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Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: an interview with author Vanessa MacLellan

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Today I’ve got something fun for you.  Vanessa is a past SF con acquaintance of mine and we hit it off well enough to stay in touch. She has a new book just out titled Reluctant Hero that touches on some new themes for her; suggest you check it out. It’s kind of funny we did this via FB messaging (live, not canned), even though by a weird quirk of life, we only live at most a few miles apart. I think you’ll enjoy her candor and forthcomingness, if that is a word. Without further ado:

The Editorial Maverick: Vanessa, welcome to the blog!

Vanessa MacLellan: Thank you! I’m happy to be here, J.K.

TEM: You’re a successful indie author. This means that all indie authors who want to be successful should pay careful attention to what you choose to share. First, though, could you please give us the basics: where’d you grow up, anything remarkable about it, and up through college?

Vanessa: Sure. I come from Moses Lake, WA, in the heart of the state in the desert. I grew up in the Middle of Nowhere and so I often had to just play with my imagination rather than other kids.

I went to college at WSU for civil engineering, but I’d always been telling stories, writing poetry, and generally doing imaginary things. In college I played my first roleplaying games as well, and that opened up a whole new world. This was in the early years of White Wolf (a gaming franchise) and I adored it. Once I found a place in Vancouver, WA (for the real job) I immediately looked for other gamers.

TEM: Eastern Washington RPG nerds representing all in here. Do you find that your major helped with or influenced your later writing work?

Vanessa: In a way. I’m very analytical as an engineer, so I think I approach writing with more of that kind of studious planning versus just making things up as I go. I like numbers and formula and things that make sense. Even though I write fantasy and other speculative fiction, I still am pretty grounded about it and like it all to have form and follow a logical system. But as for real engineering, I don’t really put that in my books. Maybe I should!

TEM: It’s ‘what you know.’ So what were you doing in life before you decided you wanted to author fiction novels?

Vanessa: Well, I guess that whole ‘deciding I wanted to author fiction novels’ wasn’t really a solid line in the sand. I’d started writing very bad stories as a child and then in junior high I moved on to poetry… angst-ridden, and once I was an adult (and a gamer) I wrote stories for my early gaming characters and fanfiction for stories I wanted to see more of. I didn’t really decide to write my own stuff until NaNoWriMo of 2004 where I wrote my first environmental fantasy, to which I recently returned and got stuck again. So, I guess it was 2004 and finding out about NaNo that got me realizing…I can do this! And I did. And I’ve done it again and again (writing rough drafts, anyway).

TEM: And at roughly what age, if I may be so bold, did you decide to go that way?

Vanessa: 2004, I was 30. That was 20 years ago, if you want to do the math.

TEM: Heh, not my forte. Please share the thought process that went into your first book’s topic and story creation.

Vanessa: My first book was Three Great Lies, published by Hadley Rille Books in 2015. It’s a portal fantasy where a modern woman falls through a tomb into ancient mythological Egypt. My love for Egypt and Egyptian mythology totally took over that book. I don’t even know if there was much thought, it was more, I studied mythology for so long, I wanted to include it in a book. The portal aspect of it came from recently reading Stardust (I think that’s the name) by Neil Gaiman, and I was just delighted about going into a magical world.

Those types of stories are not new at all, but the timing just hooked me and so I decided a modern woman in mythic Egypt was what I was going to do. And I did it. And it took a while to edit it all because it was the first book I really finished and polished up and it was utter joy to have Hadley Rille pick it up.

TEM: A lot of first-time novelists would commit low crimes to have that moment. Now we’d like to hear how it felt. You were not then established. Were you confident? Nervous?

Vanessa: Hahaha…I was completely bowled over! I wrote this book and somebody wanted to publish it! Holy smokes. That’s like the holy grail. And I worked closely with the editor and he just loved it and supported it so much, I was very lucky. I would say I was super nervous, because what if nobody else liked it? I was also very happy and just inflated with all of this goodness. It’s hard to explain, but it uplifted me quite a bit. I love writing and here I was validated, if you know what I mean.

TEM: I do. You tried the trad-pub route before self-publishing. This is very interesting because so many of my clients wrestle with trad-pub vs. self-pub. Please tell us all you can about that change, the decision, and what it was like.

Vanessa: I mainly decided to go self-publishing because of the experience with my second book.

My second book is also mythology-heavy but it’s different, it’s dark fantasy versus portal fantasy. Hadley Rille told me if I wrote a similar book to the one they published, they would be interested, but this second book, Awaken, didn’t fit their bill. So, I wrote it and I shopped it out to agents and other small presses. Long story short, one press requested a full exclusively and had it for a YEAR, and rejected it, then the second had it for another year and rejected it. That was TWO YEARS gone just waiting for someone to make a decision. Ugh. I didn’t want to deal with that again.

Part of me would like the validation of an agent and traditional publishing, but the other part of me is 50!…and I don’t have years to waste because I have too many ideas in me.

