Drawing from the Well
Chapters Edited: 1/2
Chapters to Edit: 26 1/2
Yeah, I didn’t get much done yesterday, but I spent the evening with my kids so it was a good trade-off. More will get edited today for sure (especially considering how fast the edits are going).
Filling the Well
That Hideous Strength: 54%
Elegy: Page 16 of 89
Jessica Jones: S2E12 of 13
The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections: 20%
I made a slight amount of progress here too — a page. Whee! Seriously gotta finish this YouTube playlist so I can listen to some stuff and take osme time to read. This is ridiculous.
Polishing the Well
Finally saw Captain Marvel last night with the kids. They enjoyed it (including my daughter, though she got lost in the first quarter of the film — which I told her was the point), I loved it, and fun was had by all. Now we’re all caught up for Endgame.
Note: My son keeps reminding me that we haven’t seen Homecoming but I keep reminding him that it was before Infinity War so it is less relevant to Endgame. Still, he persists.
Well Chat
Combining Your Instinct with a Professional’s
I know I’m talking a lot about editing right now and you’re probably getting tired of red pen photos, but it’s where I am and this is important stuff. A lot of new authors, like myself, have no experience with professional editors, also like me. When you get your first edit back, it’s natural and frankly expected to get defensive.
I’m here to tell you to let that reaction come and then let it pass.
It is your editor’s job to look at your work objectively and pick it apart. And it’s their job because you paid them to do that job. It is their goal to improve your work. If they do a bad job, are you going to hire them for your next book? NO! So they already have a vested future interest in doing a good job. So let them do it.
Am I saying that it is acceptable to unplug your brain and just hit the Accept button on all their digital markups of your work? Absolutely not. But if you look at a minor edit, for example, moving a word from the middle of the sentence to the end, and it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, trust your editor and accept the edit. If they suggest moving a sentence around but keeping it intact, trust your editor. Read all your edits in context by reading the entire sentence and even the sentence before if necessary, but be prepared to accept a lot of them. You’re so far into the weeds on your manuscript that you miss both big things and idiosyncracies of your own writing style. My editor found a reoccurring grammar error that she couldn’t catch in the first edit because the first manuscript I sent her needed much bigger changes. That said, my current manuscript is RIFE with this error. So I trust my editor.
Now, there’s something to be said for trusting your instincts, but that’s for tomorrow’s Well Chat. Have a great week everyone.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG