Editing Thoughts

So, I’m pretty new at this editing thing–at least professionally–and I know all my experienced editor-friends are smiling gently at me and rolling their eyes.

But hey, everyone has to learn sometime, right? 🙂

And I AM learning so much, it’s marvelous. Working with these stories, pondering what makes a good story work and what makes an unsuccessful story not work–it’s subtle, but also obvious; subjective, yet not. It’s already finding its way back to my own writing, as I finally got back into the edit of Hobgoblin today, and saw things I hadn’t seen the last sixteen times I went over it. Easy-to-fix things. At least so far.

The thing that has amused me the most this week has been something that is entirely DUH-level obvious once you realize it, but I hadn’t seen it till I got there. I was remembering reading all the anthology submissions, which I did as they came in–the good, the bad, the ugly. I read every word of all of them (and there go my friends rolling their eyes again)–but I needed to do that, for my own sense of what I had. And, as I mentioned, to think about why stories work and why they don’t.

So I chose sixteen stories (and I’ll post the table of contents when all the contracts are in), and notified the authors, and then prepared to edit…dreading, before I got into it, the amount of work to be done. Because I’d just had this experience of reading this huge pile of good, bad, and ugly, all jumbled up. And thinking about each story, what it would need…

I’ve edited three stories so far, and…well…they hardly needed any editing at all! Because, DUH, I chose good stories. NOT ones that needed much work–by me, or by the author. I mean, of COURSE. But I didn’t see it till I was sitting there with the stories going, Gee, that was easy.

Yeah, okay, I’ll get there.

In other news: I almost have peonies blooming…any day now:
Almost Peonies

But then I met Miss Q for tea in Ladd’s Addition, and afterwards we walked through the rose gardens, which are in full bloom:
Rose Garden 1 Rose Garden 2

We took the time to stop and smell the roses. They were lovely.

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