understood that this (heavy-bearded, old, male) Anglo at least would not snarl at her or humiliate her.

It was easy to leave good tips, considering the great service I received. I had done nearly nothing to deserve this but fib a little. How is that anything but an amazing deal? Best value ever: better experience almost for free, and walking out happy. Word will get around. Come back any time soon, and notice a special respect in some folks’ tones, eyes. Nice way to start off a dinner date with my wife!

There are times not to dicker even if you could. An example is my favorite sports card vendor. We met for the first time in a parking lot, and I looked over the vintage cards he had priced for me. The price was very fair, so instead of dickering, I pulled out my checkbook and paid what he asked. This was the beginning of over a decade of business, with the deals getting better and better over time. If I couldn’t afford it, I’d tell him so rather than ask him to lower the price. He might offer to do that on his own. The value was always there; it was just a question of what I could afford to spend on old cards.

We became friends, and we’re still doing card business. I’ve even sold him some, which brought the flip side into play. I tried to base the price on what he would consider a great deal, but wasn’t sure about what that might be. I had to push him, however politely, and finally said the magic words: “Look. This is the best chance I’ve had to treat you as well as you treat me. You’re offering me $150 and I think it’s too much. Would you consider $125 an awesome deal?” He admitted he would. “Then not a penny more,” I said, enjoying the whole transaction. $25 to do right by someone who has asked thousands of dollars less than he could have over the years? Barely even registers. I hope I get to do him a great deal again sometime.

When a bad vendor screws up–as, being bad vendors, they customarily do–they’re going to be off the list anyway. When a good one screws up, that’s when you really cement the relationship. In a previous city of residence, I had an auto mechanic relationship so excellent that I’ve been tempted to take my vehicle back there for service, three and a half hours away. Well, one day they gave my name out to AAA without asking me, and I got an inquiry/questionnaire about them. Now, I don’t cotton one bit to having my information sprayed about without my advance consent, and I am often inclined to be very vindictive about that, but this was the best shop in town. When my battery was toast and I needed a jump, they sent a guy out to do it so I could drive to their shop. Is that not awesome? Who burns a vendor relationship like that? More plainly spoken, who is so shortsighted, childish, and stupid as to do so?

So rather than pitch a fit, I sat down with one of the managers I’d seen mature over fifteen years. I explained why I had a big problem with the info sharing. He explained that they were shooting for AAA certification of some sort, and that it would help their business a lot. “I get it,” I said. “Normally I’d be pretty pissed, but I respect you guys a lot. Please don’t do that again, but I won’t say anything rough on the survey. Fair?” He was relieved and appreciative. Relationship preserved, message received.

In 2024 I had spinal cord surgery for a condition that would otherwise have killed me, with debilitating pain ultimately destined for quadriplegia and death. I woke up in the ICU and was able to move my hands, and I felt better than I had in six months. I’d never before spent the night in a hospital, and my self-adopted daughter and some very good friends are nurses. The worst possible thing I could do was be at my worst, and it would be real smart to be at my best instead. The night shift nurse was kind and did some small thing to make me more comfortable. When I said “Thank you, Nurse,” she told me I was welcome to call her by her first name. “I appreciate that,” I replied through the medical fog, “but I’m pretty sure you worked very hard to become an RN. You earned that title.” She was surprised but not at all displeased. Nurses don’t get a tenth the respect they deserve. Try it.

Word gets around. The morning nurse got the same treatment, and asked if I needed anything. I asked was there any chance I could get a good cup of strong non-cafeteria coffee? “No problem,” she said. She kept checking back and ended up bringing me four cups of the good stuff before finally suggesting this might be a good time to switch to tea. I smiled, laughed, and went along. I wasn’t very needy and stayed off the call button. When they had to perform tests, even when I wasn’t much in the mood, I went along without giving them any guff. They have more than one patient and the give part of the give-and-take is to refrain from grousing about when they get their periodic duties done. You help them, they help you.

I was home about 48 hours after they stitched up my neck and detubated me (that should be a word). Coincidence? I suspect that 25ish me would have ended up in rehab rather than just going home. He would have made their lives harder, giving them zero reason to make his easier. Better philosophy = happier outcome.

