Tag Archives: fiction editor

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.

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Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: action scenes

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Why are action scenes so hard to write?

It might not seem that way when you see the material in published form, but it is quite probable that most of what you’re seeing was once an action salad. I doubt that any two editors help fix such situations in the same way.

Far as I can tell, the most common problem with action scenes is over-familiarity on the author’s part. Think of this: You have been working on a fiction novel for five years. Within the first quarter of the ms, there is a complicated fight scene that starts two new story arcs. You have played this scene out in your mind two dozen times as you have gone over and over your ms. You know what “happened.” You have known it so long you can no longer imagine not knowing it.

Your reader doesn’t know any of it until you tell her. How big was the room? Your first gut response might be: “Uhhhh…big enough for the action.” You probably wouldn’t go with that answer, but it is probably the truest one. Your reader has to be told that, especially if the space constrains the action. She must be told everything that is pertinent–but not too much, because…

The next most common problem is over-description. Too much detail: The living room had old-school 1960s tongue-and-groove paneling with a ceiling fan, a brown leather sofa, two leather recliners, a fireplace, and two lamps on end tables. Could any of those details possibly help your reader through the action? Possibly the fireplace, especially if someone grabs the poker. The fan? Sure, if it constrains the action. The other furniture? Minimally, if it too constrains the action. The sofa’s upholstering probably doesn’t affect the outcome; the fact of a sofa might. Does every stroke and feint and hit matter? No, and trying to include all of them makes excruciating reading. This is overcorrection, and it is much easier to fix than omitted essential details. We can always whittle it down to the basics, a few short descriptive strokes that are just enough to help our reader through fast-paced suspense and action.

She likes that, and we want her to have it. Let’s not forget to think of her. She bought the book! Bless her with a mighty blessing! We begin by thinking of her as wonderful, a customer we very much wish to satisfy. We don’t want her bogged down in detail or confused by events. We want to help her. If she puts the book down in frustration, we lose.

There is a third problem: unrealistic action. Take for example a combat situation involving multiple troop movements and weapon types. Some authors have actually been part of troop movements in battle; most haven’t and are glad of it. Fine. How do we sort this all out so it comes out reading plausible?

When in doubt, I make a miniature wargame. I rough out a map, sketch in some basic rules, and borrow counters (small square cardboard pieces from my wargame library). I designate who is what and how many, decide which side initiates the action, and start walking through the battle. Some are easier. If it’s WWII, for example, my old Avalon Hill Squad Leader game is my friend because I won’t even have to make up rules or use my imagination regarding what the counters represent. I’ve drawn a scene on graph paper and used pennies and nickels for the opposing sides, with different dates to designate that this is Joe, this is Lakeisha, this is José; these others are the thugs, and the 1969 nickel is the one with the pistol; everyone else on that side has a switchblade. Anyone who has ever played role-playing games is well equipped to sketch out a game of an encounter and walk the characters through it. Anyone who has not probably knows someone who has.

Yes, they’re hard to write. They are also hard to edit, but the editing is easier than the guidance. The hardest part is conveying to someone whose brain contains indelible footage of “how it happened” which parts are implausible, which are incomprehensible, and which are illogical (a polite way of saying the character isn’t dumb enough to do what the author has them doing). I came up with another tactic, which I call the readercam.

Put your reader in the room, invisible and non-corporeal; Nothing can interact with her, and she stands in the corner with a ringside view. Now put a video camera on her shoulder and see the action through it. What’s visible through the readercam? Of that which is visible, describe what is germane. Use the readercam to define her perspective and field of vision. When need be, change the camera’s aim. This does not mean adding exhaustive detail of a new wall, for example, but it might mean that new obstacles come into play. If they were already described, those bits of description now pay their way. You see the principle, which is that you focus on what affects the action and you don’t move the vantage without some good reason.

And yet you don’t want to over-describe for one more reason: You will be taking your reader’s fun away. She doesn’t want you to tell her every little detail; she wants to tell the story as her mind sees it. How she does that is purely her choice and business, and you’re there to help her but not do it for her. Your work is not to tell her every detail. It is to give her enough roughed-in information to let her mind animate the action in a plausible and exciting way. This is why authors often won’t clarify the way character names should be pronounced. The pronunciation  likely won’t change events; why not let your reader say it however she likes? Is it LEGG-oh-lass or le-GO-less in Tolkien? Who gives a rip? How the reader pronounces the author’s names is none of the author’s business.

The author has more pressing business, such as writing a decent action scene. If you’re the reader, and you just read a banging action scene that had you in suspense while making you want more, more, more, that scene probably didn’t spring into its current form on first draft. Unless done by an author with a natural intuitive gift, it probably didn’t gel on the fourth or fifth. And the long the ms took, the farther away from novelty went the author’s mind. In time, he forgot not knowing.

