How I Gave Myself a Fire Lizard

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is the item from your books you most want to own and why.

In mulling this topic, I've come to an interesting realization: I rarely have interesting "items" in my books. With a couple of outliers, I don't really include objects of power or other magical artifacts in my stories. There's the Star of Annfwn in The Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms books, but it's not something I'd necessarily want to have. There are a couple of objects of power in my Forgotten Empires trilogy - most notably the orchid ring - but I wouldn't want that, even if it could be mine.

Mostly, the interesting stuff in my books that I'd like to have comes in the form of personal powers. And I'm noticing now how often the ability to control weather - like being able to make it rain! - crops up in my characters. So, sure, I'd love to have Lia's connection to the land and weather in the Forgotten Empires, or Salena's storm-making magic in THE LONG NIGHT OF THE CRYSTALLINE MOON in the UNDER A WINTER SKY anthology and the other upcoming Heirs of Magic books. I think it would be totally cool to be a shapeshifter as in Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms.

But those aren't items. 

The closest I can come is a familiar, which is a living being, not an item, but can be "owned," more or less. So I'm picking Chuffta from my Sorcerous Moons series. That's him, on Princess Oria's shoulder on the cover of book one, LONEN'S WAR. Chuffta is a telepathic, tiny white dragon. More or less. It's complicated. He's also Oria's best friend and staunch companion - even though he suffers from an unfortunate fascination with fire that occasionally gets him into trouble.

And yes, Chuffta is totally wish-fulfillment because I always wanted one of Anne McCaffrey's fire lizards for my very own!

 

No Time for Nits

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is  Nitpicking - venting about things or thinking about the value of attention to detail.

Personally me, I’m not much of a nitpicker. I tend to be live and let live and select my battles, you know?

As far as editing for tiny details, the worst situation I ever had was once when a new-to-me-copy editor went through one of my ancient Egyptian paranormal romances and ‘corrected’ almost everything. When I write a story set in 1550 BCE Egypt, I have a style and a voice that fits the epoch and the way the ancient Egyptians thought about the world. It’s one of things readers and reviewers compliment (not to be boasty). As one reviewer said, “These are not 21^st century people in kilts.” Right. I do a ton of research and have a huge library of reference materials in order to achieve my desired effect of taking the reader to that ancient world. I like to joke I’m getting my informal degree in Egyptology with all this studying. So I was irate and the copy edit was useless to me.

Have you ever dealt with real nits by the way? Our family went through several rounds of that activity when the children were little, especially one year when the day care was allowing children back in without being diligent enough on checking they were actually nit free. I’ll spare you the gory details but nits are tiny and tenacious and there’s nothing fun at all about searching through an entire head of hair to find and detach them.

Gave me a whole new appreciation for the term, let me tell you!

Hopefully I haven’t grossed you out…

I did have to watch the details on my new release of the past week, STAR  CRUISE: RETURN VOYAGE, which is in the Pets in Space® 5 scifi romance anthology. The events take place on a ship called the Nebula Zephyr but a lot of the plot is anchored in a tragedy set decades earlier, in The Wreck of the Nebula Dream. I had to be so careful and triple check myself every time I referred to either ship to be sure I was getting it right. Dream was destroyed, Zephyr sails on.

Speaking of details, we did hit #1 in several categories on Amazon and got that little orange flag appended to the listing for a while and we were a Nook Best Seller…but then to balance that, Kobo had a technical glitch on their end and were delivering four pages of gibberish to people versus the humungous anthology they expected. Details, details. Kobo admitted it was a problem on their end and took quick action so all is good.

PETS IN SPACE® 5 ANTHOLOGY BLURB:

It’s time for an escape! Pets in Space® 5 is back for the fifth amazing year! Escape to new worlds with twelve of today’s top Science Fiction Romance authors. They have written 12 original, never-before-released stories filled with action, adventure, suspense, humor, and romance that will take you out of this world. The giving doesn’t stop there. For the fifth year, Pets in Space® will be donating a portion of the first month proceeds to Hero-Dogs.org, a non-profit charity that supports our veterans and First Responders. If you are ready to forget the world around you and make a difference while you are having fun, grab your copy before it’s gone!

STAR CRUISE RETURN VOYAGE: Gianna Nadenoft is a reclusive survivor of one of the worst interstellar cruise ship disasters in the history of the Sectors. Now a renowned artist, she hasn’t left her home planet in decades, not since returning there after the wreck as a traumatized three-year-old. With her service animal at her side, she’s going to attempt to travel across the star systems to attend her brother’s wedding and reunite with her fellow survivors.

Trevor Hanson is a security officer aboard the cruise liner Nebula Zephyr with his own traumatic past as a former Special Forces soldier and prisoner of war. He’s assigned to provide personal protection to Gianna during her time aboard the ship but soon finds his interest turning from professional to romantic.