TEM: You have a new book just out! Can you tell us about the inspiration behind Reluctant Hero? How did the idea for the story come to you?

Vanessa: Yes, I’m very excited about my third book coming out. It’s sci-fi superhero and the idea came from all my years of roleplaying games. (waving my geek flag) I love superheroes and enjoy a good superhero read and decided: I wanted to do that too! Many of my characters in the book are based on roleplaying game characters from my decades of gaming (see, I’m still writing gaming fanfiction).

So, I decided to make these RPG characters into characters for my book, but I had to decide where the superpowers came from. That was a lot of fun. I pondered it for a long time because I didn’t want it to be too similar to other mega-superhero franchises and I think it’s somewhat unique (though who knows, I haven’t read every book out there!) but I know my characters are unique. As for the story…the plot…it stemmed from where the powers came from. Someone put the Seed in the Seeded…why? How? To what purpose? That’s where the story evolved and I’m very happy with how it came out.

TEM: I was an RPG gamer myself for decades, so I completely get how your characters originated from roleplaying games. What are your favorite RPGs?

Vanessa: I love that! Did you ever insert a character or two into your story?

TEM: I gave some thought to novelizing one of my favorite characters, but it opened up a can of IP worms. Plus, truth told, I never much had a passion to write my own fiction. My first paid writing was non-fiction. Honestly, I’m more comfortable helping other people with their books than writing my own. But let’s get back to your RPGing.

Vanessa: I played White Wolf’s Vampire and Changeling for years, as well as D&D (earlier editions, and Third Edition, as well as Pathfinder). I think I liked WW the best, because it really was more of an unfolding story versus stats. Stats and dice rolling are important, but it felt like a more natural telling of tales. I enjoyed storytelling for other gamers and just kinda making stuff up, as well as plotting bigger stories. When the players go left field, you have to be ready for it!

TEM: Nekoka, the protagonist of Reluctant Hero, is a unique and compelling character. She’s the reluctant hero from the title, she’s a hedonist, and self-centered. What challenges and joys did you face while writing her story?

Vanessa: Nekoka doesn’t want to be a hero. She has dear friends that say ‘we have power, we should use it to help people’ and she disagrees. Just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you MUST do something. I know that’s not super popular in heroic fiction but it was where Nekoka needed to start. I think making the natural arc of her being ‘oh, no way’ to any kind of duty, to having her jump in both feet to be heroic was my biggest challenge. The progression needed to be believable and natural and I think she evolved nicely in the end.

TEM: Reluctant Hero blends elements of fantasy, science fiction, and superhero genres. How did you manage to weave these genres together so seamlessly?

Vanessa: At first, I was thinking I couldn’t mix them. I know people do it all the time and it’s been done for ages (I’m reading Silverberg right now which has magic and aliens and the like), but my engineering brain wanted to keep them separate. But I think, especially in the superhero genre, the lines are blurred. I can argue that the power is from a scientific source, but in such an alien situation, when does it become magic? So, in a way, they all just wove together naturally, on their own, as the characters used their powers using the rules I defined.

TEM: And now here you are in the Portland, Oregon burbs, just like me. The setting of Portland adds a rich backdrop to your story. Why did you choose this location, and how does it influence the narrative?

Vanessa: Howdy neighbor! Portland is such a dynamic city that I felt it would be a perfect place for my story. Though my story is in the future, it’s still very Portland. There are the wonderfully accepting open arms of Portland, as well as the not-so-shiny parts of it that we’re struggling with as a city. Two of my main characters are homeless, each giving a different perspective on that situation, and I bring in the fact that welcoming Portland LOVES the Seeded (the superpowered people) while other cities don’t accept them. Plus, it was a lot of fun to include sites I know and visit. One such site, the Firehouse, has since been torn down and it just shows how evolving and changing this city is, and you can’t nail it down.

TEM: I have certainly noticed that in nine years here. What do you hope readers will take away from Reluctant Hero? Are there any particular themes or messages you want to convey?

Vanessa: Oh yes. So, it’s a thing of mine…the whole found family and dedication to friends. It’s a thing! I can’t help it. Nekoka will do anything for her friends and even when she needs a break, she will always be there for them, and they for her. That kind of dedication, of love and loyalty, is my bread and butter and I love it. So, I just want readers to see how much she means to people and how much people mean to her and family can be found in all different places.

TEM: Being employed full time, how do you find time to write?

Vanessa: Ugh. It’s harder and harder. I have the full-time engineering day job and I write when I can. I fully believe in the writing tip of ‘write every day’ and I did that when I was younger. I got up at 5 am to write before work. I did this for years! And now, I can’t seem to write every day. Some days I just want to come home and drink a whiskey and read a good book. So, I carve out time when I can, but it isn’t every day. Retirement, I’m dreaming of you!:) But seriously, you just have to make the time. There is no ‘wait for the mood to strike.’ Now, I just need to listen to myself.

Pep talks. I’ll make it with daily pep talk.