If he had a competent editor, of course, that got fixed.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: adverbs

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Adverbs? But Stephen King talks about them like readers talk about his antagonists!

Right?

Right. And he is–but it’s easy to take it too far. Let us start with the fact that not all adverbs end in -ly (and not all -ly words are adverbs), so spotting them doesn’t just require a document search. One must read the writing with some application of basic grammar. An adverb, as most of you probably know, is a word or combination of words that modifies a verb:

She ran very quickly down the sidewalk.

If you think like me, of course, you saw the problem with that sentence in short order. The adverbs do not pay their way; a better verb could replace them, and one could even argue they are redundant. The better verb would be childishly easy:

She sped down the sidewalk.

That’s your basic test and correction in simplest form.

I let more adverbs go than perhaps most editors do. I brought up the part about -ly endings because that’s the sort of simple dogmatic crap that one might get from the not insignificant population of crummy editors who would be paralyzed without spellcheck, grammar check and word searching. When I see your adverb, I ask myself whether a better verb could subsume its meaning. I also ask whether the adverb adds anything of substance to the verb (handy mnemonic for writers, perhaps). In my earlier example, she’s already running; would we say she ran slowly? Kind of doubt that. We make clear she’s on the sidewalk, so the default presumption is she’s on foot; we can trust the reader to infer this specific of “to run,” especially as there would be surrounding context to inform us she isn’t driving a Harley down the sidewalk, or doing something else odd. The only thing we got from the original adverbs was that the author wanted to make clear she was seriously booking down that sidewalk. We have many fine options:

She sprinted down the sidewalk.

She dashed down the sidewalk.

She raced down the sidewalk.

How would you choose? If this were a developmental edit, you’d explain this to the client and ask them to hunt up a better verb. In developmental editing, I don’t correct everything. It works far better to correct a few examples of a writing misbehavior, define it clearly, and encourage the client to hunt down and repair the rest herself. While a part of her might be cussing you and/or crying in frustration, another part of her knows she’s growing. The editor is helping her reach her potential.

After you’ve staked your fiftieth adverb, the lesson has either begun to sink in or it hasn’t, and we have an uptake problem. When you picture writers, you probably picture retreats full of brilliant remarks and an urgent need not to have to explain any references–the intellectual big kids. That stereotype exists (and it might surprise you to learn that it doesn’t really extend into editing so much; maybe we have less to prove), but there’s another subset that just doesn’t improve. You can teach until you run out of red pens and they still don’t get it. I’m not mocking them because they are to writing as I am to calculus, but they do exist.

One way to help such a person is with a substantive edit, which aims to create text that is ready for proofreading. Maybe the client has just decided that she doesn’t need to write better as long as her editor is willing to fix it up, and if so, that’s a valid choice. As long as she’s been told of the problem, with explanations and encouragement in good faith and directed at her best interests, the editor must live with the client’s choices or tell her to find a new editor. I’ve had to do that before, and it’s not fun, but I can’t always live with the client’s choices. When I can’t, the client deserves someone who can.

So how is this mavericky? Because I’m somewhat more permissive. First I try to improve on the adverb. If it adds something, and I can’t improve on it, it serves a purpose and should stay–but my definition of “adds something” might differ from that of others. There are times to use a redundant adverb for effect; dialogue uses redundant adverbs all the time; sometimes it just brings a different flavor. I’m by no means the only editor who looks at it this way. To my mind, the purpose of writing is to communicate with an audience. No two audiences are identical, nor are any two writing voices, and we handle this by reading the writing. We don’t answer it by quoting a reference.

Lastly, the people have spoken. I asked the Facebook page with regard to changing this page’s title to “The Editorial Maverick.” The logic is that “The ‘Lancer,” while perhaps cool, is very dated and doesn’t even tell the casual observer what I do nowadays. People might think I’m anything from an SCA equestrian to a dermatologist (both possibilities actually came up in the conversation). While it was not unanimous, support for the change was overwhelming. I plan to retitle this page just before the end of 2022. No action is needed by subscribers and nothing else will change; same URL, same style of content, same maverickiness (perhaps even more, with the rep to uphold).

I do plan to focus a little more on work-related content rather than the self-indulgence I have shown over the decade and more I’ve been at this. At heart, it is supposed to be marketing. If I don’t use it for marketing at least some of the time, it’s not serving its designed aim. I look forward to your continued readership at The Editorial Maverick in 2023 and beyond, and I thank you for your past readership and support.

Hail the new.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: commas

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Some of the strongest articles of faith in the style guides concern commas. You must blah blah blah. You must not blah bah blee blah blah. People get militant. If you fail to do it their way, you are wrong and bad and just simply incorrect, and you probably shoplift at dollar stores.

There are rules for commas, and they aren’t stupid. Famous SF author C.J. Cherryh was the first one I heard say never to follow a rule off a cliff. An observation that goes with it is that one should know the rules in order to know when to break them.

I agree with that. To me, the question is whether bending or breaking the rule will make the words read better. Not be more correct; read better. Most of the time, writing reads better when one follows the rules. I’m more concerned with bumps in the flow. Sometimes the addition or omission of a comma creates a little jolt in the flow, like the feeling you get when you’re driving through Spokane (Washington) and the entire city is plagued by road damage and repairs. There are huge steel plates covering craters that could have been made by incoming mortar fire, and every time one hits one, there’s a jarring bump. If you have never driven in Spokane, you’re in for an experience.

In editing, one of my goals is to help remove jarring bumps that serve no purpose. I’ll encourage clients to use commas not where Chicago or Grammarly says they go, but where they read best. There is large and welcome overlap there, but in a conflict between rule nitpicking and successful written communication, I don’t see how I can take any side but the latter. Is it not about the audience?

Therein lies the point: Who’s the audience? Who would read this? If it were an audience of editors and grammarians, the comma rules would matter far more because what jolts experts differs from what jolts a layperson. How many authors seeking editors are writing for an audience of editors? None of them have yet brought their projects to me–but if they did, it would be a factor. Because that’s what would best reach that audience.

There is one comma area in which I have yet to see a single case for endorsement: the comma splice. When a comma connects two stand-alone sentences, we call this a comma splice. A comma splice always looks bad, their use is a terrible habit. (See? Hideous.) Depending on the situation, it might be better to break the sentence into two; to use a semicolon; even to use a colon. What one can’t do is stet [‘let stand as set’–editor-speak for ‘ignore this edit’] a comma splice. It cannot stand.

But if I ever learn of a situation that would make a comma splice look like effective communication, rather than the brain-shaking jolt that it is, I’ll rethink. That’s what an editorial maverick does–use their brain rather than just quote a book.

Editing/writing life

Editorial Maverick: introduction

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Would people want to read about editing? If it means reading lamentations about agonizing for eight hours trying to figure out where Chicago says to put the comma, I’m guessing not. But I work differently from many editors.

For example, unless the assignment directly involves a style manual, I regard Chicago and AP as suggestion books rather than bibles. It’s that simple. To many editors, that would be heresy. Here is the logic: The list of purposes for the English language is varied, vast, and inexhaustible. The purpose of writing is to communicate information to a given audience. Does a former gang leader write in all lower case? Besides utterly defying the style guides, won’t that limit the audience? It might, but the question I would ask is not whether the sacred style guidelines had been profaned. I would ask whether this method was effective in reaching the desired audience, and why.

You cannot imagine the crickets I have heard in this career when I have asked the basic question: “Who’s the intended audience?”

Take the aforementioned gangster book. I would ask the client why he (I refer here to an actual book I once read for pleasure, not an actual client) felt this style would best reach his audience–which, by the way, was exactly who? We’d talk about that. I’d hear out his case, consider it. If I disagreed, I’d explain why. We’d have a conversation. I’m the editor who might be receptive to subversive style methods if they were effective, so I’d have an open mind.

In such a case, it usually comes down to whether the major style variation is lazy or deliberate. If lazy, the short version is “I think my shitty is as good as others’ polished.” It has no aforethought, just “I don’t want to grow.” But if it’s deliberate, it’s written that way not because their basic ceiling is shitty, but because that reaches out to the intended audience in ways I might never understand if I’m not part of the target market. I have to be open to that.

That’s part of what makes me the Editorial Maverick, I guess.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Do English spelling and grammar even matter any more?

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Does that seem like a strange question coming from an editor? It shouldn’t–nor should one leap to conclusions regarding the answer.

I submit that the answer is a qualified yes. It has to be qualified due to these observable realities:

  • Not all communication is formal and professional. If we’re texting or PMing on FacePalm, do we really need to stress over mistakes? Not sure about your phone, but on mine it’s enough of a pain in the ass just texting understandably. There are many contexts in which I care about upper case, avoiding loose spaces, and so on. This one tends not to be such a context.
  • Language does evolve, however powerfully language conservatives rage against ‘deterioration.’ That there has been deterioration I think few can deny, but at any given point in time language differs from previous points of time, and its future will differ in turn. Look at the styles of 1800s and 1700s writing and you can see how it happened. There is never a time at which the orthodoxy is static, meaning that “perfectly correct” is a moving target.
  • As if that weren’t enough, many other countries have their own versions of English. There are more English speakers in India than in the United States. Australian and New Zealand English have marked differences, and I don’t recommend going there to try telling them they’re doing it wrong. Same for South Africa. Irish English and British English also differ from ours, with the added fillip that “The King’s English” is supposedly the mother tongue. Canadian English is akin to US English but with noteworthy British influence. If we’re going to talk about “correct English,” whose correct English do we mean? That of the largest numeric grouping, which would be Indian English?
  • Writers can be very effective yet be doing it “wrong.” When I get a ms that is written in some bizarre-looking form of English, I ask myself whether it’s effective. Some time back I did a line edit on a vanity book about of an elderly Alabama gentleman’s country music career. It sounded like what it was: a book written by a rural Alabamian nonagenarian. To edit it into some semblance of English perfection would have meant destroying the author’s basic tone. As it was, parts were a little repetitive and sometimes unclear, but his tone was familiar and regionally correct. His audience would understand every word of it, even find it warm and comforting; what was more, who would want to excise the author from his own autobiography? It’d have been lunacy.
  • At the opposite pole, I read a book by an L.A. gangster who converted to some variation of Islam and reformed. as i recall, it did not use upper case. It sounded like it was written by a moderately educated gangster. It was raw, real, personal, and effective. If he’d come to me as an editor, I doubt I would have tried to regularize his language. The way he wrote made it feel like the reader was getting to look at an otherwise inaccessible world. That I couldn’t think of a compelling benefit that would make it worth losing that feeling testified to the effectiveness of his style.

Qualifiers noted, I have indeed seen the quality of US English education and composition decline over my lifetime (don’t blame me). That gives it something in common with the rest of education during my adult life. With a dead battery, most people now are without their arithmetic. I was watching a frightful display of ignorance on Big Brother where someone thought London was in Paris, or Paris was in London. Most every day I read at least one adult female person refer to herself as “a women.” People not only don’t learn physics and geometry; they don’t even learn to adult. (There’s a verbing you might expect me to hate and reject. Nah; that word arose in reply to a genuine need, right around the time it became de-stigmatized to live with your parents once you grew up.)

All the more reason, some might say, to give no willing ground in the erosion of language standards. I understand the outlook on an emotional level. From a practical standpoint it feels like a King Canute activity. I’d rather fight for the differences that make differences, such as the abuse of “literally” to mean “figuratively.” We need that word. Without it we have no way to clarify whether a statement is hyperbolic or, well, literal.

In the end, my editorial outlook is that everything comes down to judgment and context. Does it work? If it does, any change requires a compelling case. If however its language causes it to fail, we need to rethink and adapt. There is no editorial Scripture, just some textbooks and style guides; they should be consulted but not worshipped or thumped at anyone. In the end we must apply our best understanding.

If it were as easy as just pointing to the arcana of the Chicago Manual and interpreting its holy words, this job would require far less experience and discernment. (I might start terming that crowd the “Chicago judiciary.”)

Editing/writing life

How I would go looking for an editor…

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…that is, of course, assuming I didn’t have a bunch of contacts (or they all retired or died or told me to go away, etc.). If I didn’t know any, but did know what else I know, how would I do this?

I’d cheat is what I’d do.

But first, I’d quantify my project and what I wanted to happen. I’d decide whether it was a vanity or commercial project. If it was a commercial project, I’d have a marketing plan. I’d also decide how much I could afford to spend on editing. And I’d be realistic with what I could afford. A substantive edit on a full ms could run me into the $3000 range or more, whereas a short story would be rather less. A developmental edit would probably also cost less, but still likely to be four figures for a normal-length fiction ms.

Once I knew where I was at with means and goals, I’d go on FacePalm and join a writers’ group. The reason I would not join a writers’ group is that many of the participants are sure they know (nearly everything, but in particular…) exactly what editors do, and  few are fully informed. I don’t fault them for that; I don’t exactly know all that ER nurses do, for example, and I don’t need to become one in order to be grateful for one if I break a wrist late at night or can’t stop ralphing. But there is a a lot of stridency in writers’ groups, and much of what you would read would imply that editors are dream-slaying parasites who move your commas and tell you that you suck. If you spent much time there, you’d come away with such a bad attitude you’d have trouble finding a competent editor who would put up with you. That would leave the desperate ones. Do you want a desperate one? Check it out for yourself if that’s what works for you, but if it were me, I’d let the angstfest proceed without seeping into my mentality. Everyone has to own their own angst.

Now it’s time to cheat. This is not honest. I’d search for the term ‘editor’ on FacePalm and narrow my search to groups, and I’d start joining and observing. If there were public groups I’d observe those; if not, well, I’d have to find my way in. I would not introduce myself with a noob hello post. If the group said it was for editors only, I’d see how strict their vetting process was (usually there isn’t much of one, just answer a few questions). If I had to flex reality a bit to do that–such as liberally interpret questions about what kind of editing I supposedly did–I would probably do that. Whatever it took to worm my way in.