Onboard the Nebula Zephyr, powerful enemies are watching Gianna and making plans to seize this rare opportunity to gain access to her and the secrets they believe she’s still keeping about the wreck. Can Trevor overcome his personal demons and rise to the occasion to save Gianna from the danger waiting on his ship, or will she slip through his fingers and suffer a terrible fate deferred from her last disastrous voyage?

Amazon      Apple Books      Nook      Kobo      Google Play

Note: Image from DepositPhoto

Nitpicky Editing

 Edits. You never know what you're going to get when you entrust you WIP to someone else's critical eye. The only way you get to pick your editor is if you're self-publishing. The rest of the time, you get the luck of the draw. 

I don't have a horror story per se - just an annoyed the crap out of me story. I had a copy editor, a copy editor I hadn't picked. This copy editor defined nitpicker. He didn't understand my genre. He had a totally literal brain and a need to prove he was smarter than anyone else. So rather than simply marking that I'd overused a word, there just had to be a condescending comment about it.

I gritted my teeth, muttered, "Fuck you" under my breath a lot. But even if I didn't appreciate the nonsense, I had to check my ego and make corrections regardless of the BS comments. I also did check in with my editor, who was amazing. I asked if it was possible to request that a copy editor NOT be assigned to my work any longer. She chuckled and said, "Yes, it is. I wondered how you'd feel about that copy edit. I disagreed with some of the edits. I feel like he was changing your voice." 

A vast wave of relief washed over me. I wasn't just being a jerk when I declined a bunch of suggested edits. I was preserving my story and my voice.

I learned several things from this experience:

• Never submit your master  copy to your editor - keep a back up that is your clean copy. 
• If you have concerns, always talk to your editor in a calm, professional manner.
  
• If you're self-publishing, remember you hired 'em, you can fire 'em. Don't spend time furthering a mistake just because you spent a long time (or a lot of money spent) making it.
• Ask other authors for recommendations before you hire any kind of editor. 
• No one caution or solution will prevent poor experiences, but if you make sure you always keep a clean copy in your files, you have a fall back.

Finally, it doesn't matter how many annoying edits I get, I'll always ask for edits from someone who gets paid for doing the job. I'm not equipped to call myself on my own bad writing habits and I like my readers too much to leave those habits unchallenged. 

Unlimited

  Nitpicking…nitpicking. I’m sure I’ve got something to nitpick about, I mean—I can vent with the best of them. 

There’s—

Uhh…yesterday—

Well…maybe I can’t. I’m not much of a complainer because I’d rather focus on the what’s going good. So, what positives have I got going on right now? 

I’m in the editing cave which means:

• Coffee’s on tap
• I get to close the door (meaning the kiddos know they can only interrupt for really really important stuff…if they come in it’d better be for more than my brother took the last granola bar)
• I’m focused—zeroed in, end in sight, can’t distract—

Ullr pup just walked in! Aww, he misses me and needs some belly scratching. Never mind me, I’ll be over here getting some puppy kisses. 

Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck ~Dalai Lama

How To Tell if Your Manuscript Nitpicker Is Qualified

This week on SFF Seven we’re talking about nitpicking, which puts me in mind of the wonderful folks we hire to do these things: proofreaders and copyeditors. Back in the olden days of publishing (and still the case for some folks), our publishers took care of interviewing and hiring manuscript-polishing professionals, but now we don’t always have access to those experienced individuals. So how do we find qualified nit pickers for our work? How do we trust that they’re finding all the errors in our manuscripts and making the right changes? It’s tough out there both for freelance book prep folks and for the writers, but I’ve been on both sides of the writer/editor divide and can, hopefully, offer a few insights. 

What Qualifications Should a Proofreader/Copyeditor Have?

Proofreaders and copyeditors are not licensed professionals — we mostly find these services through online searches or word of mouth — so it can be really hard for writers outside the book-publishing industry to find a qualified contractor. Literally anyone can claim to be qualified to edit your words. Very few people actually are.

Heads up: a degree in English is not, on its own, enough to qualify someone as an editor or proofreader. Most college English degree plans don’t even require a grammar class. It’s almost better for a person to have linguistics or extensive foreign language knowledge because those courses of study actually look at how language has evolved and is structured. An English degree means you’ve read a lot of classics and have written a bunch of analytical papers. 

Similarly, years spent teaching English is not a qualification that can stand on its own. If you think English degree holders have slim credentials in the grammar, punctuation, and usage realm, check out education degree requirements. (Disclosure: My degree is in English, from a biggish university, but I also went through teacher training and have a minor in secondary education. I learned nothing appropriate to an editing or proofreading career in college.)

One Way to Tell Whether a Proofer/Editor Is a Fit for Your Manuscript

So that potential proofreader who claims they know what’s what because of a English or Journalism degree and/or teaching career? Nice start, but you need more.

