Watch What You Feed that Ego

For those who don't follow me on Instagram or Twitter, this is our agave flower spike. It's fixing to bloom any day now. Really spectacular!

Some of my friends find this monster spike unsettling and alien. More than one has compared it to the flesh-eating, massively growing plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
via GIPHY

I can see their (okay, pretty melodramatic) point. But there was something about that manipulative plant, whose hunger for human flesh could never be sated, that sticks in our heads and still gives us the creeps.

We could say it's that atavistic and animal instinct to avoid the predator. I'd go a step further and say that stories of this type warn us of another great peril of being human: the overweening ego. That's our topic this week, asking each other "How Do You Keep It Humble?" aka "Great Cautionary Tales: the Enormous Ego Edition."

Now, there's nothing wrong with a healthy ego. In fact, I'd posit that it's crucial to being a successful author. You need that ego to believe in your own work enough to survive all the criticism, rejections, and those (So Not) helpful advice givers who counsel you to give up on your silly, impossible dreams. Ego is good, because that's what gets a writer through it all. We need a strong ego.

But a strong ego is like a strong body - it should be made of muscle and bone, not fat. An ego built on a solid foundation will be a workhorse. An ego made of lean, well-trained strength is an asset to fight off all attackers.

An overfat ego, or an obese ego, is a liability. It grows huge and bloated on a poor diet of flattery, lies, and denial. It gets in the way. No longer is the ego a responsive weapon and foundation, but it becomes an insatiable monster demanding ever more to feed it. It craves flattery and attention. The truth burns, so it fosters lies and denial. The overfed, bloated ego lives and grows only to serve itself.

That's the greatest danger told by these cautionary tales. In the beginning, the plant offers Seymour gifts, wishes granted, in exchange for food. But in the end, it consumed everything good in his life.

That's what a bloated ego does. It loves only itself, and it will devour everything if not controlled.

So, how do you keep that healthy ego fit and in fighting trim? Watch what you feed it.

• It's wonderful to have your work praised, but keep it in perspective. Remember that it's the work that's wonderful, not YOU.

• Consider the source. There's a lot of suck-ups out there who will tell you everything you want to hear. Your true friends will call you on your bullshit, too. Treasure them.

• Be brutally honest with yourself. Graciously and joyfully accept the good things that come your way, but always treat them like gifts, not your just due.

• It ain't just a river in Egypt. Guard against denial. Even on the little things, make sure you're seeing things clearly, not the way that makes you look the best.

• Acknowledge the role of serendipity and blessings. We achieve success through hard work, but also through the grace of the universe. Whatever you believe in, give thanks daily for the luck that brings you good things.

• Ask "why me?" One of my favorite religious studies professors said, "When bad things occur, we raise our gaze to heaven and ask God, 'why me?' But when good things happen, do we ever question it?" This has stood me in excellent stead. When something terrific happens, I ask "why me?" and then I give thanks.

• Observe the cautionary tales. When that writer does something that makes you roll your eyes at their huge ego? Quit rolling and pay attention. It can happen to any of us. Be vigilant!

And, please, don't feed the plants. ;-)

I Won't Publish the Book Without the Editor's Input

I’ve been on the record forever as stating that a book must have a professional editor. As my friends have said all week, the author is too close to the story to catch everything that might need revision, or to think of some cool twist that resolves a plot issue or even to see a plot issue sometimes. I absolutely will not release a book that hasn't been through both my developmental editor (our primary topic here) and a professional copy editor. I hire my developmental editor to review my novellas and short stories for anthologies as well.

And the editor does need to be a professional, not just someone who likes to read books or who is good at grammar. Ask those people to be beta readers perhaps. Your editor should understand your genre and the tropes and traditions of that genre. Even if you’re writing something you think is genre-busting, it helps to have a second, knowledgeable eye. Also, you may have fallen into a few lazy writing habits that the editor can check you on. Sometimes if you read enough books by an author you come to know all their heroines will be named Mary and have red hair. Or that there’ll be certain lines that get used verbatim in every book, for example.