They’ll kill me for this, but it’s a lot better than the writers’ groups. Plus, when you see some of the people in editors’ groups claiming to be editors, posting heartfelt pleas asking people to tell them where to put a goddamn comma (because evidently it’s asking too much for them to just make a decision based on informed understanding and good sense), you’ll realize this:

Anyone can anoint oneself an editor. Anyone. While that might not make them the real thing, there’s no bar to clear.

This is how you locate and experience the large mass of people who don’t know what they’re doing. This is how you see the people you want to avoid. They’re making anguished pleas to “edi-buddies” to help them figure out some petty points of style precision rather than make a damn decision and live with it. You don’t need a degree or a certificate to be an editor, but you do need to know the language well enough to tell other people what’s correct, and to adapt it where necessary to the conventions of a style guide’s letter and intent. You also need to know the conventions well enough to know when to bend them, why you would want to do that, and so on. That’s the basic requirement. As a writer in English, surely you want an editor who isn’t still learning English?

At some point, you’ll learn enough about editors and editing to have some sense of the kind of person you’d like to work with. Identify one of those and search out their professional presentation (blog, webpage, Facepalm page, etc.). Cyber-stalk the hell out of them; see what they are about. If possible, see what sort of work they have done. If you feel that they can help you, get in touch.

Keep doing that until you find someone who is available, fits your budget, and feels like a good partner in the process. The reality of a good writer/editor relationship is that it’s not Lofty Expert bossing around Rank Noob. It’s partner helping partner: brainstorming, discussing, communicating. It’s always okay to ask an editor their rationale for a decision or recommendation. Good ones should be pumped to show off their depth, excited to see clients succeed and grow, and confident enough to be very sharing with knowledge. We are knowledge workers. We should not hoard knowledge; that smacks of a fear that we’re going to run out of it. We should demonstrate its depth and breadth by sharing it generously and thus giving best value.

If you’ve had bad editor relationships, don’t open the discussion with the next candidate by telling all your horror stories. Know what I think when someone does that? I think I am not much interested in the job, because I am not much interested in being the next chapter in the Litany of Editorial Sorrows. What I’m hearing is someone saying: “I am a pain in the ass who doesn’t take their share of responsibility for what goes wrong, and you are being considered as the next casualty of my asspainery.” If you had a contractor come out to bid, and you spent the whole time telling them how much all your past contractors sucked, how competitive a bid you reckon you’re going to get? You might not even get one at all. If you do, you’ll be paying what a lawyer friend of mine calls the “asshole tax.”

You might notice that I didn’t send you to Fiverr, Sixerr, Sevenerr, FourHundredSixty-Twoerr, or some other site where those who purport to be editors often sign up to obtain work. In the first place, that’s doing it in the wrong order. If you have seen editors in groups and learned what we really do, and you simply do not feel drawn to or impressed by any of the people in the groups, then perhaps you’re willing to resort to one of the hire sites. If it were me, I’d keep looking harder in the groups. Surely there’s got to be someone who sounds good to work with. In fact, since I belong to them, I know most have some great editors because I’ve watched what they say to their colleagues.

I’m not saying there aren’t good people on hiring sites. I know of great editors with presences there. I’m saying that it is very hard to tell them one from another without seeing them interact; that any clod can create an appealing EightyTwoerr profile; and that in fact you can get a lot of cheap ‘services’ there because there is a subset of the editing world that is as desperate to edit as most novice writers are to be published. Why are they that desperate? The question could have many answers, though “massive student loans for a degree in Comparative Literature at venerable Piltdown College and really hate working at McDonald’s” is not a terribly rare one. The salient point is that hire sites will probably be die rolls and you might or might not get good value. They are the equivalent of hiring some struggling guy named Ernie off LostCatsDoor to rewire your house. There’s the off chance Ernie can do that as well as a journeyman electrician. There’s a much greater chance that if Ernie could do that, he’d be a journeyman electrician, and he is not.

By finding someone by the way they communicate with their peers, you can find people who are not desperate. That’s because they are established and capable. They will rarely be cheap, but they will offer you far better value for your dollar. That’s what I’d want if it were me. The hell with what the investment costs me; what does it pay me? What’s the benefit? Size up the benefit and see if it’s worth what you pay for it. Oh, and let’s say your target is wonderful but can’t fit you in for six months. In that case, ask them for a recommendation. That would be a much better start than wandering onto Forty-Ninerr and picking people like throwing darts at a board.

If you were hoping this would tell you how to get top-grade services for desperation prices, I am glad to have shattered that hope because it is not realistic, and gives me a chance to share an essential lesson. That’s one thing we do: get paid to give the truth with the bark on. While it is not automatically true that you get what you pay for, it is nearly always true that when you establish a very low willing-to-pay price, you also establish a very low ceiling on the likely benefit you can gain. Anyone who offers to “edit” your full-length fiction ms for $300 is probably just going to run spellcheck and grammar check, then send it back and put their hand out to be paid.

Hell, you could have done that. And should have.

 

Book reviews, Entertainment and music, Human relations

Lords of Chaos, a tabletop RPG by Randy Hayes

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This time-tested fantasy RPG has come to market in e-form and hardcover. I was developmental editor.

Randy is a friend of nearly forty years going back to our college days. He’s an interesting guy. Many people talk about doing things; Randy goes out and does things. He wanted to be a successful financial advisor, and he became one. He wanted to play in a rock band, and he does. He wanted to learn SCA-style medieval combat, and he has done so. He wanted to be an officer in the Army, and he was.

He also wanted to play a fantasy role-playing game that was as realistic as one can be and still have profound supernatural mechanics. One always needs that qualifier for the obvious reason that “realistic” doesn’t normally imply magical fireballs and summoning ogres. For our purposes, realistic means that the physical movement and combat are plausible. Randy had done enough SCA fighting to see the fundamental problems with physical combat as presented in most RPGs and movies. And yes, there is a school of thought that says: “Hell with realism, it’s fantasy, I want to do epic things.” And to that I think Randy might say: ‘To each their own. But over the years my players have done quite a few epic things. Not every system is for everyone, and I get that.’

When we got back in touch in life after a long stretch of doing our own things, Randy showed an interest in building his writing skills. He wasn’t bad, but he could improve, and we worked on his fiction writing techniques. Some of the fiction involved stories from his RPG gaming world, tales played out by his merry band of tabletop players. That was fine, and Randy made rapid strides. While all of his group had made contributions and suggested refinements, two seemed most involved: Mike Cook, one of our old cronies from UW, and Keith Slawson. Keith was not well, but wanted with all his heart to assist with the layout and graphics. Here’s the kind of friend Randy is: He could have just punted and gone seeking those services elsewhere, but so long as a chance existed that Keith might be able to offer them when the rulebook was ready, Randy kept that hope alive for him. I had the pleasure of brief correspondence with Keith  before his passing in late 2020. Randy, of course, visited him to the very end.

As for Mike, he aspired to publish fiction based on the LoC world, and the same drive that once put colonel’s eagles on his shoulders was in refined evidence with his work. This resulted in Out of their Depth, an excellent hard fantasy novel I had the pleasure of midwifing. I am not sure I’ve ever seen a client improve as fast as Mike did, and his medieval vocabulary taught me some new words along the way.

It was a process. This might sound odd, but rulebook editing is technical editing. I do some tech editing here and there, and even though Randy’s project was a game guide, the mentality is similar. While humor and style matter, the heart of the project is how it organizes and presents information. I have done a lot of RPGing in my life, but have never played a moment of LoC, so in some ways I was the perfect guinea pig. Randy was very receptive to rules modifications and procedural clarifications. He laughed over my developmental editing style, which is to explain a problem, make a couple of sample corrections, then let the client hunt up and fix the rest. It would be sort of drill sergeanty on my part, except that I’m not raising my voice or pointing someone’s genetic shortcomings in an attempt to motivate them to do a proper about-face.

For Randy, the hardest part was something many authors experience on long-term projects: One cannot forget what one knows, nor easily put oneself in the place of not knowing. Let us imagine a fight scene in a novel. The author has worked on the novel off and on for twenty years. She has complete mental video memory of how the fight “happened.” She knows how she pictures her characters, how they maneuvered, what their voices sounded like. Her reader has none of the above, and knows only what he learns from her portrayal. Does it matter that the room has a table in the middle? Maybe; probably; depends. It’s probably an obstacle in the fight, in which case at least enough description is wanted to help the reader picture the scene. Does it matter that it’s oak or walnut? Probably not right then. Her challenge is to keep the readercam steady, furnish enough description that her reader can follow the action, and avoid overdescription. It’s difficult to strike the balance between too much description and not enough.

This also applies to such areas as RPG rules. Randy has developed the rules for so long he can hardly remember what it is like not knowing them, so my ignorance was a help. If an experienced RPGer with reasonable comprehension skills couldn’t figure out how something worked, this raised valid questions whether something had been left out, described ambiguously, and so on. We changed quite a bit of the basic terminology because I thought some of it created confusion, and added a Game Concepts section in the front so that players had a quick reference for the terms one must understand in order to play the system. Randy came up with a genius way to present descriptions of the character skills: He created a ne’er-do-well elf named Potlatch, assigned him one point in each skill, and had him walk through a (somewhat contrived but not entirely implausible) story in short installments that involved one skill at a time. It’s hilarious, especially with Randy’s wry style of infantryman humor. As with anything Randy cares about–which means most of what he spends his time on–he took the time to do a really good job.

