Apologies for being away for so long. It's had a lot to do with being almost submerged by the amount of editing work I'm currently undertaking.
This includes a historical adventure, a historical gothic thriller, a modern-day crime novel, three works of narrative non-fiction and a very stylishly written chick-lit novel. Wow! Written down like that it's even more than I thought. No wonder I've barely had time for my own writing.
It has also included over the last months a second copy-edit and a proof-read of the excellent book by Sandra Danby that I talked about in my last post, Ignoring Gravity. I was very glad we had the chance to re-visit this after the rather demanding first deadline and, while I'm pleased to say there was nothing outrageous we'd missed, we were able to hone and polish and help make this lovely novel the best it possibly could be.
Sandra interviewed me for her blog about the ins and outs of editing and has reproduced it on her blog.
It includes:
* 5 things a writer should do
* 5 things a writer shouldn't do
* what's the difference between critiques, structural editing, copy-editing and proofreading?
* what to do to an MS before submitting to an agent - or self-publishing.
Well worth a look! http://sandradanby.com/2014/06/08/the-copy-editing-experience/
I also want to mention here the proliferation of freelance editors who are asking me for work. They're all screened before they can become Fiction Feedback editors and many fail as they don't have much of an idea; they seem to think it's just correcting spellings (and then they miss some).
If you're a writer looking for an editor, ask to see samples of work they've done. And you might want to ask for a short editing sample of your work so you can see what you're getting - we still offer 500 words of fiction copy-edited free. The last writer we did this for had sensibly asked around and got a few samples. He came back to Fiction Feedback for the full novel edit, saying our sample edit was 'technically far superior'.
It's nice to know.