TEM: This has been great, and it was kind of you to take the time on a busy weeknight. Thank you, Vanessa, and best of success with Reluctant Hero and all your endeavors, writing and otherwise.

Vanessa: Thank you, J.K. This was a lot of fun and it got me thinking of my books in an excited light! I’ll get back on the wagon! Cheers to you and all of yours.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Editorial Maverick: So you want to write a book?

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Cool. What’s first?

It doesn’t begin with banging the keys, which is not to say I discourage that–but it would probably work better if you gave it some thought first. If your story idea is boiling over and running out your ears, and you want to get it on paper as though you were under the lash, very well–but early on, at some point, when you have satiated that urge for the day, give these things some thought.

Be honest with yourself. Why do you want to do this? What drives you? Common reasons are money, recognition, bucket list, inner personal need, service to others, revenge upon others, making people laugh, therapy, making spines tingle, and so on; there are as many more as there are people. I suggest writing down three if you can summon them, using all the self-honesty you can muster. All motives that don’t lead you to get into serious trouble you cannot handle are okay.

Your motives are important because they will inform everything you do. If money matters, for example, you’ll have to have a marketing plan. I divide books into vanity and commercial projects, and I do it this way: If it has a marketing plan that intends to turn a profit, it’s a commercial project. Until it has such a plan, it’s a vanity project because there is minimal prospect for profit. “Hoping I get noticed by New York” is not a marketing plan.

Please don’t misunderstand: I love vanity projects. They are liberating and often powerful. Many are books I would read for enjoyment. What they aren’t is moneymakers. All the passion in the world is not a marketing plan. And if you don’t much love marketing, well, you have company and it begins with me. It is not my forte and I do it because I must, because one of the reasons I want to edit is to earn. I groove on helping people achieve their dreams, teaching them to avoid common problems, and becoming more of a friend than an editor. That is why I’m the Editorial Maverick: I don’t do it the way most people do it.

(I’m not joking at all. If you were to read some editors’ groups, you’d see why. One can only take so much “Edibuddies please help me Ive been struggling for six hours where to put this comma and CMoS doesn’t tell me!” Jeez. If you can’t make a simple decision about punctuation without help from a huge book, you are either too poorly read or too fearful to be an editor. Decide. That’s why they hire you. If they wanted it screwed up, they could do that without you.)

Note that nowhere am I saying you need to start by planning out your book. There are slang terms for those who advocate just writing, and those who create flow charts to map out the story. I don’t care which you do. It should be whichever works. What I am saying is that, while you are doing whatever you do at the start, make time to be honest about your motives and goals. It is very difficult to set goals without motives, and it is very difficult to achieve goals without setting them.

Once you have a self-honest compilation of your reasons for wanting to write a book, you can decide whether it should be a moneymaker or a hopefully-break-evener. Because if it’s the former, you need to start the marketing plan as soon as you decide to write a book. If it’s the latter, of course, you are liberated from considerations related to the former. Do as you like and feel no shame–it’s just fine.

Whatever you do, if you begin with self-honesty about motives and goals, and own those decisions, will be fine.

Book reviews, Social comment, Sports

Current read: Victory Faust, by Gabriel Schechter

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This is arguably the best baseball book you’ve probably never heard of.

My copy was a holiday gift from Mr. Schechter himself. I met him at a mutual friend’s birthday party, one mainly focused on baseball enthusiasts, and he was handing out copies. I’m glad he was.

In 1911, a farm guy from Marion, Kansas (one county over from the one where my parents grew up) was supposedly told by a fiction fortune teller that if he went to Manhattan (New York’s, not ours), he would become a successful baseball player and meet the woman of his dreams. Charles Victor Faust was not, shall we say, richly endowed with any better critical thinking skills than he was a pitching arm, a batting eye, or a sense of baserunning. He hared off to New York City to thrust himself upon John McGraw’s New York Giants, a team that had come close to glory in recent years but never quite made it.

Faust made enough of a pest of himself to gain admission to the Giants’ clubhouse, if not the roster. He proceeded to entertain, lighten the mood, and make a fool of himself daily. He was the only one not in on the joke. Baseball players being a superstitious lot, the fact that New York tended to win with Faust in attendance got their attention. They took the correlation seriously enough for McGraw to keep Faust around the dugout, entertaining fans with his warmups, absorbing the heckles and pranks of the players. At least, when he wasn’t doing vaudeville or sulking because McGraw wouldn’t give him a contract.

The pride of Marion even got to appear in a couple of late-season games. He hardly lit the diamond on fire, but he has stat lines on Baseball-Reference.com and I don’t. The Giants won the pennant, but fell to the Athletics in the Series. Faust had worn out his welcome and migrated west, giving up on his delusions of big league pitching grandeur but not on a generally delusional nature. This was before Portland and Seattle had come to embrace their quirkiness, and he spent time in asylums in Oregon then Washington. He died of TB in Western State Hospital at Steilacoom, WA, where it seems the original numeric grave marker has in recent years received augmentation from a plaque mentioning him by name. About time.

