You write. I edit. You shine.

Category: sample edit

You’re the author. I’m the editor: Respecting the difference

Hey, writers … ever wondered what would happen if you and your editor didn’t see eye to eye on every aspect of your book? This post is for you.

I recently–and successfully–finished editing a romance with some magical realism elements. My client’s happy and moving on with publication, but I can’t tell you how many times I read and reread their last email to me. I can’t tell you either how many times I constructed a reply in my mind, typed the reply, deleted the reply, and then wrote it again, only to delete it for good.

Sometimes, I just have to let them go.

I had a couple hurdles with this particular client. (I’m keeping my references to this client gender neutral to respect their privacy.) Continue reading

Free Sample Edit #1.2: DF Roberts

In last week’s post, I began sharing with you the sample edit I did for DF Roberts on the prologue to his novel The Scholars. If you missed it, you can find it here. If you’d like to know what it would be like to have me edit your work, check out my post from April where I offer a free sample edit when time permits.

Since my last post, Mr. Roberts and I have exchanged a couple more emails about the edit, and we talked about whether that prologue should really be chapter 1, which is what I figured it should be. He told me more about the book, and it turns out that my recommendation is to omit the prologue altogether.

As I mentioned last time, prologues are tricky and usually unnecessary. Continue reading

Free Sample Edit #1: DF Roberts

Back in April, I offered to do a free sample edit for anyone who was interested in what it would be like to work with me and/or to see what it would be like to allow their manuscript to go under the knife. This week, DF Roberts contacted me and offered me the prologue to his novel The Scholars. He graciously agreed to let me share the edit here on my blog (which was part of the deal to get it for free), so let’s get started.

First, let’s talk for a minute about prologues in general. If they’re well done, there can be a place for them. Most of the time though, they are basically just “chapter 1” without the proper title, or they’re a backstory dump that the author thinks the reader needs to know right at the beginning of the story. Unfortunately, those backstory dumps can often turn a reader off in the first couple pages as they try to absorb all of this information that could have been more elegantly and smoothly incorporated into the story later on.

What about DF Roberts’ prologue? Because the prologue is all I got to see, I can’t answer definitively, but my gut tells me this is chapter 1.

OK … on to the first bit of actual editing. Continue reading

Editing Your Manuscript: Free Sample Edit

Now that you’ve had a chance to watch me begin the editing process on my first novel, it’s time to turn the tables. I hope that you learned a little from what I shared with you of that self-editing process. I intended to go longer with it, but the same mistakes kept cropping up, and I didn’t have much new to share.

So I thought, why not ask my readers to submit samples of their writing for a free edit–with the stipulations that I’ll do them as I have time and that I can share it all right here on my blog with the rest of the world so that we can all continue to learn together. Writing and editing are skills that evolve, so it never gets old and I never stop learning.

Here’s what I’m offering:

Send me an email with no more than your first 2,000 words INCLUDED IN THE BODY OF YOUR EMAIL. NO ATTACHMENTS. (You’ll benefit most from this if you send the FIRST 2,000 words–that’s what readers see when they crack open your book to decide if they want to buy it, and it’s what an agent sees when they are deciding whether or not to ask for additional pages.) Continue reading

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