One year my wife and I were at a pretty nice restaurant for our anniversary. The kitchen botched up our order, and started in on a party of 25 immediately after. The waiter had the unfortunate job of breaking the news to me. “It’s all right,” I said. “We live by a simple principle. Want to know what it is?” He nodded, actually near tears; he knew it was our anniversary. I motioned him closer and lowered my voice below the din of a busy dining room. “It’s easy. Don’t be assholes in the restaurant. No one’s trying to make your day worse. Stuff goes wrong. I know you’ll take care of us. In the meantime, I’m here with my best friend.” Down came the tears, but he also laughed. He got the great tip he deserved, and we got free desserts.

Guess how many times that’s happened over the years? It’s simple enough: Just be someone they’d like to make happy, rather than someone they hope never returns. I’ve lived both ways and the first is far more pleasant.

Believe it or not, part of it is knowing when to at least try to refuse taking something for free. A good vendor who has a bad day will often offer you too good a deal, such as not charging you for this or that. If you have the ability to calculate a good deal for you, you have the ability to calculate too good a deal. If this is a vendor you want to keep around and make you a priority, you have two options. One would be to simply make the payment for more, but that has an element of forcing a kindness on someone. More tactful, and likely to be declined but very much respected, is the rejoinder to her: “Hey, I really appreciate that, and it says a lot about your principles. $X – 30% is too much, though. You still did in the end come through; it just went a little sideways, and we all have rough days. You still need to make a living. I think you should split the difference with me at $X – 15%.”

As Molly Ivins might say today, you could then knock her over with Pete Hegseth’s bourbon brain. She’ll probably decline, which is all right; you made an honest effort and she knows it. Even if she accepts–and it’s good to push a bit–you still got a very good deal. Either way, she’s not going to forget you soon. Not only were you kind to her on a lousy day, but you tried hard to make sure it was still a decent deal for her. Put another way, you did your best to be great business for her. She’d like to do more in the future. If it’s between you and some mean old bastard (the kind forever and ironically leaning into the “honored citizen” stuff, reaming grocery checkers for carding them for alcohol) who hammers her on price and then complains about any tiny detail, who’s getting taken care of? Who’s better business?

It works this way in many situations. It earns ridiculous benefits: servicing priority, better pricing, quality work. The objective is to be someone they do not want to lose.

I’m not saying that your whole purpose for business is to kiss your vendors’ asses. Every day my browser opens up with a news aggregation of listicles telling us all the things we should do to make it easier for people. TSA agents, flight attendants, truck drivers, etc., etc. It’s too much, and unless you are a professional altruist or have no self-respect, at some point it’s natural to ask yourself if your counterparts are planning to make any extra effort on our behalf–you know, out of fairness. Otherwise it’s basically: Let me get this straight. My primary concern should be making your day easier. It’s unlikely you plan to show much appreciation. I should invest half my energy in your concerns with what motivation?

A few small asks, that’s fine. Asks that make sense anyway, that’s fine. Have no goal but to kiss your ass? That’s not fine. I think maybe I’ll fall back on treating you the way you treat me. You care about me, I care about you. You show you don’t care about me, fine; you entitle me to feel the same.

I fail to see what’s wrong with that–either way.

So no, it’s not about being everyone’s buddy, nor about restructuring my whole way of life to the Suckup Model. I don’t reward bad business, and if truly screwed, my rages are legendary and my memory eternal. I’m still pissed off at those movers from Boise. There’s an orthopedic surgeon in eastern Washington I came close to decking. I refuse to use self-checkout and that now keeps me away from Blowe’s and Home Despot. I’ve boycotted American Airlines for forty years. I quit donating to every Catholic charity when they poured several mill into manipulating elections in my home state. Every. Single. One.

In other words, none of this is me cosplaying Barney. I don’t turn the other cheek. It is enlightened self-interest; I want good outcomes and I have figured out how to maximize the chances. I also care about pleasant interactions and relationships, and I have found a way to have those and the good outcomes. The bad ones can stay on my bad side and out of my way. I will reward the good ones emotionally and financially.