What you want is a work sample.

(Note: Editors/proofers, looking at a writer’s sample pages beforehand can also help you.)

Here’s what I suggest: send a prospective roofer/editor/copyeditor ten pages before agreeing to a contract. You won’t need more than that to assess their work style, and honestly, they are likely to be thrilled at a chance to see how dense an edit they have in store. If they read those ten pages and your prose is so messy they’ll need a ton of extra time to do the project, that’s something they will want to know in advance and charge accordingly. If your manuscript is super clean, that should affect their pricing and scheduling as well.

You don’t order a wedding cake without tasting a baker’s samples, right? The cost of a good cake and the cost of a good edit is comparable, so you should invest at least as much due diligence in selecting a book baker.

How To Know When Your Edit/Proofread Has Gone Off the Rails

Jeffe Kennedy’s anecdote from earlier this week (Sunday) provides a crap-case scenario for how to tell when your manuscript has been savaged by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. A few quick tips for judging the work if you’ve already had the edit/proofread done:

1. Look for comments. The best late-stage editors will only change text where they see an obvious error or typo. They will never, ever make in-line changes that affect an author’s voice. If they notice you have a bad habit (e.g., a lot of dangling participles, too many proper nouns), they will highlight a few instances and comment. The best editors will explain, either in the comments or in an edit note, what the persistent error is, how to find instances of it in your manuscript, and a couple of ways you might go about fixing it. Extremely diligent editors will comment every instance of this error and in the comments suggest a possible sentence recast. Those editors deserve public praise and maybe chocolates.

2. Look for a ton of identical changes. If, for instance, you have written an entire manuscript without using the Oxford or serial comma but your editor has a passion for the thing and has decided every manuscript needs to use their personal punctuation headcanon, you’ll see a half dozen nasty red inserts per page. That is a problem. If you’re self-publishing, you have the right to adhere to whatever style you want so long as it’s consistent. Caveat: If you’re writing for a publisher, that publisher will have a house style, so it’s possible all those added (or removed) commas are an attempt to adhere to that. However, a publisher is more likely to just send you the house style at an earlier stage, probably before developmental edits, and ask you to implement those changes yourself. A late-stage copyeditor or proofreader should never bleed that much red ink over your book. 

3. Look for voice changes. An editor at any stage should not significantly rewrite your manuscript. Any changes to your author voice (e.g., “fixing” sentence fragments, adding or removing details in order to speed or slow pacing, rearranging scenes) are not in within the purview of an editor. A good early-stage, or developmental, editor will send you a (sometimes really long, bless them) edit letter outlining spots where pacing sags or continuity is a problem or a scene needs you to delve deeper or hit a moment harder. Sometimes those edit letters will have suggestions or examples of how you can fix things. Beware of any editor who tries to apply a big fix in-line. A good rule of thumb is you should never accept-change for an entire scene. I would submit, you should never accept-change for an entire paragraph. Writing is your job. 

Signs of a Nitpicking Job Well Done

All that said, a good nitpick read is a beautiful thing. You can tell your money has been well spent if your finished product reads smoothly both for you and your advance/review readers. Don’t be alarmed if you get your manuscript back and changes are minimal: that’s just a sign that your manuscript was clean to begin with and did not require a lot of correcting. A competent proofreader will not manufacture errors just to have some mythical minimum amount of red ink. 

Of course, the ultimate sign that you’ve been edited well is ... crickets. If no reviewer comments on weird punctuation choices or “typos,” and your audiobook reader doesn’t point out a bunch of problems, and you  yourself are content in the knowledge that you’ve produced a quality piece of fictional entertainment, that’s the best feeling.

And the final step is to then recommend that manuscript polisher to everybody else, because they’re a unicorn and we all want to do business with that person.

Release Day: PETS IN SPACE 5 (A Charity SFR Anthology)

 

Need a break from all the chaos and negativity roiling through the real world? Want to do some good without risking your health? We have a (very biased) suggestion!

For the fifth year, our own Veronica Scott and eleven other talented Sci-Fi Romance authors are releasing an anthology of stories starring romantic leads and their scene-stealing pets! A portion of the proceeds from the first 30 days of sales goes to Hero-Dogs.org (Service Dogs for America's Heroes).

So, grab the ebook and settle in for action, adventure, and romances sure to make your pulse race.

BUY IT NOW: Amazon  |  Apple Books  |  Nook  |  Kobo  |  Google Play

Down the Rabbit-Hole

 This week we're all about the editing, or rather about editing horror stories. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. 1) Hire an editor or two. 2) Know what you are getting into and PUT YOUR EGO IN CHECK.

