amusedI'm always fascinated by the way different people approach the editing process. I know authors who don't let anyone see anything until the book is finished for the first time. Authors who hit a single chapter eighty times before moving on to the next one -- they may be slow, but dude, when they finish a book, it is finished. Me, I tend to run as fast as I can from one end to the other, editing and correcting as I go, and throwing chunks of text to the wolves as frequently as I can.
Right now, I'm processing edits to A Local Habitation provided by Mary, who has developed a vendetta against the British comma. Seriously, she's like some sort of twisted naturalist, stalking them through the wild paragraphs, and clubbing them to death like baby harp seals whenever they're stupid enough to come into her sight. I'm afraid she's going to start taking shots at me. She's also going to war against my tendency to insert semi-colons wherever I can swing it. This is why I love Mary so very, very dearly. Also why I will never actually let her near me with a red pen.
I have about five stacks of edits to process after this (gulp), and then it's on to the denouement, which will hopefully do me a favor and not hit me like a ton of bricks. Ah, editing. Ah, criticism. Ah, snark.
What are your feelings on editing? How much is too much -- and how mean is too mean?
May 27 2008, 17:47:51 UTC 9 years ago
• I hate editing my own work after a point. If I could see where it was wrong, I'd fix it already!
• I think I'd like editors who point things out quickly and let me hasten to fix my clear idiocy, though a bit of clever, kind snark would probably make it more enjoyable.
(BTW -- and ignore this part at will! -- Any suggestions towards building proofer-pools? I have some beta-readers, but if I can't hack something down to a quarter its size (*wince*), I'm going to need someone else to help with the machete work and I suspect that the readers I've got are either too busy or aren't seeing the same flaws I'm not seeing...)