10 (11) Ways To Tell Your Editor Hates You

Everyone knows editors are the natural born enemies of writers. We’re…uh. They’re mean, narrow-minded, ruthless people without an ounce of human compassion in their black, shriveled, gin-scented hearts. Bitter and entirely destroyed by the rigors of life, they hate everyone – but especially hate writers. And books. With a passion. And it’s likely that your editor hates you. In fact, it’s pretty obvious. Not sure if your editor hates you or not? Look for these 10 11 signs:

1. He points out your errors. It’s impossible to be perfect with some asshole constantly griping at you about comma abuse, homonym misuse, and proper apostrophe placement. You never do anything wrong. The dude needs to just back off.

2. He explains things to you about grammar, proper usage, plotting, characterization, etc. What does he think you are, five? Of course you know these things. You know everything. He just doesn’t get that you’re exercising your stylistic freedoms. And why is he giving you lessons in history, physics, Cantonese slang, Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the limits to which the human body can strain in that particular position of the Kama Sutra? You’re creative. You don’t have to be factually accurate.

3. He suggests improvements to your story and style. If you’d wanted to write it the way he suggested, you’d have done it that way in the first place. Even if you’d never thought of it before. Jesus. What an ass. He’s probably a failed writer with nothing better to do than try to undermine your talent. If he’s so smart, he can go write a book. You don’t need to improve anything. Ever.

4. He makes you do all the work of implementing his recommended changes. Cripes. You wrote the book once already. Why should you have to retain ownership of your characters and storyline to write it again? All that BS he spouts about trusting you and your talent, and about not taking over your story…pfft. He’s just blowing smoke up your ass because he’s too lazy to do it himself. He should just whip everything together and take care of it; it’s not your problem anymore. Editors are really just glorified proofreaders anyway. Everyone knows that.

5. He actually thinks your writing should mature with each iteration of edits and each new story. Why should you have to change what’s already perfect? So what if you just had to rewrite ten pages of action because he decided the existing scene created a plot hole the size of a mutant manatee? You’ll just dash it off and send it in as-is, flaws intact. Nevermind the fact that he’s spent the entire manuscript griping like your mother-in-law about semicolons can’t be used that way or make sure the modifying clauses agree with the main subject, verb, and object. Whine, whine, whine. If your writing style changed from edit to edit and book to book, he wouldn’t have anything to do. You’re just being considerate and keeping him from getting bored. After all, he wouldn’t have a job without you.

6. He’d rather go without sleep than miss another chance to go through your manuscript. I mean, obviously he’s just trying to create problems and he’s got a grudge against you. Does it really matter if every instance of the word Green in the Manuscript is CapitaLiZed? Get a life, man. Maybe if he slept more than three hours a day he wouldn’t be so nitpicky.

7. When you halfass your edits, he makes you do them again. Clearly he doesn’t understand that you skipped 75% of his editorial commentary because it was all asinine and destructive, demonstrating that he doesn’t get what you’re doing. Also, see previous comment re: getting a life. Doesn’t he think you have anything better to do?

8. He makes you kill your darlings. You spent months crafting that perfectly placed piece of purple prose, with its precisely poetic palliteration. You love that particular figure of speech and damn it, even if it’s not appropriate, you’ll make it appropriate. Your favorite 20-page scene detailing the movie the lovers watched in chapter 40 just touches your heart and reminds you of when you first watched it at a slumber party 72 years ago. You adore the way you always write “ocular orb-thinguses” instead of “eyes;” it’s your signature. You love your art. You are your art. And he’s trying to destroy you by making you cut out the things you love most. Nevermind that the narrative makes more sense without them. He’s ruining the beauty of the thing.

9. He challenges you. He pushes you beyond your comfort zones and asks you to write things you’ve never written before, try things you’ve never thought of, learn new ways to do an old art. What is he trying to do, give you nightmares? New experiences are traumatizing. If you take risks, you might fail. Wait. That’s it, isn’t it? He wants you to fail.

10. He gives you deadlines. You have other priorities. Your hair appointment is this afternoon, your dog needs a mani-pedi, you’re working on a brilliant new story that will blow the NYT list out of the water. Look, those deadlines can wait. It’s not that hard to put a book together. You can just turn it in the day before the release date and it’ll be fine. It’s not like there are any other books in the pipeline, anyway. Yours is the only one that matters. If your editor really cared, he’d prioritize you above everyone else.

11. He makes you self-promote. And he’s out there promoting you, too. I mean, really. There are marketing and PR people for that. You shouldn’t have to self-promote; you are the author, the diva, the prima donna who watches from an ivory tower as the fans come flocking. You shouldn’t have to do anything to draw them. And heaven forbid anyone expect you to speak with them or engage them in any way. They aren’t authors like you.

If your editor meets even half these criteria, it’s obvious that he or she hates you and wants your book to fail. Or at the very least, they’re trying to make you as insane as they are. You should take up drinking. Make sure you drink while you write and while you edit; it’s a bonding experience, and you’ll be keeping your editor company. It won’t affect the quality of your work at all.

Besides, even if it does, your editor will fix it. That’s what he’s there for, after all.

I just know someone out there will take this seriously. And then I’m going to cry. You wouldn’t want to make a poor, defenseless, exhausted editor cry, would you?

Guest blogs!

Hey, guys, just a quick little bit of pimpage: I’m guest-blogging over at the Lyrical Press blog today, talking about author fatigue and how to write past it.

Good lord, I’m a wordy bugger.

Also: not too long ago one of my authors, Jason Beymer (author of the upcoming humorous fantasy ROGUE’S CURSE), did a great post on character development and how he finds inspiration for his characters. You should go check it out. (And be nice to him. He’s funny.)

Watch this space for some other guest blogs soon, as I cajole my authors and my fellow Lyrical editors into speaking up. (Cynthia, I’m lookin’ at you.)

I keep meaning to update with photos of my nifty new Sony Reader Touch Edition and faff on about how awesome it is, but every time I talk about the thing I sound like a product shill. Bleargh. Well, here, a couple of blurry photos snapped off on my G1 phone, with the thing on my messy, disorganized coffee table:

Man, do we need to vacuum.

That’s the Pixie skin from DecalGirl.com*, crap about my student loans underneath the reader, and Elizabeth Darvill’s BOUND BY BLOOD on the reader’s screen. Liz and Jason have been great sports about not killing me yet despite the volumes of edit notes I’ve dropped on them. Ashley has yet to find out what she’s in for, but she will. [insert innocent smile here]

What else, what else…OH! One other thing: The latest book in Diane Duane’s YOUNG WIZARDS series, A WIZARD OF MARS, released this week. It wasn’t due out until early April, so imagine my surprise when my preorder showed up on my doorstep on the 23rd.

If you love Diane Duane as much as I do, get the damn book. Seriously. YOUNG WIZARDS has always held a firm position as my favorite YA series of all time, and A WIZARD OF MARS is a great addition to the collection.

……

…oi, that’s a lot of tags on this post.

 

 
*Random aside: DecalGirl has the best customer service. My original order was shipped incorrectly; they sent me a skin for the Pocket reader, rather than the Touch edition. I e-mailed asking how to do an exchange, and they apologized and shipped a priority mail replacement the same day. It’s sad that it’s rare to see good, polite customer service, but it’s always nice when you run across it.

Phoenix.

Human beings are sponges, absorbing new experiences, influences, information and constantly adapting, changing, reshaping ourselves in response. New things impress upon our psyches, change the way we operate, change the way we think and feel. We are swayed, we are pushed, we are shaped by our surroundings, the things we hear, the things we see, the things enforced upon us. Never the same from one minute to the next, our glass of water neither half empty nor half full but stirred with drop after drop of everything but water to create a freakish and dynamic concoction at once original and entirely derivative. We are nodal points of a life’s accumulated sensation, and our old selves die and are reborn from one breath to the next.

There’s a story idea in that somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.

Yet.

It should be illegal to wake up this early.

Finished the rewrite a few days ago (yes, in between reading the Dictionary of Phrase & Fable; the etymology involved is entrancing). From 100k down to 82k; not a bad shave. I’m letting it sit for at least a week; I need a bit of distance from it so I can go back and read it with more objectivity. It’s easy to see a style and flow that aren’t there when it’s pacing along with what I imagined, and my brain is filling in the blanks. I need to approach it as something new, or at least less familiar, so I have a better hope of spotting any problems.

In the meantime I’m playing around with other ideas, just so I don’t fall into a non-writing slump that could stretch months. Right now I’m looking at Waking Magic; I don’t remember how much of that I’ve mentioned here. Vice, the pissy male warrior-fairy; Veronica, the human librarian who dies and is resurrected as something of an ethereal warrior, given a new life by your standard magical Powers That Be as compensation for the fact that it was Vice’s fault she died.

The thing is, the story doesn’t quite work. The central villain’s motives were simple enough: find a source of magic strong enough for him to rule Earth and the magical world as the only human sorcerer, as magic doesn’t exist in our world. That was part of the problem: generic villain wants to rule the world. Another part was the premise of the world was too convoluted. There was a reason for separating the two worlds, and a reason why joining them again would be bad. It was messy and didn’t quite make sense. The overall rules of their existence were too tangled and overdone; complexity is fine, but this wasn’t complex. Just bogged-down.

And then there’s Veronica, who really doesn’t work well as a central protagonist. She’s a paper doll; no real personality of her own. Just something the reader can drape themselves over as a vehicle to place themselves in the story. While you need a character that the reader can see themselves in, one they can follow and empathize with, I’m not a big fan of the type of stories where the entire world and supporting cast are fleshed-out, but the central character is just a placeholder for perspective. They need to have their own personalities, their own lives, individual strengths and weaknesses. They need to be people we can care about or hate.

On that note, I’ve been thinking of changing Veronica to Harvey, Vee for short. And if I do, Vee will be my first gay central protagonist.

It actually means something to me that I don’t write only gay protagonists, despite my sexuality. I write characters who are who they are, and if they turn out to be gay, great. If not, no biggie. This actually ties in to my previous rant over the article commending the “writer of color” for choosing to write mainstream (white) characters so they’ll have greater appeal; I have a feeling that the author in question didn’t really choose to write the character that way for those reasons. He probably just let the character develop as they would, and they just happened to be white. I tend to prefer that method of character development, honestly. It feels more natural, rather than a contrived way to build a character who has a theme, conveys a message, or fulfills a fantasy.

So far, none of my MCs have been down with the rainbow swirl, but Vee seems to be shaping up that way. Here’s where it tends towards crackfic, though: Vice and Vee, in their immortal/magical forms, are both invisible to humans. They have mortal forms that let them interact with humans; one of the other problems I’m struggling with, actually, is why Vee might need or choose to stay in his mortal form when he doesn’t have to. But the crackfic portion of it is that Vee is going to end up in the mortal body of a tiny Chinese girl, reverting back to male only when he switches to what’s basically his true form. It’s something that could be a lot of fun to write, if I can ever stop worrying over these problems long enough to write it. It’ll never be anything serious, though I think on the side it could be an interesting exploration of gender identity vs. sexual identity – basically demonstrating that homosexuality is not a desire to be or fill the role of a member of the opposite sex. Vee is very much not going to like being in this girl’s body; he likes men, yes, but he has no desire to be a woman.

I don’t know. I’m rambling; sometimes that’s what I do here. With any luck getting all this off my brain will help me work out the plot problems. Or I’ll decide I don’t have the skill to write this well, and move on to something else. After work, of course…because I have resumes to write.

Ciao.

Snozzberries taste like wha?

Life lesson:

If you’re too tired to do something right, all the sworn avowals in the world don’t matter a damn when you just have to redo it the next day after gaping in horror at the rotten fruits of your own labor.

Yesterday I had a whirlwind day. Two resumes, a ton of e-mails to catch up on, and yet somehow I managed to write 4,000+ words on Shadow’s Voice. I promised myself that hell or high water, before bed I’d rewrite my query for Shadow’s Breath from scratch, focusing on something punchier that captures the dry humor in Ken’s voice without getting as bogged down in adjectives as the old one. By 11:00p I was practically drunk on my own tiredness, but I sat down and wrote the query anyway. Last night I thought it was okay – in need of some minor editing, but okay.

This morning I took one look at it and let out the mental equivalent of a shrill horror movie scream. It was horrible, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. It got the basic ideas I wanted down, but the writing was so loose, clunky, and disjointed that the ideas got lost in a mess that was the literary version of teeth on unglazed porcelain. I’ve since rewritten it, fresh and bright after breakfast and a short work day, and the difference is amazing. Complete 180. I don’t think it’s the best query letter in the world, but it’s better than what I’ve been using and can’t even be compared to what I wrote last night. I should have just waited until this morning and saved myself the extra work.

Thankfully the pages of SV held up better under scrutiny, but those were written earlier in the day when I was still energetic and bushy-tailed. Chapter one’s almost done; just one short scene away, I think, though I want to work out how to end the chapter on some kind of tension. I also jotted down a few later scenes introducing a new character: Jordan, who already has both Anji and Amanda’s inner thirteen-year-olds all a-flutter. I think I like Jordan, though I’m still working out a few things about his base character and personality. Roman will most definitely hate him. Once I figure out those unresolved things on his personality, that’ll determine whether he hates Roman too, or if he’s just so charming he can’t even dislike that surly little monkey.

I’ve got this whole afternoon to write and am determined to stop wasting the time I have, so off I go. Before I do, though, this post is amazing. It actually made me cry, if only because it resonated so much with the frustrations I’ve been suppressing lately in an effort to stay cheerful and positive during the long, confidence-shredding road towards publishing. It’s just great to see a published author speaking so sympathetically and so frankly of (and to) her younger self’s doubts, mistakes, optimism, disappointment…everything every aspiring author goes through. It’s great inspiration to keep your head above water, keep trying, and keep a sensible head on your shoulders.