Sounds easy, right? It's not. It's a damned sight harder than most people think. Do you know why? Because it's your baby. Y0u have spent God alone knows how much time writing this book. (My fastest was three weeks. My longest was over a year.) You have poured heart and soul and passion into this work if you're doing it the right way, and when you're done, you have to (gasp) Show it to other people!

And those people will tell you what they think of it. And the odds are decent you'll pay them to do so. 

Listen, I get it. It sucks. People who know what they're doing (if you've done your research and found a good editor or five) will actually show you the changes they recommend. Some of them will merely do grammar corrections. others will make suggestions on story structure. Inside, you're probably going to bleed a bit. That's okay, it just means they're doing their jobs. 

Now for those other rules you should follow: don't assume they're right. Some proofreaders are flawless in their approach and will do nothing but enhance your stories. That's a lovely thing. Don't assume that's the person you've hired, even if they have a long track record of success. Once they're finished looking everything over, YOU look over their work and approve or reject the suggested changes. I don't care if you hired them yourself or if they work for one of the Big Five. At the end of the day, this is still your baby. Take the time to do it right. Failure to do this can and doubtlessly will lead to awkward tense shifts and the occasional typo sneaking through. 

It's a project for everyone but you. For you, it's a labor of love and sweat and passion and pain. for them, it's a gig where they're trying to make you better at what you already know how to do. The simple fact of life is that new eyes can see mistakes that you gloss over without consciously doing so. Wait six months after you write something and MAYBE you can see all the flaws but before that? Good luck!

Editing is a job. The people who do it well are worth the money. Those that don't? Well, they don't get hired as often, now do they? That's not me being mean, it's just a matter of fact. 

Your mileage may vary. 

Keep smiling, 

Jim

PS: Working on Book Five: THE GODLESS. It's different being back in the world of seven war gods and two cashing civilizations. But I rather like it!

Nitpicking: When Editing Goes Horribly Wrong

I'm sending a shoutout to my bestie Grace Draven this week, celebrating the long-anticipated release of THE IPPOS KING on Tuesday, October 6, 2020. I read an early copy and this book is amazing and wonderful and totally worth the wait. (I know her website still says September, but it really comes out Tuesday!) (Also, Grace might be a dear friend, but she became my friend because I read and loved her books. So, I'm biased, but in the best possible way. This is really is a wonderful book!)

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is  Nitpicking - venting about things or thinking about the value of attention to detail.

I want to tell you all a story.

Recently, a good friend self-published a book. This is not Grace, btw. (I also discussed the initial part of the story on my podcast on September 24.)

But this friend is an accomplished author - more than two-dozen traditionally published books, multiple appearances on the top bestseller lists, winner of top industry awards - and she knows what she's doing in writing a book. 

As a responsible self-publisher, she lined up an editor to proofread the book, scheduling them for two days to read an ~60K book. She'd also factored in a couple of other reads: one from her continuity editor and a couple of betas, including me. I read - and loved! - the book in about a day. I marked the very few typos I happened to spot and identified a few word-choice questions and one continuity error that could be fixed in five minutes. 

In other words, it was a really clean manuscript.

Or, it was, until the "proofreader" got a hold of it.

H.G. Wells is credited with saying "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." There's a lot of truth to this. It seems particularly true when the editor is also an author.

Unfortunately, the proofreader succumbed to this passion and began making vast changes to the book. When I say "vast," I'm not exaggerating. It was on the level of a deep-dive developmental edit. Scenes were rearranged. Sentences deleted and new sentences added. Her personal opinions added to change aspects she didn't approve of. 

Reader: this was not a proofread.

The resultant manuscript was in such terrible shape - with almost no time to sort it out - that my friend was reduced to stress tears multiple times. I was hugely upset on her behalf. So, I went to another proofreader, one I thought could be trusted to help sort it out, for help.

That person, however - also an author as well as an editor - scrambled the manuscript further. They didn't listen to the writer of the book either and made huge changes again. It took my friend days to sort it out. Time she did not have. Worse, they didn't even catch the typos as was the job they'd been hired to do.

Finally I - chagrined that I'd thrown my dear friend from the frying pan into the fire - found one more proofreader for her. By this time, so many people had made changes to this manuscript that it desperately needed another set of eyes. I'm going to tell you that I asked Crystal Watanabe at Pikko's House. I'm giving you all her name and link, because she did an amazing job. And you know what? She did exactly what she'd been hired to do: proofread. She submitted a quote, performed the turnaround in the agreed upon timeframe - and she didn't attempt to do any more than that. No bragging on social media about "saving" the book. No rewriting or trying to make herself look special by her affiliation with the author. She did her job and she did it well. 

I've hired her to proofread my next novella.

All of this is by way of a cautionary tale. It's not always easy for Indie authors to find professional services that aren't predatory - and that aren't primarily a path for the service provider to advance their own interests - but it's critical that we do. And that we share those resources with each other. 

My friend and I both learned a good lesson here.