Schechter tells all this far more effectively than I have summarized it.  His lengthy research shows in the detail he has uncovered about a ballplayer who was otherwise somewhat of an obscure caricature of a ballplayer. He offers just enough personal comment to be witty, but never to slant the narrative. If you like offbeat baseball history, this book is a yes. If you appreciate quality writing, another yes. If you respect deep research, three-for-three.

Secondary market copies go for $20-30 at this writing. I looked for a way to buy them direct from Schechter (who surely has a stockpile given that he brought some as gifts) and did not find one, but affordable copies are available.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

New release: the Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide, by Randy Hayes

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This volume is now available to purchase. At one point or another, I performed in most of the editing modes, but mainly developmental.

Randy and I go back forty years, to when he was a year ahead of me in college. He was always an unconventional thinker, a stand-up guy, and while quite bright, leveraged his natural intellect by seeking out people who knew things he did not. He was never for five seconds of his life at risk of becoming one of those stupid-smart people who get so caught up in all their knowingness that they resist learning unless it comes from approved directions. (Most people with that mentality get Ph.Ds and become professors. Academia is the only place that will put up with that crap because it’s common enough.) Randy is the kind of guy who, if he wanted to learn to skate backward, might just go to the rink and find some kids who were doing that, and ask whether they would teach him. And they would, because he’s very amiable that way.

He won’t tell you the juicy details, but as a businessperson Randy has enjoyed enormous success in some very difficult environments, notably investing. When he brought me this book idea, therefore, I was very glad to be working on it because I have many of the entrepreneurial wrong tendencies and bad habits that the book describes. I have taken guidance from him in ways that I see manifested in his book, and they are very helpful. For example, for five years now I have been carving out an hour a week to do CEO things, which I define as management and planning activities that are not doing the actual hourly paid work that is my main business focus. It has helped me to stay focused, to review a business plan, to recognize my weaknesses. Randy is an authority on this stuff.

Want a sample of the most notable principle of Randy’s that guides me? Very simple. Offer solutions rather than services. Think about what I do. Many editors think that their work is to change people’s use of the English language. No; that’s the car, not the journey. People come to editors because we are industry pros whom they expect to know things we can share with them. Editing a book ms is not the end goal; the end goal is the best possible book or other ms consistent with the author’s objectives. Editing is just one of the ways we can help make that happen.

I knew this intuitively, but I really knew it when Randy codified it. Take websites. No one just wants a website if for commercial purposes. People want websites in order to share information, answer common questions, describe offerings, allow viewers to inquire further, and generally present the best possible marketing and informational face to the world. The website just happens to be an efficient means to those ends. The web designer who believes that her job is to push HTML and scripts around has missed her real job and needs to remember why people hire her. So in this context, I offer clients the best possible guidance (including editing support) to help them achieve their writing objectives. It is wonderful when people want to become better writers, but sometimes a writer just wants it out the door and doesn’t want to learn.

Think that’s lunacy? One of my more recent clients was a nonagenarian with a bucket list book, a wonderful man who was a marvel to work with. My directive was to get the ms from draft to publishable, staying as true as possible to the au’s intent and experiences. I was approached, I believe, because evidence indicated that I understood this. He passed on, sadly, a year after the publication. He never made back his money and did not give a rip if he did. He saw his book in print, looking professional and with the benefits of experienced handling, and had that joy while he could revel in it. Mission accomplished all around, with the helpful intercession and interpretation of one of the best in the business, Maggi Kirkbride (who does not happen to work on fiction, thus the approach to me).

Yeah. Randy has that kind of impact. As I worked through his ms, I saw numerous areas where I could improve, and other areas where I already had good practices but it helped to see them codified and reinforced. This is why his book is such a gift for entrepreneurs.

When the original ms came to me, it needed a fair bit of polish and consideration. Randy began our relationship with as many bad writing habits as the typical college graduate, but the difference is that he has declared war on them and worked to eradicate them. The work has been successful. My task was to take the mistakes (comma splices, excessive adverbs, hyperdependency on parens and em dashes) out of Randy without taking the Randy out of Randy. His basic style is informal, friendly, and approachable. For the most part, anyone at the GED level or higher can understand all of it.

We batted it back and forth. Oh, how we batted it back and forth. Randy’s always coachable, and is one of those clients who wants to know why. Why do we do it this way? What’s wrong with doing it that way? The best clients, and the ones who get the most out of what they pay me, are always the ones who ask me why I did things. Sometimes they will present alternatives and ask me why those options aren’t a better method. Well, sometimes they are. Editing isn’t sitting like the statue at the Lincoln Memorial, a giant gazing down upon the masses. Editing is making written material the best it can become. If my client has a better idea than me, that’s excellent because in the ideal world it would be the author’s creativity that would formulate solutions. So I would toss something out there, and he’d often accept it or come up with a different way of incorporating it. I did the appropriate thing: beam with pride and keep marking.

The last major step was the dignified execution of a Faulknerian darling. Randy wanted to incorporate a marketing presentation that had been very popular. Why it was popular was obvious enough to me, but it also duplicated a lot of information. When I mused about that, the fact that he was readily open to the idea told me that he’d had that same thought. Protip: When your client accepts a fairly radical change idea with surprising readiness, it’s probably because they have already been wondering about it. I left the decision to him with a recommend that he fold it in. He folded it in. With that, the book’s last major hitch was handled. He’d even bent a little bit on one of our longtime factual disagreements; an amiable difference, to be sure, but he did provide enough context that a reader couldn’t just poke a hole in it as presented. Excellent; that was all I’d wanted.

What authors should know is that some of what we do involves review protection. The editing mind looks at what the au did and comes up with the most caustic comment a reviewer might offer (and we have the capacity, if we wish, to be much meaner than most reviewers; we just should not often want to be) if that were stetted. That editing mind then figures out what changes would render the possibility of such review comments unjust; someone might still say it, but importantly, they would be incorrect and probably wouldn’t even think of it because most people at least have a process for not making up crap.

This was a lot of what I did for Randy. I foresaw the spots where readers and reviewers might start to think he didn’t know as much as he purported to (which would be wrong on their part). I got him to make enough changes that those weak spots were no longer present.

The remainder is one of the most important books any entrepreneur could read. As an entrepreneur myself, I can just about assure even seasoned pros that they’ll find new ideas.  Randy is a good guide as well as a good guy, and he will give your fair value.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: why did that book get brutal reviews?

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If you’ve been reading here very long, you know by now how stupid it is for a book reviewer to snip: “Well, obviously she should fire her editor,” or “Duh. Clearly she didn’t hire an editor.” The reviewer cannot possibly know how much editorial guidance might have existed and been disregarded, nor what sort of editing might have been sought or employed. When you read that review, just mentally mark that reviewer down as not knowing what he’s talking about.

If that reviewer understood anything about the different editing modes, about the way the relationship goes, or had at least some basic insight beyond ‘me no like book,’ they’d show it.

Here is the takeaway in context: All those truly awful self-published books you’ve seen, been cajoled into trying, bought at SF con dealer rooms, ended up with at used bookstores, came up on searches and looked cool enough to try, then turned out unreadable? Many of their authors considered an editor, then talked themselves out of it with:

  • Oh, no. No, no, no. I am not paying $1000 for you to mess with my baby! (So you’ll raise the baby, but you won’t get it medical care. Okay.)
  • Sorry, but I like my original better than your sample edit. (That, or you got a serious shock when you saw all that “red ink” and decided you need someone who “believed in your work,” that is to say, didn’t know how much help it really needed.)
  • This would damage my unique style. (Yes. Your hyperdependence on passive voice, your head-hopping, and your grammatical incontinence could be considered a ‘unique style.’ And if you are fond of all that, I wish you the best.)
  • I can find someone on Sixerr or Sevenerr or whatever who’ll do it for half that. Can you match? (Can? Yes. Will I? Zero chance, and I’ll probably decline the project at any price after that. Anyone shopping purely on price is not my target market.)

You get the idea. It’s all about money, fear, ego, or some combination of these. My rejoinders (internal to my own mind, not articulated) might seem blunt, but do remember that blunt is part of the benefit. If they don’t want that, I get it, and I accept. We can both move on.

The reality is that most people put weeks, months, or years into a book from which they hope to make money, yet rarely choose the full benefits of professional feedback.

Most such books are lost in the sea of mediocrity. They didn’t have to be.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: forgetting how not to know

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It’s a problem in some non-fiction, but it’s endemic in fiction. It is worse in semi-autobiographical fiction, because the au “experienced” the events and “saw” the places and people. The same effect occurs when the au has been working on the story (in mind, on paper, on computer, wherever) for a very long time. They “know” all of it so well that they can’t get back to where the reader will be: knowing none of it until told.

While it’d be great if authors learned how to overcome this, most will never make the effort. As long as they are working on details they lived, or might as well have lived given how long they’ve been crafting the story, they will “know.” The best way I can think of to un-know is what I call the readercam: the focus position of the reader’s view. Decide where the readercam is on this scene, and think about how much of it must be described to help your mom understand it over the phone. I can tell them to do that until I’m winded, though, and few ever will.

And that’s okay, because it does make my role essential. As long as I have offered my best professional guidance toward a better outcome, if the client declines it (as in “nah, I’d rather just let you catch that kind of thing”), that’s okay too. And I’m not just saying that because it means I have paid work to do. Another reason is that such worries can get in the way of creative flow. Let’s ask the question. Which would you rather have written?

  • A brilliant story with piles of mechanical flaws, perspective issues, and grammatical errors?
  • A dull story executed to scholarly perfection?