If I don’t give them a chance to be likeable and good to me, that’s on me. It isn’t always possible. In some situations I’ve learned that I need to put up an automatic emotional wall, especially with car dealerships. The more they go on about how they’re an “alternative,” “no bull/no dicker,” “believe in nice,” the more certain you can be that you’ll gain nothing from trying to develop harmony. They are sure to do something you despise because that’s their identity, but you need a car. So treat it like dealing with a fairly dumb bureaucrat who has the power to hose you; maintain your composure; and sidestep all efforts to “establish rapport” and “overcome objections.” Bargain as though it’s life or death, without remorse or emotion, and plan to walk away the first time.

Don’t answer questions that are none of their fucking business, but don’t say it that way; just move past the rude question. (I’ve actually had a car salesman insist on an answer to some personal question, and then get mad at me because I told him that wasn’t pertinent. Guess how many people I’ve told about that place, with its whole “we’re the nice people” schtick. Not that I’d ever dime out Wilsonville Toyota, nor in any way imply that they behaved this way. Of course not. They just randomly came to mind.)

Kindness and good relationships are for those where it will matter. If you’re forced to deal with basic evil, you are at complete liberty to think only of your own interests. They surely will. If you have a mean streak, it’s okay to bring it out when dealing with evil. In fact, I consider it admirable.

So what’s the technique?

  • Evaluate a vendor on the first transaction, and decide whether you care. If you don’t care, find another vendor for that or just accept that this’ll never get better and stay with mediocrity. (Often necessary in small towns where there are only so many options and half the time they don’t even show up.)
  • Be polite and kind to good service providers, and don’t go back to those who don’t appreciate decent treatment. If you have no other option, put up the emotional wall and get through it.
  • Be especially polite and kind to service providers who see people at their worst, which is accomplished by trying to be at your best.
  • Don’t dicker just because you can. First see if their pricing is pretty fair, and if so, just pay it.
  • If you go to a store and milk them for some free advice, buy something. Always buy something when you go, even if small.
  • Remember that you’re not their only customer/patient/whatever. This could be called empathy.
  • Remember that they too have to make a living. This too could be called empathy.
  • Don’t overcontrol when you don’t really know that much. If they ask how you prefer something be done, ask them what they think makes the most sense.
  • Do little things. Tree removal people working all day in your back yard? Let them know they’re welcome to use your patio to eat their lunch. Hot as Satan’s perineum out there? Would it hurt you to offer them some ice water? Doubt it.

That could summarize this whole blog post. Be kind and generous until people show you that you need to be selfish.

 

Editing/writing life

Editorial maverick: my quick bullets of advice for writers

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And not much else. If you want to write, you so signify by writing. Here:

  • Decide on your genre (including a synthesis of genres) and write it on paper where you can see it.
  • There is no such thing as writer’s block. Refuse to give this invented malady power over you.
  • Write every day, something, anything. If need be, write about how you’d rather be doing anything else that day.
  • Never self-edit as you go. Use the comment feature to mark areas for later review.
  • Your biggest enemy is fear of writing garbage. Write anyway.
  • Use good peripherals: quality mouse, large screen, comfortable keyboard.
  • Start your marketing plan, unless it’s a vanity project.
  • Read Stephen King’s On Writing, and learn.
  • Don’t show it to anyone until you’re done. No, not even her.
  • Consider honing your craft by starting with short stories.
  • Back your work up and save frequently, using new filenames.
  • Learn the different editing modes, so that you know more about editing than at least half the “editors” out there.
  • “Write what you know” means to incorporate your knowledge into what you write.
  • When you don’t want to write, admit that to yourself.
  • Never book-format as you write. First finalize the content, then do the pretty stuff.
  • On a first draft, never stress over grammar or spelling. Create. Keep creating.
  • Use change tracking when you revisit the completed ms.
  • Your Faulknerian “darlings” are the things you think are your best quips ever. You’re probably going to be the only believer in those.
  • Read great writers in your genre; learn from them.

