~700 downloads so far. Not bad for a zero promotional budget. All the reviews so far have been complimentary or at least amusingly harsh.
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Have to say, though, I'm having a blast.
But you could really use a good editor.
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some of it is intentionally stylistic (e.g. I refuse to use semicolons) the rest I catch over time when I review. if you mean passages that don't need to be there, I must have looked at every paragraph at least three or four times.
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I absolutely do not mean passages that shouldn't be there, nor semicolons. None of that is any of my business. Is your book.
I mean grammatical mistakes and typos that don't seem intentional, a few inconsistent details that may be intentional or gaffes. Stuff you wouldn't catch.
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If you're writing under contract, these are certainly things an editor can make their business - and if not, many are meddling anyway.
But my perspective is, unless they work e.g. for a franchise, editors should stick to fixing unintended mistakes, as well as providing feedback.
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Ultimately, though, unless they just really hate others touching their work, nobody should edit their own books.
Errors are far too stereotyped and idiosyncratic for that. Ditto on the limits of perspective.
But yeah, much editorial advice is just BS ('use semicolons!').
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Oops. Went a bit off script with this rant. Spent two years doing freelance editing (not for novelists, mind).
Most people have no idea what to expect, why it matters or how it can help - and many editors do very little to better that impression.
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Whoops, realized that final tweet could be read as a jab at you. Not meant that way.
Just trying to say I can sympathize with seeing editors as pedants, but I don't seem to have had a very good grasp of how I wanted to say that...
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yeah, no worries. paradoxically I realsied I edited the second half a lot more thoroughly than the first so there is a fair bit of stuff I ended up not catching until after I released the first edition. I'm used to self editing from school, so I'm pretty paranoid about that stuff
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I'll probably end up doing a second reading at some point. If you like, I'd be happy to pass along what I notice along the way.
My reading brain has been ruined by doing this stuff for work, so the lower levels of this process are pretty much automatic for me by now.
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