Editing: How "Near" Was Arranged and Why

I blogged a couple of days ago about arranging stories and my philosophy for such arrangements. I wanted to show those principles in action by looking at the two ToCs for the book Near + Far.

As you may know, the book is divided into two parts, near future stories and far future stories. This allowed us to take advantage of the old Ace double format, where each half is one side of the book. It also meant creating two tables of contents, one for each section.

So here’s the order for the Near section, with some explication:

The collection leads off with the story, “The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each”. The story originally appeared in Clarkesworld, and is one of my favorites, as well as garnering significant critical attention. It’s a story that I knew would be familiar to many of my fans, and perhaps remind them of what they liked about my work, setting them in the proper mood for the rest of the stories. For readers who were new to the work, I knew that this was a good strong start.

The second story is, “Peaches of Immortality,” which originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine as “The Immortality Game.” This is another strong story although it deals with a different theme than Mermaids. Like the first story, it has a somewhat ambiguous (but in this case arguably happy) ending.

“Close Your Eyes,” which originally appeared in Apex Magazine, marks a movement into more slipstreamy stuff and a venture into more experimental realms. It is a slightly odd story in that it toys a little with meta-fiction, talking about narrative conventions, and even ends with two possible endings, inviting the reader to pick the one they prefer. This seemed like a reasonable choice for a third story, in that it let me nudge the reader a little out of their presumed comfort zone.

“Therapy Buddha,” which appeared in a collection called 2020 Visions, ontinues to present some variety in terms of theme. If I had to sum them up so far, Mermaids is about hope and love, Peaches is about the perils of dwelling in the past, Close Your Eyes is about dependency, and this story is about loneliness and the relationships with the inanimate created by such circumstances. Notice that so far there is not a lot of variety in terms of length. While the other side has several flash pieces, this side only has one.

“Ms. Liberty gets a Haircut” is a change in emotion. It’s a story that, although it has a serious subject, also deals a lot with wordplay and pop-culture references, and is generally a lot of fun for readers. I felt that by now the readers probably had enough misery and ambiguity, and perhaps might like a little play.

“10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace,” a flash piece, marks what is close to the middle of the book. It is a prose poem of sorts, and so seemed a good accompaniment for Ms. Liberty, as well as also being somewhat experimental.

“Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Dtars,” moves us back into more straightforward narratives and also away from the comic moments that its two predecessors held.

“Real Fur” is one of my earlier stories, but one that I like very much, and which has turned out to be a favorite with a number of readers, I suspect for its tactile qualities. It’s the first of the trio of what I consider the slightest stories of this section, followed by “Not Waving, but Drowning,” and “Vocobox,” which was one of the very first stories that I published.

After that I hit the last two stories in the book, and wanted to finish with fairly strong ones. I chose for the next-to-last story, the story “Long Enough and Just So Long,” which originally appeared in lightspeed and which is, I think one of my best. Or at least one of my favorites.

The final story, “Legends of the Gone,” is not the best in the collection or even close, but it is one that creates an impression that I wanted the reader to close with, a story about endings and goodbyes. It seemed like a very good choice for the final story of this section, particularly knowing that most readers would turn the book over and begin the Far section at that point.

Questions? Comments? What might you have done differently?

One Response

Sandra M. Odell says:

December 10, 2012 at 7:05 pm

I might have ended with “Peaches of Immortality”, a stronger story and a better message (as it were) about good-byes. It also offers a different look at the nature of time, something for the readers to think about before flipping the book over to look at FAR.

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When and Why to Hire an Editor, And What They Should (and Shouldn't) Do

July 11, 2018

The question of hiring an editor often comes up in my classes, and since editor for hire is one of the hats I wear, I wanted to provide some overview. There are different kinds of edits. I’m focusing on two: the developmental edit versus the copy edit. You might also hire someone to proofread, where they are simply looking for mistakes and errors, rather than making any editorial suggestions.

Developmental Editing

A developmental edit is an edit that looks at the big picture stuff. It is not a final edit, but an edit designed to help the writer improve on the manuscript’s strengths and address its weaknesses. The order of things may change, characters may get added or dropped, pieces of the plot may be altered. It does not do things like fix typos or look at individual sentences.

You want a developmental edit towards the beginning of the revision process, rather than after you’ve spent a lot of time polishing sentences, because polishing something that may get chopped out is inefficient and discouraging. This is an early draft, but one in which you have filled all the obvious holes and perhaps run it past a beta reader or two.

You want an editor who respects your style and your vision as well as the story’s voice. Your editor should take the time to identify all of those, working to tell you how to strengthen them and make them more effective, rather than to change them into the editor’s vision of the story. This is why editors are not one size fits all — it is quite possible to hire an editor who simply does not grok your style.

Developmental editors charge around $50 an hour, according to the Editorial Freelancers Association, which estimates 1-5 pages per hour. This…seems somewhat excessive to me, but I also read much faster than most people. When I work out the math of things, that’s $20k for a 100k word manuscript, which seems insane to me and is more than I would dream of charging. Another editor quoted a rate to me of 1 cent a word for developmental edits, which is about the lowest I would go, I think. Either way, you are looking at a decent amount of money and when you are spending that sort of sum, you do make sure that you are getting your money’s worth. Talk to other clients or read some of the editor’s writing. It is perfectly kosher to ask for a sample edit, but limit that to a few pages. Asking for a free chapter edit is a bit much; remember that’s a significant chunk of time for an editor and so they simply cannot afford to do many of these. In all honesty, I have enough clients willing to forego sample edits that I usually will not do them but will send the client elsewhere to someone more willing to perform that work without compensation. If you really don’t want to hire someone for a novel edit without a sense of their editing style, perhaps hiring them to edit a short story or essay might work just as well.