 

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: Who are my examples?

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One of the best ways to teach involves good and bad examples. In many cases it’s easiest just to show the client someone who does it better than I do, or at least as well, and recommend they learn from it. Why not share that list?

Tightening: C.J. Cherryh’s fantasy and science fiction, and it’s not  even close. I often say that you could string a bow with her writing. If you are looking to see how someone gets away with the minimum words while presenting great narrative and dialogue, she’s your draft pick. Another author who doesn’t waste words is Tim Cahill (also mentioned below), whose laconic Sconnie style is that of a trained but taciturn journalist.

Dialogue: The art of dialogue takes time to acquire. There is a fine art to the correct density of dialogue tags (“he said”, etc.), how to present emphasis, and so on. The one that stands out to me is the early and middle work by W.E.B. Griffin, before his son’s name went onto the cover (and definitely before post-Junior’s hired pens were hired). You could always tell who was talking, and there were just enough adverbs in the tags (as in not many).

The Moment: If you read much fiction, and even some non-fiction, you have observed that some authors show a powerful sense of the key moment. Most very good storytellers must be cognizant of it, but a few do it with deft gravitas. My money there is on Frank Herbert in his Dune books (not the ones after his death, most of which I strongly suspect were written by ‘lancers).

Third Person Limited Point of View: For those not familiar, this means that the storyteller is inside the protag’s head but doesn’t assume the protag’s identity (which would shift it to first person: to “I” from the 3P “s/he.” All perspective colors our fiction with a basic approach; for example, the most common for first novels is semi-autobiographical 1P, probably because that’s suited to the skill level of most novice novelists. (That sounds waspish, but is not so intended. Let’s be real: there are novices in all fields, and they find certain paths easiest. Thus here.) In any case, my favorite example for 3PL is C.S. Forester, especially the majestic Hornblower novels. A deep dive into a man’s insecurities, disappointments, triumphs, and tragedies, the bohicas and terrors and even joys of military/naval life.

Mastery of English: Winston Churchill, and it’s not even close. Churchill is what I read when I need to be reminded what I am unlikely ever to be. William Manchester (including two of his three volumes about Churchill) is another candidate in a different English dialect.

Urban Paranormal: I admit that I am pretty much over this genre, but keeping an open mind. It’s not that I fundamentally hate it, but rather that it is so often so very badly done. Miniature dragons as part of huge elfy/vampy/wolfy spell battles on the San Francisco waterfront, and the next morning the city wakes up to business as usual? No. One thing I believe is that every fiction author gets one cheat: one step they don’t need to account for or fully explain, one leap of faith. To use that one on the notion that the rest of the world would just keep calm and carry on after zombies came pouring through town–that is not good. Some–and they know who they are–are so fetishistic they have to keep ratcheting up the monstrosity, like a bondage addict who must up-kink in order to keep feeling the thrill. The one who seems at least respectably tethered to the rest of reality is Patricia Briggs with the Mercy Thompson series.

Travel: This is my favorite besides history, so I’m fussy here. For a laconic outlook that reflects his Wisconsin upbringing, anything by Tim Cahill. He has the gift of being funny without appearing to try. For unconventional ways to write about nearly everything, William Least Heat-Moon. One gets the sense that Heat-Moon is simply a deeper and more patient observer than the average person.

Biography: You might not have heard of her, but Fawn Brodie flat killed it. Just five: Joseph Smith, Thaddeus Stevens, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Richard Burton, and (the only one I have yet to read) Richard Nixon. Brodie is that sort of biographer that helps one feel a deeper understanding of the subject’s times, not simply the life.

There’s also a long list of popular authors I consider inept, even unreadable. I’m not going to write a blog post about them because I can’t. Most of you can, but I cannot. I’m in the industry, albeit one of its tiniest lights, and there’s a non-zero chance I could run into someone. Some people have long memories, and I don’t have a need to go out of my way to put myself on the bad side of those long memories for zero benefit. The standards have dropped, and as some of them age, time is unkind to their skillsets.