Another example is how the game handles the common low-value loot that characters tend to accumulate in the course of adventuring (vanquished foes’ weapons, load-bearing equipment, doodads that don’t do anything special). Randy doesn’t think the game should be Lords of Bookkeeping. Therefore, the rule is that players are assumed to gather up and sell whatever useful when possible. In turn, players do not have to keep track of and replenish consumable supplies of arrows, bolts, rations, and so forth. The selling process is presumed to sustain the common consumables; anything special or valuable is not considered common, of course, and gets valued separately. What a fantastic idea, right? One abstraction kills off two annoyances that few players would miss.

One notable aspect of the game is the lack of character classes. A player may define their character as whatever, but the game doesn’t bless or curse that choice. If you’ve always felt shackled by class restrictions, this is the open road.

This rulebook process took maybe three years. It came into final form, with areas of confusion ironed out and graphics added. Things happened. A pandemic came and sort of went. We pimped it at two Orycons and got some minor interest. Keith passed. Mike published his book while giving important input. Artists flaked. Artists delivered. Now here we are.

Randy has a bunch of online playing aids that supplement the book. If you’ve been looking for an RPG system that is designed for plausible melee and missile combat, one well refined through decades of play and experimentation, this could be just what you’ve long been looking for.

Later addendum: I have received my copy and it’s a beauty. Great layout, professional artwork, solid production. If you’re like me, and want to pick up the physical book and read relevant sections, you will appreciate this.

 

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current re-read: Yankee Hobo in the Orient, by John Patric

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The first time I read this book, my (purchased well used) copy was a gift I soon intended to pass along. Kind of blazed through. This time, with a copy I plan to keep, I’m giving it better attention.

John Patric was an interesting guy. A die-hard libertarian and frequent traveler, he said the things one was not supposed to say. The travels in the book happened late in the Great Depression, but he updated it after World War II. We thus have someone writing about a Japan that was already embroiled in land warfare, but had not yet become involved in the general global war; he has impressions of his travel, but also perspectives on a Japan under occupation following the incineration of many of its cities (two with nuclear weapons). He was also a Pacific Northwest homie, born in Snohomish, WA and making his residence down near Florence, Oregon (southward along the coast).

What’s great about Patric is the sophistication and general fairness of his outlook toward Japan and its people. He compares costs of living in terms that avoid the common oversimplifications of relative value. His goal was to paint a candid picture of Japanese society and attitudes without quivering in fear that someone might brand him Not A Good Murrican. Even though Pearl Harbor was about the most fortunate way in which our entry into war could have come about–and yes, it’s true; they destroyed two fairly obsolete battleships and bottomed three more, while whiffing on the carriers that would have been grave losses, and came to be the most important ships in the war–his times were those in which Japan was made out The Ultimate Demon by our customary wartime fanaticism. Saying anything remotely positive about Japan was about as popular as the word “retarded” is today. Patric didn’t care.

Patric observed a Japan in which people lived with great frugality, where fancy lodgings and things were mainly for tourists who would not tolerate the sorts of accommodations and travel most Japanese chose. Insofar as possible, he avoided the spendier options in favor of local custom.  He understood that tourist industries are designed to insulate the traveler from the truth while thinning his or her bankroll. I suspect Paul Theroux is a fan.

The result is a travel essay that did not follow the beaten paths, that saw Japan’s natural strengths and weaknesses, and that was able to apply hindsight to earlier observations. My copy was printed in 1945, when the future of Japan was uncertain from a Western standpoint.  If the book has a weakness, it might be his libertarian political ranting; Patric indulged himself in this way with as few f-bombs given as about any other subject he explored. Given that we now can see that libertarian economics ultimately lead to monopolies and corporate fascism, I find that part a bit naive given that Patric was a bright enough guy to have worked that through to its logical outcome.

Recommended for sophisticated readers who, like me, love old school travel writing.

Book reviews

Recent read: The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker

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A tech editing client–an engineer who can write for real–said such good things about this book that I bought and read it. This vindicated his praise.

One might view the editing world as a stylistic continuum. Let us define the extreme left as accepting of nearly any stylistic oddness or grammatical perversity. The extreme right lives and dies by style manuals (AP, APA, Chicago, etc.), grammar guides, and archaic meanings. The extreme left is so fluid it has hardly any rules; the extreme right not only has them, but will follow them right off a cliff. (No direct political analogy is intended, though I won’t say none could reasonably be made.)

