Today, when I awoke this morning, I found my editor had returned the edits for Storm Clouds Gather (Part Three of Revin’s Heart, serialized by Water Dragon Publishing). While I was still in bed, I downloaded the PDF on my phone and looked over all the recommended changes.
A lot of people complain about editing and editors, but I love it. Here’s someone’s who’s actually taken the the time to really read and understand my story! And they want to make it better! What’s not to love about that?
In looking over this set of suggestions, the only consistent grammatical mistake I appeared to still make is this one.
Help! My editor is making me use commas between independent clauses joined by a conjunction!
— Steven D. BREWER 🏳️⚧️ (@author_sdbrewer) June 22, 2022
It was funny to me because a beta reader had pointed out that I do this just a couple of days ago.
I went through the manuscript and proposed revisions three times. The first time, I simply accepted the inline edits he’d proposed. These were mostly like the commas I mention above. And other minor word order changes or simplifications. The second time, I went through the comments where he had asked questions or identified places where things were unclear or didn’t read cleanly. And finally, I read it one more time to look for places where the track changes had left cruft: there was a “,.” in one place. And two spaces in another.
In one place, my editor commented that a sentence of exposition was unnecessary because the characters would know that information. At first, I misread the comment as that readers would already know and I was like, “Wut? I made that up for this book. Did they already read this book or something?”
In the end, here’s my main observation.
Be sure to always love what you write because you're going to read it over and over and over again.
— Steven D. BREWER 🏳️⚧️ (@author_sdbrewer) June 22, 2022
And, luckily, I do love reading my own writing.