What I give a client in a developmental edit package is almost always the same, and I think many developmental editors work along similar lines: a 4-5k word write-up of suggestions for the overall manuscript, focusing on different areas that include plot, pacing, characterization, worldbuilding, etc; a copy of their manuscript with comments/notes specific to chapters; and notes/suggestions about their writing strengths and weaknesses along with a few pages of sample edits intended to help them work at the sentence level. For example, I might say something like, “You have very long paragraphs, here’s how I might break one up,” and provide a few samples. Included in all of this is a call beforehand where we discuss what they want from the edit and the option to do a call or lunch afterward where we talk about specific strategies and questions the client has about the edit.

Is a developmental edit always necessary? No. It can save you some work and time, and it can make a manuscript stronger in a way that may make an agent or editor accept it, but in my experience, they will also want to provide developmental edit level notes. If you cannot afford a developmental edit, a reasonable substitute is work: finding beta readers and then reading through and incorporating their feedback, looking in particular for places where they don’t understand what’s happening or don’t care about what’s happening.

Copy-editing

A copy edit is not going to do a lot of big change level stuff. It’s going to look instead at the sentence and paragraph level. This is for me the most labor-intensive kind of editing, and the amount of time it takes really depends on the writing. The last project I did required a decent amount of work, and my speed was 5-15 pages per hour. A few projects before that, I did an edit for a professional writer, and that edit moved considerably faster, because her work was already pretty clean and tight.

A copy-edit happens towards the end of the revision process. Usually the editor will go through the manuscript with track changes on and the writer will later go through, accepting (and sometimes rejecting) those changes. I would not expect a copy-editor to make suggestions for structural changes, but they might suggest an overall formatting strategy and they should definitely make things consistent as far as spelling, punctuation, and similar formalities are concerned.

Copyediting is a pain in the butt and it’s also expensive. Here you’re looking in the $40 an hour range, according to the EFA again. But this may be something that’s particularly useful for newer writers, because going through changes and thinking about why the editor made them can be truly enlightening. This is something I learned early on when working with my college paper. A good editor really tightens and clarifies sentences, and makes them effective and efficient. A superlative editor will show you how to write sentences that sing.

Again, you want an editor that figures out what your style is, and makes your prose more of that, rather than re-writing it to make it their own. A good editor can be a revelation; a bad editor can discourage and dishearten.

Is a copy-edit always necessary? Not a paid one, no. But you really should get someone to look over stuff if you can, because otherwise you will miss things. It simply is not possible for a writer to catch every mistake, and there will always be something that you find, and kick yourself about, later. If you do not have the financial resources, perhaps figure out a barter with someone, even if it’s just swapping manuscripts around with your crit group. On the other hand, as you know from reading, there are errors even in the books that have gone all the way through the traditional publishing process and its layers of edits.

Thinking about Becoming an Editor?

If you are a good editor, this is not a bad way to earn money. I would suggest that one thing you will want to do is figure out a schedule and amount of time you’re willing to do it, and make sure you don’t get deluged, even if it means turning down a project sometimes. Time and energy spent editing someone else’s work is time and energy that doesn’t get spent on your own. Remember that and plan accordingly.

Thinking about the revision process? Check out the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers‘ on-demand class, Rewriting, Revising, and Fine-tuning Your Fiction.

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Announcing The Reinvented Detective!

October 16, 2023

I’m pleased to announce that we have final cover, release date, and table of contents!

December 12, 2023, The Reinvented Detective, the second installment of the Reinvented Anthology series from Jennifer Brozek and Cat Rambo, appears from Arc Manor.

The evolution of crime, punishment, and justice in the future.

What happens when time and technology change the definition of crime and punishment?

Science fiction often focuses on future technology without considering the society housing it. Social norms may change as tech changes — or not. What will criminals, investigators, judges, and juries look like in a complicated future of clones, uploaded intelligences, artificial brains, or body augmentation? What stories emerge when we acknowledge the possibilities of new laws, new police methods, and the birth of sentient Artificial Intelligence, as well as all the ways they can clash or combine?

The Reinvented Detective presents stories that complicate law and order as well as the concept of criminals, detectives, punishment, and justice for all by showing how shifting technology, the rise of sentient AIs, and shifting social attitudes may affect what is not only acceptable, but expected, within both real world and digital communities—and everything in-between. These stories reinvent detective and true crime tropes, recasting them for the 21st century, and above all, experimenting, astonishing, and entertaining.

Table of Contents

Foreword – Jennifer Brozek

REPORTS
Poem: That Missing C: Police Report #1 – Jane Yolen
The Best Justice Money Can Buy – C.C. Finlay
The Gardener’s Mystery: Notes from a Journal – Lisa Morton
Someone Else’s Device – AnaMaria Curtis
Coded Out – Frog and Esther Jones
Murder at the Westminster Dino Show – Rosemary Claire Smith
The Unassembled Victims – Peter Clines

ARTIFACTS
Poem: Ghosts – Seanan McGuire
Agents Provocateur – Lazarus Black
Great Detective in a Box – Jennifer R. Povey
Color Me Dead – E. J. Delaney
The Unremembered Paradox – Maurice Broaddus and Bethany K. Warner
Go Ask A.L.I.C.E. – Lyda Morehouse
Request to Vanish – Lauren Ring
Overclocked Holmes – Sarah Day and Tim Pratt

JUDGMENTS
Poem: Final Judgement – Jane Yolen
Dead Witness – Marie Bilodeau
We Are All Ourselves Inside Our Skins – Sam Fleming
Inside, Outside, Above, Below – Premee Mohamed
To Every Seed Their Own Body – Guan Un
In the Shadow of the Great Days – Harry Turtledove
Gum5hoe – Carrie Harris

Afterword – Cat Rambo

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