Anyway, I might not write about that in a concentrated form, but you perhaps have ideas. If you’d like to discuss Popular Writers I Think Are Lousy in the comments, I’m not going to interfere unless it gets out of hand.

Editing/writing life

New release: The Girl in the Rusted Cage, by Mindi Boston

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This women’s fiction novel is recently out. I was line editor, plus a bit more.

Mindi came my way thanks to a kind referral from author Mike Hancock, a fellow traveler from the Epinions days circa 2000. She reached out to me on the Facebook page, told me about her project, and asked whether I’d be interested.

I was. It’s a fictional tale of a pregnant teenage girl failed by nearly every support system that was supposed to step up for her. I don’t know how it feels to be pregnant, but I know how it feels when all the support systems abandon you. Mindi explained that the ms had been years in the making, was still too long even after tearing through it with ruthless trimming, and that she was exhausted. I also know how that feels. Due to the exhaustion, she wasn’t up for developmental editing with a major revisit to the ms. She wanted a line edit (tone, style, consistency), which would be one of the customary options at this point. I agreed to read it and give her my impressions.

There was something of a battler’s spirit about Mindi, that type of person who has dealt with significant adversity (in her case, single motherhood and major health issues; more than enough to know what she was talking about with regard to her fictional protag) but who remains sharp and feisty and a little bit brassy. I knew she would stand her ground on what was important to her, and that was fair. I hoped she would be open to persuasion as to a course of action, and that hope was justified. The ms was in rather good shape, and a line edit was a good solution, but I saw a few areas where some latitude might enable me to make things better.

One of my basic editing philosophies is that we should tailor our approaches to the client’s actual needs, rather than live by slavish conformity to the various editing modes. I view those the way the military views regulations, at least at upper levels: They are for the guidance of the commander, not as shackles. There are times and places to go afield from them. Same with editing, so I suggested to Mindi that we do a line edit with latitude. This would be short of a substantive edit by some distance, but would enable me to fix some flaws that might exceed the purview of line editing.  Mindi’s one of those wonderful clients who doesn’t overcontrol, which is sensible because she could still have rejected any or all of my edits. It’s great to work with someone who will allow you to give all the help you wish.

Her basic writing, dialogue, and timing were quite good compared to most first-time novelists, no doubt reflecting a background in journalism. There was some overuse of similes, and I did a lot with phrase order within sentences. Take that last phrase and adjust the order: I did a lot within sentences with phrase order. You can see why that would suck, which is why I wrote the original in the phrase order shown. For one thing, the within then with looks bad; with then within flows better. For another, since the first prepositional phrase would tend to be the more pertinent here, we’d rather tell them we did it with phrase order rather than that we did it within sentences. All the latter says is that we didn’t swap them around between sentences, which is kind of assumed but not bad to clarify. As I reflect, I could probably have yanked ‘within sentences’ altogether.

If you ever wanted to know how line editing feels, imagine over 100,000 words of such considerations, one by one.

Anyway, I worked my way through the story. Mindi’s vivid descriptive talents were a joy, and she rarely overdid them much. A few redundancies, popped in a few segment breaks within chapters and combined some others, otherwise tried my best to bring her novel nearer its potential.

Mindi and I both went through some life turbulence during the process. I started doing more tech editing, and was dealing with back, wrist, and neck pain issues; I ultimately had to have a mass removed from my spinal cord. Her basement flooded. I worked on it in grabbed hours here and there, half hours sometimes, trying to stay within the budget range.

She wanted to try her best at the trad-pub route, and I supported this while advising her that there were a lot of reasons many writers have stopped bothering adding their mss to the infamous slush piles. After investing a great deal of time and effort in a valiant attempt, she went the self-publishing route. I maintain that we learn a lot about our projects by trying to market them and seeing what happens, and I think the experience will help Mindi be her own marketer.

At the last moment, she decided on a major change. We worked through that, and now it’s time. I believe that this will be inspirational to everyone who has experienced, or cares about someone who has experienced domestic violence. I grew up with it and felt the authenticity in every word–and I’ve never even been pregnant. Well recommended.