Tag Archives: developmental editing

Booking My Editing Services

The flooring saga continues. One guy came and made the repairs to the subfloor that the flooring people had requested – or so I thought! When the flooring people came back, they weren’t happy with things still, and so the … Continue reading

Posted in editing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Norwescon Editing Panel(s) Notes

I was on two different editing panels at Norwescon this weekend. I’ve taken the liberty of combining my notes from both panels, but my notes from the first panel are much better and actually contain a page of quotes from … Continue reading

Posted in editing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

When and Why to Hire an Editor, And What They Should (and Shouldn’t) Do

The question of hiring an editor often comes up in my classes, and since editor for hire is one of the hats I wear, I wanted to provide some overview. There are different kinds of edits. I’m focusing on two: the developmental edit versus the copy edit. You might also hire someone to proofread, where they are simply looking for mistakes and errors, rather than making any editorial suggestions.
Continue reading

Posted in editing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

For Writers: Re-visioning, Rewriting, and Other Forms of Fine-tuning Your Fiction

As with all writing advice, mileage will vary according to the individual. The best thing as a writer that you can do is to pay attention to your own process and make it more effective. Experiment with lots of things, identify the practices that work, and incorporate them into your process. Keep experimenting, mixing things up a little, every once in a while, writing to the sound of whale songs, or dictating while hiking, or using a pen rather than the keyboard — it doesn’t matter what as long as you keep testing things in a way that lets you grow as a writer.
Continue reading

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 11 Comments

How to Critique: Best Practices for Workshopping

Both my Writing F&SF Stories and Advanced workshops offer students a chance to critique and be critiqued. To my mind, the latter is actually more useful, because being forced to articulate one’s position on an aspect of writing can be enlightening and instructive. With that in mind, here’s some best practices for such workshops.
Continue reading

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What Exactly Do We Do in the Editing 101 Class?

I’m glad I’ve got enough students for the Editing 101 online class that starts tonight, but I’d love a couple more. Mention reading this when you mail me about the class and I’ll give you a special deal. 😉

So what do we do and who is the class aimed at?

The class is aimed both at writers who want to learn to edit their work better as well as editors who want to hone their skills and learn about it as a career path.
Continue reading

Posted in classes & workshops | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

First Editing Class: Notes and Observations

The Editing class is split into three sections. In this first session, we focused on developmental, or “big picture,” editing. Here’s some notes on the process of editing. Continue reading

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments