Sharon Honeycutt, Editor

You write. I edit. You shine.

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2017 Resolution: I’m going to read more!

January 6, 2017 /

I don’t usually make resolutions for a new year, but this year I did. I resolved to read more best sellers in all types of genres—those I would naturally pick up and those I would naturally pass over.

I love to read, but you might be surprised to know I don’t do a lot of it for pleasure. As a full-time editor, it’s not uncommon for me to spend six to eight hours each workday reading clients’ projects. It’s hard at that point to sit down again and read for pleasure, so I end up saving my personal reading for bedtime … which means I read for pleasure for about ten minutes a day—if I’m lucky—before I fall asleep.

I realized that as both an editor and a writer, it’s really important for me to stay up-to-date on what’s selling and what people are raving about. Why? Continue reading

Editing Your Own Book: Good or Bad Idea?

August 18, 2016 /

I was reading a thread in the Absolute Write forum tonight where the OP (original poster, icydk) asked about others’ editing and revising processes once they finish their first drafts. I love this website and the forum there because there are always great ideas and new ways to do things. I almost always learn something.

I didn’t read all the responses to the question, but I did read probably the first ten to fifteen. They all gave ideas as to how to go about it, and some of them were really good. (My favorite from the responses was to open the first draft in one window and a new doc in a window beside it and just start rewriting. I don’t know if I’d ever go to that extreme—to start over completely—but I liked the idea. My preferred way is to print the whole book and go after it with a pen and highlighters. Then I head back to the laptop.)

What I didn’t see in those responses was “hire a professional editor.” You may ask, “Why was this?” Continue reading

Free Sample Edit #1.2: DF Roberts

July 22, 2016 /

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

July 16, 2016 /

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

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