I learn from my developmental editor’s comments and now avoid some mistakes I used to make every time, although I suspect I’m probably developing new ones. I had a bad habit of kind of skipping over parts I wasn’t too interested in writing (to get to other parts I was very excited about writing) – in Mission to Mahjundar there’s a dramatic escape across a raging river, which takes up almost an entire chapter in the finished book. It was one sentence in the manuscript. “They crossed the river and rode on.” My editor very properly gave me a hard time over that and basically demanded I flesh that episode out, which I did. In two of my ancient Egyptian novels, the early drafts pretty much said “they sailed up (or down) the Nile for two weeks” at a certain point in the narrative. What is it with me and rivers??? At any rate, the editor refused to settle for that and gave me suggestions, which I then enlarged upon and ended up writing quite a bit of hopefully interesting plot that shed more light on the characters and their motivations. In Warrior of the Nile her ideas really upped the stakes and the tension.

Nowadays I catch myself when I realize I’m about to skip writing some portion of the story and I go back and ask my Muse what I could add to the tale at this point.

 The other thing which is also a joke between me and my editor is what we call “slime trails.” In an early draft of Escape From Zulaire I wrote this really cool, shape shifting alien and then in what I thought was a further amazing burst of late night creativity, I had it leave a slime trail when it moved. Uh duh, if the alien has shifted into the shape of a human for example, won’t the other humans in the vicinity think it a mite odd (and disgusting) that ‘Sam’ leaves a slime trail LOL? I did a similar thing in another story idea that hasn’t been written yet where it was tactfully pointed out to me that if I included cool plot point X, I’d be undoing the entire established history of my worldbuilding. This is why I don’t write time travel.

I think some authors have the mistaken thought that if they have an editor, then they must follow that person’s inputs blindly, that it isn’t entirely their own book any more…maybe that’s how it was in trad pub. I can’t say because I never was traditionally published. My two books with Carina Press were the closest I came and I loved my editor there. She gave me great feedback but – leading to my key point here – I did not accept everything she suggested. A few things I felt were ‘wrong’ for what I wanted with the book and a couple of others I said, “Oh, okay, not exactly this but maybe I can do that instead,” and we were both satisfied.

On Star Survivor my editor felt I could cut out a couple of scenes with Nick and Mara (the lead characters in the first book, Wreck of the Nebula Dream) but my instinct was that my readers had been waiting about five years for this book and would feel cheated if they didn’t get to spend some meaningful time with the couple, even though this book focuses on Khevan the assassin and Twilka the interstellar celebrity. So I left both sections the editor suggested trimming and I have had reader feedback and reviews about enjoying the chance to catch up with Nick and Mara, and see them in action. I think she was probably correct about the scenes not being absolutely necessary to the plot but I stand by my final judgment that they were necessary to fully satisfying the readers.

It’s always going to be your book, you call the shots as an independently published author, but you want to present your readers with the best story possible. A strong, professional editor can and will help you polish that diamond to its brightest sheen.

(Award winning Escape From Zulaire is free by the way, if you want to see what happened to that alien and its slime trail.)

To Edit or Not To Edit

To edit or not to edit. That is the question.

Fortunately for us all, I'm not Shakespeare, nor am I currently sufficiently caffeinated to offer you a two hour treatise in iambic pentameter that would convince you the answer to the editing question is yes. Always yes.

I can have the tendency to be the contrarian here on the blog. But not with this issue. You've had a legion of excellent reasons from excellent writers on why you should hire at least one editor for your work. I'll add another.

Let's suppose your work is polished and clean. You've even had some beta readers. Their feedback was generally good and you fixed all of the typos and misplaced commas they called out. You're golden right?

Nope.

Hire that dev editor. Reason being that the dev editor exists to call you on your story-crafting shorthand. We all have it. It's the reflex gesture or the phrases we use so habitually that they become invisible to us. Unless you are an extraordinarily unusual writer, you have information about your scenes, your characters and your conflict that are in your head, but that never made it to the page. Also, that slow scene just before the climax? The one you've spent so much time telling yourself is just fine but you only half believe it? Yeah. It's not okay. And a good dev editor will call it out and even suggest options for fixing it.

I have a critique group. Two, in fact. On that meets in person and one virtual. All of my books go through those groups. That's four multi-published authors and several very experienced writers  who well on their way to being published reading my stuff and yelling at me when I mess something up. That should be good enough, shouldn't it? I mean. That many eyes on my writing makes for some very clean stuff.  Except.

Because these people know me, they know my modes of expression, both in person and in writing. When they read my text, they hear MY voice reading it, not their own. It's gotten to the point that major plot holes have been missed because these lovely writers know me well enough now to know what I meant even if I didn't say it on the page. This is natural and normal human behavior. The key is acknowledging it. The groups bring tremendous value to my process, especially early in a book's life cycle. But it's on me to accept that these groups no longer call me on every last bit of my story shorthand.

So. Editor. Editor. Editor. Editor.

The edit letter will annoy you. It usually does me. You get 24 hours of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then you suck it up and you objectively evaluate what you were told about your book and you fix it. Your readers will thank you. I'd like to tell you that you'll be a better writer - and maybe at some point you will, but all I can see is that I keep finding new mistakes to make. So ymmv.

Apologies for the late post. The week has defined shitty. Starting with Saturday night, when Autolycus informed us that he was done with this life. He died Saturday night. He had acute renal failure likely brought on by bladder cancer. He was 18.  

On editing and editors

So, I had a few different angles I considered taking on this.  Do I talk about my editing process?  I considered that, but that's largely only useful to you if you think my nuts-and-bolts method is something you can use.  Do I talk about the value of beta-readers & editors and getting other eyes and opinions?  I could, but you know that.  Or, rather, if you're looking for writing advice of any kind, you've already seen that, and have absorbed it, or it's bounced off you and nothing I say will change your opinion on the subject.

Instead, let's talk about specific editors.  Namely, my editor, Sheila Gilbert, who I adore. She won the Hugo for Best Editor Long Form last year, and she's nominated again this year.  Now, you may say to yourself, "Hey, she won last year, should she really win again this year?"  I say: hell yes.  And that sort of thing is hardly unprecedented.  Heck, in the history of the Best Editor Award, before it was split into Long and Short, over thirty years there were only nine different winners.  NINE.  And after it was split, Patrick Nielsen Hayden won three times, and David Hartwell won twice in a row.  So there's plenty of precedent for Sheila to win twice, and she totally should.

Now, you're going to ask me, why should she, Marshall?  What does she do that puts her above the rest of the crowd?  (The rest of the crowd is 80% excellent, of course.)

The obvious answer is, she publishes my books.  This makes me biased, certainly, but it's an important point from my point of view.  But you want something a bit less subjective.

So, let me put something else on the table, in terms of What Editors Do, since it often seems so very nebulous.  I often go to conventions, meet other authors, do the barcon thing, and so on.  There's a lot of in-the-trenches horror stories.  Stories about editors butchering manuscripts, demanding changes that would fundamentally alter the story.  Stories about copy-edits that went outside of the bounds of the copy-edit.  Stories about horrendous covers that the author got stuck with, deeply unhappy with how their books were going to look.

These horror stories are part-and-parcel with the industry.  I've heard them from big names and midlisters and newbies.  

And I don't have one.

I do not have one of those editorial horror stories, and that's because Sheila has been there to keep me from having them.  Even when I've had cover art come in with problems, she's right with me saying, "Yes, let's fix this."  That's what makes someone a Best Editor, in my book.  All five books, in fact, with the sixth, seventh and eighth on the way.

(Speaking of, I have editing to do on that eighth one.  Off to it...)

Come to ConCarolinas

Everyone else this week has made the case for a good editor, so I'm just going to say ditto, mow my lawn, and get packing cause I'm headed for Charlotte, NC and ConCarolinas. 

It's a great con, for more info here's a link. 

My 2017 ConCarolinas schedule:

FRIDAY JUNE 25 PM Who Wants to Live Forever?

SATURDAY JUNE 39 AM Handling Rejection
3 PM A Cast of Hundreds
5 PM Write What You Don't Know

SUNDAY JUNE 410 AM Where Have the Heroes Gone?

I'll also have a table with my books and cds available. Hope to see you there!

The Self-Edit & The Professional Edit

As Jeffe and James both attested, editors are necessary. Dev, line, copy, proof. Doesn't matter which path to publishing you take, having a minimum of two professional editors review your work is not an optional part of the process. In self-publishing, newbies think they can skip the professional edits and save a lot of money. No. No. Nononono.

SPEND THE MONEY, you cheapskate.

You may be an awesome editor of others' works, you may be Marian the Grammarian's sister-from-another-mister, BUT that doesn't mean you can edit your own stuff to the level necessary for publication.  As the creator, your brain simply cannot see the flaws.

However, you do need to edit your work before sending it to an editor.

Wait, but, you just said...WUT?

Look, as authors, we all know our first draft is the crap draft; it's riddled with issues. Some drafts are worse than others. It's okay. It's totally normal. It's part of the process. However, DON'T hand that shit over to a professional editor. If you're trad-publishing, you're wasting your editor's time. If you're self-publishing, you're wasting your money. You need to edit that draft.

But, but deadlines...But, but pre-orders...But, but...

But nothing. My friends, I can tell you horror stories from trad-published authors who turned in their "rough draft" only to have it be the one that got printed. Oh, the readers noticed. Oh, the author felt betrayed. Oh, the publisher didn't care. Don't set yourself up for that worst-case scenario. In the self-publishing world, if you send a rough draft to a freelance editor, they may refuse your business or charge you more money. Make your work as good as you can before sending it an editor. That includes having your CPs/Betas take a run at it, then incorporating their feedback. (Scheduling is a different topic for a different day, but don't be a dick and expect 24hr turnarounds.)

The catch is how to edit your work effectively and efficiently without over-editing it. For those of us who are perfectionists or suffering imposter-syndrome, we can all too easily fall into the viciously unending cycle of "tweaking" and micro-edits.

Let the Rule of Threes be your guide.

Kathy McIntosh has a nice post on Three Pass Self-Editing.

Then, and only then, do you send your work to the professionals. Most likely, you'll go through three more rounds of editing with their input. My experience with freelance editors in self-publishing, it's 2 rounds of Dev/Line edits then one round of copyedits. Proofreading is the final step.

No book will ever be perfect, but good editors make books a helluva lot better.

EVERYONE needs an editor.

Okay, so , here we are again.

This week's subject is simple enough: Do we need editors.

Yes, profoundly, yes.

Let me clarify: YES!

Let's go with my latest, experience, shall we?

let it be known that I love making characters! I dig the hell out of it. I once counted the named characters in my novel/trilogy SERENITY FALLS and I came up with 187 named characters. that wasn't all of the characters in the book, just the ones with names. The damned book should have a lexicon, especially since the story spans three centuries and, just as in real life, some of the characters actually have the same name in the family tree. My editor was ready to have an embolism. I didn't care. I knew what I was doing and the characters with the same names were never mentioned in the same chapters.

But I digress.

I recently finished the first draft of FALLEN GIDS< the second book in the TIDES OF WAR series. All was well and I was taking my time with the novel when my publisher politely asked me when he might see the first draft, as it was currently Three Months Late. That is not a typo. 

Here's the problem: I thought I still had a month to go.  Sometimes it's not a matter of writer's block or any of that sort of thing. I knew what I wanted to say, I knew where I wanted the story to end for Book Two. I just confused myself on the deadline.

That meant going from Zero to Ninety in exactly no time. I slammed my foot onto the gas and I WROTE. I also apologized profusely, because I LOATHE being late. And when Iw as done I promised the next book will be early to make up thew difference. (It will be.)

I'm off working on Book Three when the editor asks to speak with me. As he's in another country, we Skyped the whole thing. Took about thirty minutes to go over the notes. Phil, my editor, is one of the best. He works for the publisher. his job is to turn my Manuscript into something coherent.  That is often a monumental task.

Let me explain: I KNOW what I am doing. I KNOW that the book is going to be roughly this long, and how I'm going to end it. I know grammar well enough that I don't sweat that stuff.

I also know that my brain LIES TO ME! It's what brains do. Why? because I have planned the book out long before I write it. No, I don't outline. I hate outlining, I feel restricted if I outline in high detail first. I feel obligated to write a scene that matches what I planned and that's horrible for me.

So I have Phil and others to help. What are they helping with? Damned near everything, but especially on the first draft they're stuck correcting my typos, telling me when I'm using the same phrase too often, and, oh, yeah, when I'm using too many characters to suit my needs.