If you visit editors’ forums, most of the loudest voices are found on the moderate to far right. Agonized posts abound: “Hey, edi-buddies, I’m dying here. I have a sentence in which I can’t figure out where to put commas. It’s four in the morning and I’ve been mutilating my soul in an effort to solve the problem. Help!” I never bother pointing out the obvious, because no one is so strident as a far-right editor catching another editor in some tiny deviation from the strict orthodoxy of the First Church of Style Manual Orthodoxy. I can’t gain anything from fighting with them, and I don’t enjoy the debate nor do I care what they say. I just let them do their thing somewhere I am not.

What would the far left do? Not much. All the client must tell them is “that’s just my style,” and they’ll roll over. Book without upper case? Well, if that’s just your style… Book written in text-speak? Wouldn’t want to invalidate youth opinions. Street-speak? Dissent would be…racist! And so on, usually in the direction of rolling over and letting this or that demographic define its own language.

And what’s wrong with that? some might ask. Nothing, provided that demographic is the writer’s only audience, and therefore that it doesn’t give a damn about being intelligible or comfortable to anyone else. “Hi. I write like garbage but I require you to read and respect my material” is not a reasonable proposition. The reader always has the right to stop reading. Making demands of the reader rarely works. She just closes the book or browser window, flips a bird if she’s feeling annoyed, and does something else.

I find myself on the moderate left wing of this continuum, a little to Pinker’s right. He and I agree that “literally” must not be used as “figuratively,” for example. We need a word that means, well, the literal rather than metaphorical meaning of an expression. If you were literally floored, you were on the ground. If your head literally exploded or someone literally ripped your heart out, you weren’t alive to describe it. He’s a little more tolerant of beginning a sentence with a preposition, and he’s willing to see “to comprise” wander afield from its standard translation as “to consist of,” which I am not. Those are tiny shadings of degree.

My governing principle is not complicated: Editorial judgments depend on context. Should we use fewer adverbs? Generally yes, when feasible. Is there a place for strange styles? I don’t know until you show it to me in context and we see whether it works. Should a book about inner-city gangs be written in gangland style? If it works well, perhaps, so let’s see it and determine whether it works. If not, maybe the fix can preserve much of its flavor.

Here’s what to like about Pinker. As a student and educator in the field of psycholinguistics, he’s deep in the ways our minds use language. When there’s a hitch in a sentence, I can usually say what needs to be done, but I can’t always articulate why. Pinker explains that and many other nuances of the English language. It’s not a grammar guide, but it does examine many aspects of language in light of the divide between Prescriptivists (the language standards’ right wing) and Descriptivists (the left wing). He isn’t intimidated by the Red Pen of Disapproval.

The language’s right wing seems to want the language frozen in time. To that group, for example, “ain’t” could never be a legitimate word. Whatever is considered correct today is treated as if it were correct for the millennium or so in which something like the English language has existed in discernibly different form from its Germanic extended family. Pinker demonstrates that language evolves whether editorial stuffed shirts like it or not, and that the Bemoaning of the Decline in Writing Standards has been with us for a very long time. Every generation does it. Put another way, the stuffed shirts of 1822 and 1922 would scowl at what the stuffed shirts of 2022 consider acceptable.

Every generation’s has the conceit of having lived in Big Important Times. Whatever it learned in childhood was The Right Way, with every later generation being selfish, lazy slobs with no respect. To this day most people sixty and over insist on two spaces after a period (and if they paid attention, the exclamation point and colon). Why? Because Mrs. Nitpickingham taught them two spaces in their typing class, and damn it, that makes it correct for all time and eternity. Never mind that Mrs. Nitpickingham (my own was a dotty but pleasant elderly lady who troweled on eyeshadow like iridescent purple bat wings extending from her eyelids) never used an electric typewriter and passed away before the advent of the IBM PC; she could not have envisioned self-publishing. Text-speak? Let’s be glad for her that she never saw it develop; same for my elderly high school English teacher, who looked like Groucho Marx and sounded a bit like Andy Rooney if he’d smoked all his life. In the meantime, every client over sixty argues with me about two spaces vs. one. I explain why the restriction no longer makes sense nor is the standard. Tough, most say, that’s what Mrs. Nitpickingham taught me and that’s what’s correct. It is the hill they choose to die on. It’s the wrong one.

It could be worse. My wife sometimes leaves three spaces, and she’s an excellent typist. I sometimes think she’s just messing with me.

If you want to see someone make a good case for the steady evolution of language and usage–someone doing so not because he doesn’t know the rules and won’t learn them, but because he knows them well enough to know when to bend or break them–Steven Pinker is your guy.