Just completed the initial edit for Maestro. I can say this for NineStar Press: my editor is very good at catching my boneheaded mistakes.
Far from hating the editing process, I loved it. It was like the final render on a difficult digital art project, or the polish of a gemstone or piece of silverwork. A necessary stage. In this case, a fast and enjoyable one. We’re not done, but we’re closer to a real book.
It just highlights why most writers can’t edit their own work to a professional standard. We’re too close to the work, and we may not have a deep enough knowledge of English grammar and punctuation to manage correct usage right away. Or like me, they managed to skate through English in high school and college mostly by osmosis and a long reading career.
I’m as careful a writer as I can be. I still turned in a 16K mms with several hundred punctuation and spelling errors, three continuity mistakes, and a lot of bad sentence structure. Granted, some of that was because I wrote it fast and didn’t really polish it before sending.
My agent and several editors have said I turn in relatively clean copies…which terrifies me. I wonder what they’ve been getting from other authors.
In the pits of self-publishing and uninformed small presses, I have seen what happens when editors don’t know how to edit, and authors aren’t skilled enough to know the difference.
<Shudder>
In better news, cover art for Maestro is just around the corner. ETA 1-16-16 It’s alive! Follow the link.