Remember when I said I like creating characters? It's true, I do. And it's a complaint I've had on many reviews, for that matter. Story is okay, but there are too many POV's is a common argument. Tat doesn't stop me, by the way. I still write like me. But when an editor comes along and gives me a legitimate argument against the number of POVs I'm using, I tend to listen.


I'm over halfway through the edits Phil suggested. Some of them are easy. The biggest challenge is rewriting several scenes to limit the number of POVs to five. It's tedious at times, but it's also the right call. Because while -I- have no trouble distinguishing who is who in the scenes, there are already a LOT of characters in the series and I add more. No one has to see from their perspective, especially when they often times show up only briefly and then not for a long while.

My mind goes crazy when I'm in the zone. I know what I want to say, and I know what I mean to say, but that doesn't guarantee that I'm saying it in the best way. Typos happen and often times, if I haven't waited long enough, say, a couple of months, I can;' see the mistakes because my mind knows what is supposed to be there and my eyes assume that's what I wrote. Even if I set up autocorrect to take care of many of my more common typing *(Yes, I did that already) there are a few that sneak though. I'm finding a lot of them as I do my rewrites.

I am human. Sometimes you simply need more than one pair of eyes.

Most of the  successful self published authors I know pay an editor I'm lucky, my publisher does that for me and they chose well.


Do you need an editor? Yes. God yes. Dear God yes.

Never you'll see the mistakes. You won't. Not all of them.  Never assume that the book needs another edit. Sometimes it's finished and a writer can't see it. If you are on the fifth edit, either the book was hideous beyond repair or self doubt is crippling you and it's time for an editor.

Autocorrect won't catch everything. Ever.

trust me. You need an editor. I can edit other people, no problem, but I am not as intimate with their manuscript as I am with my own. It's exactly that simple.

James A. Moore

Why You Need an Editor. Yes, I'm Talking to YOU

This isn't a great shot, but these little girls are so awesomely adorable. We got to attend our granddaughter's spring dance recital yesterday. The costumes were amazing. So much fun.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is editing: do we use editors or do it ourselves, how long does editing take, etc.

As you may have guessed from the title, I'm somewhat passionate on this topic.

Not long ago I saw several authors on a thread discussing whether they still used a developmental editor. This group of guys happened to be all self-publishing authors. One had asked about editing, who people hired, etc. The conversation grew from there, with most of them saying that they used content or developmental editors - which is an initial pass, helping to shape the story - early on in their careers. But, a number of them said, "now that they knew how to write a book/story, etc.," they didn't need to anymore.

I cry utter bullshit on this.

And I'll tell you why!

When I was younger I was a huge fan of both Anne Rice and Pat Conroy. There were a couple of years there where I gave a copy of Conroys' THE PRINCE OF TIDES to anyone I thought might not have read it, for every gift-giving opportunity. Likewise I obsessively followed Anne Rice, and I'll tell you honestly that reading her book THE WITCHING HOUR was a turning point in my life. I could say that's the book that made me want to be a writer.

Not long after that, Anne Rice rather famously went on talk shows to discuss her new book deal, and she said, "Believe me - no one edits Me." (I'd say the emphasis is my own, but she totally said it in bold with capitalization, just like that.)

Then Pat Conroy's BEACH MUSIC came out, which I eagerly devoured. Only to find it so bloated that I couldn't enjoy it. Even as a plain reader, I kept thinking that the book needed to have at least a third of the story trimmed out.

It needed a good developmental editor. So did Anne Rice.

Even though - maybe even particularly if - they didn't think so.

And I'll freely say I think they're both genius writers - but genius writers need editors, too. I'll also put out there that there is no such thing as "figuring out how to write a book/story, etc." Last week at Nebula Weekend, Grandmaster Jane Yolen, who's written over 300 books, said that each novel is different for her and she relearns how to do it every time. Writing isn't making widgets - it's not like you learn how to do it once and then replicate that ad infinitum.

Besides which: I truly believe that it's extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for a writer to have an objective view of their own work. We need that outside lens to examine if what we intended to communicate actually made it onto the page.

So, yes, while I do edit myself, I also always use editors, also - content/developmental, line, and copy. If I'm self-publishing, I hire the toughest people I know to put my work through the wringer. In my opinion, not doing that doesn't mean you've "arrived." It only means you're kidding yourself.