When I finally felt as though I had a reasonable draft of The Dream Peddler, the one I began sending out to agents, it came in at right around seventy-nine thousand words. This was a nice length for a debut literary book, as in, appropriate to the genre and not so long as to be scary. I had cut many things, because I tend to go on and…
There are a lot of ways to approach this topic, now that I think about it. We revise our work so many times before it’s published, with feedback from so many different people. After I wrote The Dream Peddler, I went through it twice, then I gave it to a few beta readers, and went back in with their feedback in mind. Then I began to query, and I’ve…
This week, we’re supposed to be writing about how to survive an edit letter — which refers to the list of revisions that your editor wants you to make after acquiring your book. I guess it’s hard to make big changes to your manuscript after you’ve sold it, but you should never really be that attached to your story anyway. You should always be open to making it better. I’ve…
When I was a reporter, the best and worst part of my workday resided next to each other. The best moment was when I beat the deadline and turned in my news story to the impatient copy editors. The worst moment came next, when the copy editors and I would engage in a competitive dance off, figuratively speaking, questioning each other’s word choices and grammar (I have a thing for…
It is one of the minor tragedies of my life, perhaps a major tragedy in my writing life, that no one ever told me first drafts are supposed to suck until I was thirty-eight years old. Yup. Thirty-eight. Now, this is most likely because I never really knew any writers, and I rarely took any actual writing classes. While most writers would probably agree that having an MFA,…
This week we’re talking about edit letters, and today I’m going to talk about what to do WITH your edit letter…concrete strategies to make something that feels overwhelming just a little more manageable. Getting an edit letter is hard. It can sometimes be painful to realize how much work you have left to do. While fishermen sit around comparing the size of the fish they’ve caught, writers…
This week’s topic: the edit letter. Before I published The Queen of Hearts, I’d assumed the edit letter was just that: a letter with some suggested editorial changes, but that turned out not to be the case for me. I never actually got an edit letter. When I got the call from my agent that we had an offer on my book, I was out of the country. Cell…
This post about edit letters is really a post about worldbuilding, because that’s a lot of what my edit letters were about. Oh, there were things about character arcs and pacing and such, too, but much of that went into the manuscript comments. My edit letters, particularly the longest that I received from the first of my two editors, were a lot about world-building. In a successful fantasy novel, the…
The above quote from the inestimable Neil Gaiman is a lot of why I’ve had beta readers since my fanfic days, but have never had a dedicated critique partner in another writer, at least not since leaving school. Writers have a much, much harder time resisting the urge to say how we would do something — which is not always helpful when talking to another writer. I think it can…
I’m so pleased to introduce you to Jennifer Johnson-Blalock of Hyphen Editing and Coaching. I first met Jennifer through Pitch Wars when she was a participating agent, and as a reader, I’m a huge fan of some of the books she’s represented over the years. Jennifer travels the world, reading, editing, and coaching, and if you are in need of a coach of any kind – for editing, for querying,…
