August 22nd, 2007 — editing, fantasy, blogging, CSFF
Here it is Wednesday, and I’m just now getting to the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour! My apologies to everyone for the weak showing this round. All that to say George Bryan Polivka’s The Legend of the Firefish looks awesome. He’s got a new blog, too.
I thought it would be fun to play acquisitions editor based on the first page. What if I got this first page as an unsolicited manuscript? What works? What questions does it raise?
August 17th, 2007 — sentence tips, grammar
Style problems getting the way of your prose? Pick up the pace! Break through bad style and you’ll find yourself zipping along the autobahn feeling spunky and free.
A billion years ago, I started this series and forgot to post the rest of it! Bad blogger, bad! You may have forgotten, the first trick:
1) Avoid unnecessary adjective clauses.
Trick two has the same catchy grammatical joy:
August 2nd, 2007 — editing, faith and work
It’s embarrassing. It shouldn’t matter to me, but sometimes it gets under my skin.
July 30th, 2007 — editing, sentence tips
The “writing process” is something that gets a lot of emphasis in American schools these days. And for good reason. A lot of people have anxiety about writing because they think they are supposed to produce Shakespeare after one draft.
Even Shakespeare didn’t produce Shakespeare after one draft. In fact, he probably got a lot of input from the actors and directors and copywriters.
So I liked the idea of the writing process. The problem was it produced even more anxiety for the students. Now instead of worrying about just writing well, they worried about prewriting and revising and proofing and editing and, well, writing too.
So here is the old revision process I taught:
June 25th, 2007 — editing, writing, sentence tips, grammar
Anybody can write. It’s just a matter of sitting down at a keyboard and whacking out some words. As I’ve heard Camy Tang say, it’s a matter of getting BIC (butt in chair) with regular consistency.
But—as millions of completely worthless and boring blogs attest—not just anybody can write well. Your local bookstore is probably well stocked with books on writing and inspiration and how-to-publish-your-book-idea-and-get-on-easy-street. A handful of those books may even be worth the trees that died to make their pulp.
June 7th, 2007 — editing, faith and work, publishing, business
My last post in this series is about a lot more than just editing. You see, publishing is not a business with wide and generous margins. Certainly authors can’t expect to earn a tremendous amount of money directly from publishing. But even the biggest wigs in publishing aren’t running around making the Fortune 400 lists.
Now that so much good content is published online for free, these margins are only going to get narrower.
But those of us called to publish and write and edit still have to put food on the table. How does that work? Here’s the last question:
4. Is it, do you suppose, financially feasible for a single person to live in the suburbs of a major city, with only an entry-level publishing job and very part-time work in the food industry?
June 6th, 2007 — editing, publishing, networking
In some ways, acquisitions is the gateway to publishing. Acquisitions Editors are the gatekeepers. Sorting through slush piles of proposals and sample chapters from new writers. Here’s another question from a young editor.
3. I feel like I would like to do acquisitions. How would I get into it?
June 5th, 2007 — editing, publishing, marketing, inspiring
This next one is hard for me. It’s so honest. So raw. And such a completely true feeling for writers and editors everywhere.
2. How do I “sell” myself when I feel like a failure—but a failure who could stop being one?
June 4th, 2007 — uncategorized, editing, publishing
Several weeks ago, a reader asked me a serious of questions about how to break into editing. I would hardly say that I’ve “broken into” editing, except maybe as a thief in the night, rattling the windows of traditional publishing and occassionally finding one unlocked.
May 2nd, 2007 — editing, business
A reader wrote to me recently. (Okay, it was Eve Nielsen. Stop twisting my arm.)
She said, “I’ve been reading a book on how to write and just discovered that there are various kinds of editors. How necessary do you think a copy editor is?”
Let’s start with the strong warning. Caveat emptor. Seriously.
I'm Senior Editor for The High Calling, High Calling Blogs, and Faith In The Workplace.