Yeah. And that’s why I don’t get too worked up because someone tore through cranking out the ms in a creative whirlwind: I represent the stabilizing, logistics-handling, dull repairperson who cleans up after the party. I only get worked up if the story is dull, stupid, etc. I can fix most of the bad habits and problems that come from the first, especially if the client realizes the situation (I’ll help; oh, how I will help) and embraces editing as a liberating force for creativity. The second will still be a dull story unless there are major changes that make it no longer the au’s original story.

And at that point, editing is not the issue.

Editing/writing life

Editorial maverick: phases of writing growth…and lazy habits

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I’ve observed three distinct phases of writing growth/evolution.

The first phase is what I’d expect from a high school sophomore who does not plan to graduate with distinction; mostly intelligible, but with enough basic problems that fixing bad habits are a ways off. It mixes up to/two/too, can’t get the possessive apostrophe right, and doesn’t know what it’s doing with punctuation. It sometimes believes that more exclamation points are more impactful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! At other times, it believes in no punctuation, nor even para breaks.

It’s awful, but it will suffice in life for basic needs. For many people perhaps that’s satisfactory. (Maybe they’re brilliant at plumbing. Great. You hire me to write important stuff for you, and I’ll hire you to do plumby stuff. All good.) That might seem heretical, but becoming a quality writer is not easy for most people, and until people come to me insisting that the first tier is acceptable for professional published writing, we have no quarrel.

The second phase writes clearly enough, but its lazy habits keep it stuck in the middle. It overuses adverbs. It does not understand what’s wrong with comma splices. It loves italic emphasis, ellipses, em dashes, passive voice, and various other common writing weaknesses. It ranges too far afield, too often, from the straightforward declarative sentence. Most first-time novelists arrive in this stage, and many never exit it before they self-publish.

The third phase has learned to avoid the second’s failings. Up to this point, editing can only partly be about content because there are many mechanics to address. The term “cognitive load” comes into play, because one is pouring on so many other teaching points that some clients could become overwhelmed with second-phase and third-phase feedback. In this stage, the writer can write well, and our focus is on the fine points: pacing, clarity, word choices, flow, and so on.

For those seeking to exit the second, here are things to fix and how to fix them:

Question every non-dialogue adverb, with the goal of choosing a better verb. People told you to burn your thesaurus; this is why you disobeyed.

A comma splice occurs when the comma divides a sentence into parts that could stand alone, it looks like this. Unlike most parts of speech, which have their roles and places and jobs, this is an error pure and simple.

Permit yourself one non-dialogue italic emphasis per 25,000 words.

Permit yourself one non-dialogue ellipsis per 20,000 words.

Permit yourself one or two em dash constructions per chapter. And begrudge.

Launch a frontal and flank attack on non-dialogue passive voice. Attempt to recast every last instance. Surrender only when there is no other option, such as there is no definable subject to assign.

As hinted earlier, dialogue is different. Rules for dialogue and internal monologue (thoughts) are looser because people think and speak otherwise than they write. That doesn’t meant that all the rules are suspended, but it does mean more patience for italics, ellipses, and so on. You have heard the breezy boast “I write like I talk,” as if that’s something to be glad about, but you might not have heard my rejoinder: “Too bad, because people don’t read the way they listen.” Broken Dolly Syndrome ensues. And yet, as with everything but those damn comma splices, there’s a time and a place. Dialogue and IM, treated as spoken, can be more “write like I talk” because they are talking in some form. Of course, one really means “write like your characters talk,” but people get the idea.

When I get a manuscript, I must figure out how much of phases one and two remain in play. Phase one writers rarely end up hiring me, because my report says that their writing needs a lot of work, and they either don’t want to do that work or didn’t want/expect that answer. Phase two writers are likelier to hire me, especially if I can show them how to get to phase three (I can). Phase three writers are the toughest and most rewarding, because they ask questions. Lots of questions. They want to know why. I must not tell a phase three writer to do anything unless I’m ready with the reasoning, because odds are they will ask me for it.

This is good. This is how I grow in my own work.

Editing/writing life

Editorial maverick: carts and horses

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Some of you know I’m doing part-time office work that entails a lot of technical editing. I like it: It’s an excellent company high up in its field, treating staff well and producing work of which one can be proud. Half the staff have advanced degrees. For me, it’s a little steadier income without cutting into my freelancing work.

While they were excited to bring a pro on board, I think some aspects of the change took them by surprise. For one thing, I think they expected me to rip their writing apart a lot more comprehensively; for another, pretty sure they expected some debates about industry usages. The best handling of those situations brings with it some lessons specific to tech editing but also germane to other editorial work.

We come across it all the time: this idea that editors are the people who go in and dismantle your writing with ruthless precision. There are times for that…but not when one is already dealing with capable and very coachable writers. If one of my colleagues’ writing were weak, I wouldn’t hesitate to fix anything that needed it, but even our subcontractors write fairly well. My work as an editor is not to criticize or correct; those are just aspects of progress toward the goal. My work as an editor is to help the content become the very best it can be. If that means critique and correction, we do those. If that meant burning a photograph of a lemur over a purple candle flame at midnight while chanting in Old Slavonic, I’d be doing so. In this case, the best way to improve the content is to offer minor corrections with sound explanations. These are people of science and reason who expect me to know more than them about English, and to help them become more proficient. If a para needs a complete recast, I’m glad to do so, but more often the need relates to subtler acts such as changing phrasal order for clarity and flow.

I haven’t said a word about style guides: AP, Chicago, etc. That’s because I understand that these are not bibles unless the management says they are (and ours sensibly does not). Style guides are like military regulations: They are for the guidance of command, not as straitjackets to it. The idea of writing something in a way that fails to communicate, but conforms to the hallowed style guide, is idiocy. Our management knows this, as do our writers. So the writers will ask me: “What is the rule here?” If there is one that sensibly governs, I’ll tell them; in many cases the area is grey, often straddling the gap between popular imagination of the rule and its strict letter. Join an editors’ group online and you can see posts daily bleating for help with some arcane point of style guide nitpickery they’ve been agonizing over for hours. Okay, if it’s a mandated usage, very well…but if you’re an editor, isn’t it your job to make the damn decision? Whose, if not yours? People look to us as informed guides to quality writing. Someone’s saying they’re afraid to guide? This is like a professional taxi driver afraid to trust/deviate from a map or a navigation system. Decide, and use the comments to explain the decision. And if the style guide isn’t even mandated, there’s even less pressure to conform. Do something intelligent in furtherance of the original goal, and help your people understand why you felt that was so. If you can be a professional editor, you have the writing skills to persuade and explain.

The other side that surprised my colleagues was that I take a very relaxed attitude toward industry usages, even where the common presentation strictly speaking violates some basic guideline. Should it be “small diameter poles” or “small-diameter poles”? Objectively, the latter; but the industry usage most often omits the hyphen, and we are communicating with industry members. It’d be idiotic to die in a drainage ditch over a hyphen. I’m the industry newcomer and this is tech editing. It is my job to drink from the industry firehose and learn language specific to expected usages. We should be consistent and clear; we should sound informed and intelligent; we should convey the views of highly expert people with professional voicing and presentation. If that means we don’t write this item name in what I consider the obvious way, because one of our people learned in school that there was a specific reason not to do so, I can either joust with my colleague (and his MBA plus thirty years of experience) or I can accept that he’s using sound logic based in educated thought. I should worry far more about helping my people sound their brilliant best than about imposing a foolish consistency.

That’s why tech editing is an unglamorous but very necessary field. A percentage of editors simply can’t operate without some form of Scriptural guide, and will inevitably find themselves asked to make decisions for which there is no clear direction cited in Chicago, and concerning which they thus won’t be able to convince the subject matter expert without that biblical backup. And yet so many technical specialists, unlike my colleagues, just can’t write worth a damn. They starve for editorial support–not from style guide literalists, but from colleagues who make them better and help them grow.

If I were starting as an editor right now, I would still set up a blog/website and I’d still take jobs involving manuscript fiction and non-fiction, but I know what my marketing would be. I’d imagine the industries I understood best and I’d start sending pitches to firms in those industries. I would invite them all to reach out to me with a page of text and whatever context they considered germane, and let me have a crack it it. I’d send back the samples in prompt fashion and see what happened. A good outcome would be a cost estimate query for a full report/manual/other doc, because then they’d be asking themselves whether this were affordable (and could they bill it out?). The secret of technical editing is that your client can usually bill their client for your work. If they find this to their best advantage, they’ll probably start sending you rush jobs with urgent needs (because they procrastinate or get swamped). Do them no matter how late you have to stay up. They’ll come to consider you part of the support system and they won’t want to deal with anyone else once they are comfortable with you. Nice work–you now have a client. Treat them right. Their greatest hours of need are your greatest moments of potential and value.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Editorial Maverick: the unlamented death of lolling

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I refer, of course, to the unlamented abbreviation “lol.” I have a politically incorrect term for its addicts, one I will decline to share in a public presentation.

At first it was just a fun thing. Someone would private message something funny, and it was shorthand for saying that one was laughing aloud. All right. And then the cancerous node metastasized.

Soon it became the stand-in for a comma or even a period:

  • j: hi there
  • person: hello lol
  • j: how goes?
  • p: not so good lol
  • j: what’s wrong?
  • p: oh lol my car broke down on teh freeway lol and i had to have it toad lol now were getting evicted lol not sure what were gonna do lol maybe its time to get on the pole lol
  • how is this funny? doesn’t sound very amusing
  • i know rite lol

At that point I had to start controlling myself. Not only was it used when nothing was funny, but it made writing all but unreadable. I just stopped encouraging extensive conversations where I’d have to shovel through a lot of lolling. Now, I don’t worry about spelling errors, grammar, even case when typing in texts and private messages. Some people seem to imagine that editors spend every waking moment finding fault with their friends’ writing. If we did that, two things would happen. One, we’d be exhausted–too tired to do our work after all that free editing. Two, the problem would solve itself because no one would talk to us. All I care about is being able to make sense of the person I’m talking with. When something gets in the way of that, it also is exhausting.

But lolling seems to be in long-term care and about ready for hospice, and this would seem a perfect time for vocabulary assisted suicide. We don’t need this. We have emojis and other little face images that might not technically be emojis, but grouping them all under that term is convenient. The end of lolling seems at hand.

I won’t be attending the funeral, but neither will I grieve.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: don’t format it

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One key aspect of transforming a manuscript (ms) into a book is formatting, sometimes called typesetting (I’m sure the term will be with us long after the last ink-stained hands have fallen still and cold). This is how it goes from Word format to something you can print as a book. It can mean inserting photos, cute drop caps (the extra large letter to begin a chapter), graphics for segment breaks (say, a cattle brand for a book on ranching life), and all that other prettying up. A basic version can be had by self-publishing through CreateSpace or something like it; if you want it fancier, you hire a formatter or figure it out yourself. Formatters are generally expert in Word and understand how the conversion tools work, knowledge only a few people need.

Whatever you do, please do not book-format your ms as you go.

For one thing, writers do not automatically know how to use Word’s features correctly. I say Word because I don’t work on G-word docs; I’d sooner work on a plain text file (which I’ll bring into Word anyway so I can use change tracking and commenting). If the ms is in G-word, well, I’ll work on it when it’s sent to me as a .docx file. What it means is that people wanting to line things up, make them all nice, will impose all sorts of oddness on the ms. Not knowing how to indent, they’ll just use tabs, or worse yet, hit the space bar five times. Not knowing how to insert a hard page break, they’ll just bang hard returns (the Enter key) until they’re at the top of the next page. These are problems because the editing process shoves everything around. It is almost certain to mess them up; lines might be inserted, margins changed, and so on.

The little graphics and other cutesiness (which I call it at this stage, because it belongs in the formatting stage; here it’s just clutter) are as bad. They make editing harder. If that isn’t enough to discourage novice authors, let’s try money. Anything that makes editing harder also makes it more expensive. So here’s the core of it: Why would you put in extra work that you will certainly pay to have undone, and on top of that, have to do it all again later? This does not make sense.

Here’s the proper order of Good Actions. First, write. If you’re going to indent paras, indent them using Word’s Indent feature; if you’re going to break pages at chapter end, just use Word’s hard page break (Ctrl-Enter). To break chapters into segments, just stick in a simple placeholder, for example three asterisks separated by spaces. Whatever you do, focus on writing, not cosmetics. Get the text as good as you can make it. Self-edit until it wrenches your soul…then let your editor go to work. You can use italics at this point, but don’t make typeface changes. Use something straightforward, typically Times Roman or Calibri or Arial. Left margin justified, right margin ragged. Leave placeholder markers for graphics to go in later, if you’re going to put in charts or photos or whatnot.

Many seem to feel that the decision whether to single space, one-and-a-half space, or double space is a Momentous Choice. Nah, not here. Your editor can undo it in five seconds, as long as it takes to Select All and go into the Line Spacing. What I usually do is edit with single spaces or 1.5, but what matters is what I use if I do a print review. I might edit it in single, then review and red-pen a copy in double. Costs me a little more in paper and ms heft, gives me more room for editing marks and insertions. At the end, I can convert it back to the way the au sent it to me.

If you’re going to try for traditional publishing, also called trad-pub (, then I don’t really understand the logic, but I will support you as you) then prepare to send queries and submissions to people who might or might not show an interest. If that’s the plan, then either follow the publisher’s submission specs or go with the industry standards.

If you are going it alone, then we’re probably still doing this together. When you have finalized the content, by whatever handing back and forth of the football you and your editor have determined should occur, then it’s time for formatting. Formatting creates galleys–probably final images of what will be published if the proofreading doesn’t find any errors. Any formatting mistakes, typos, alignment issues, and so on can be caught and fixed at this point.

Here’s another reason for this. The hardest part, for most people, is just getting it all down on e-paper. For some people it takes a decade or even two. However long it takes, the last thing you want to do as you attempt to express your thoughts or tell your story is to run around making little cutenesses. It makes the writing harder, and if there’s one thing writers don’t need it is to make writing harder.

Have you ever had someone look at you and tell you that you just unraveled months of frustration that drove them to sleepless nights, vodka, and feelings of deep inadequacy and hopelessness? People whose work is to help people get that experience. It is a special one.

If what you write has flaws and you can’t figure them out, That’s Why You Have An Editor. Step back fifteen yards from scrimmage and punt. Tell your editor the parts you don’t like, where you’d like special attention and input. Sure, you can self-edit, and in most cases you should do some of that before you send it off to a pro. But if your self-editing is bogging you down, your work is harder than it needs to be. The reason you have an editor is to help you get the text into suitable syntax, flowing well, reading consistently, and making sense. Get those benefits. Let your editor help. Get what you’re paying for.

Believe me, your editor wants it that way.