Southern Fried Chicas

 

For someone who hasn’t really pubbed a lot, I seem to have had quite a few editors.  Maybe there’s a big turnover rate, I’m not sure.  But with one possible exception, each one of them has been pretty nice, professional, and easy to work with.

And that, plus the fact that receiving edits means getting closer to the ms being pubbed, should be a good thing, right?

Er…not necessarily.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen the ms, it’s almost like being an enthusiastic reader going over it for the first wonderful time.

If it hasn’t been long ENOUGH since you’ve seen it, it’s like having the kid you shipped off to college coming back with all his dirty laundry.

Once in a while, you’ll actually stumble over a phrase or paragraph that rocks you back on your heels and makes you squee and think, “wow—who wrote that?  Damn that’s good!”

Then again, you’ll come upon a passage (dare I say chapter?) that rocks you back and makes you grumble, “okay, who intercepted my submission e-mail, stole all my commas, screwed up my spelling, and inserted all these sentence fragments before sending it on ‘coz I KNOW I couldn’t have missed all these errors!”

Receiving edits is a great chance to substitute that better word or short phrase you thought of while you were scrambling eggs three months after subbing.  You can make your ms nice and shiny!

Your editor probably isn’t like your writing buddy who’ll crit but also let you know when you’ve done something well.  Editors tend to have some strange idea that this is a business and want you to do things like “clarify”, or they say things like “this is a poor transition”, or “this part doesn’t work for me”—or any number of skillfully worded versions of 

Edits can make you wonder if being in this business is really worth it.

They can also bring out the best in your writing.
All you have to do is survive them.