Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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Book Angst 101 had a great entry on how editors can get jazzed by a manuscript submission and how an editor can and should work with an author to the betterment of the book.

I've been going over the comments Ray Rhamey made when editing the sample I sent and trying to apply the rationale behind the suggested changes to my WIR and I must say it's giving me a lot to think about, especially in tightening prose. I think of myself as a sparse writer, but I can see now more unnecessary words than I would've thought. I don't know that I'll pull out much now, but wait til Deb goes through the ms. Then I can apply, or rather together we could apply these principals, to keep the ms tight and the word count within reason for a first novel. We won't be cutting scenes, but there are things we can cut. Anyway, the experience has been well worth it. Even for the things I don't agree with, his comments are useful and have given me a lot to think about.

Or simply an offer I couldn't refuse? Ray Rhamey on his blog, Flogging the Quill, offers a free edit of a short piece of writing in exchange for the chance to post it on the blog (writers get to see the edit first, then decide if they want to let him go public with it). So I sent him the opening of the set-aside-for-now novel that will likely be incorporated into my collaborative series. I figured it was going to be heavily revised anyway and his comments could be useful in that regard. And I was right.

So, if you promise to not laugh at the awful typo I had that he caught, you can read it here. And if you have questions as to how your writing would be received by an editor, you might want to consider giving this a try, too, and then you and possibly others who read the blog can benefit from the experience. I know that I will be giving a couple of his comments serious thought, while other editing changes he suggested are more a matter of writing style. Still, if I need to cut words, he's shown me a way to knock off a few. And I wouldn't mind hearing your comments here after you go look at the edit.