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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yeah, if there's something I'm doing consistently, or frequently. I'm pretty bad with complex sentences and subordinate clauses. I write it the way it sounds in my head and then have to fix it later, or try to justify not fixing it.
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I don't quite understand why the ellipsis is sometimes at the start of the sentence when you're writing dialogue, but also sometimes appears at the end.
They seem to be serving the same purpose with no real difference in emphasis, so it gets a bit jarring.
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it's another of those 'how it sounds in my head' things. usually either I hear a pause before they speak, or a trailing off into a silence at the end. something like that. or it's a way of joining two parts of single speech around marc interjecting a thought.
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I don't mind it when it's a Dialogue-ellipsis-thought-ellipsis-dialogue sequence. Those make intuitive sense.
It's a bit weird when it initiates a paragraph and then ends one, and there is no difference other than where the pause would be located.
Anyway, it's fine, but messy.
I keep finding more stuff like that, but if I'd address it on here I'd just be bothering you with stray tweets from now until I finish the book.
I guess I'll just put down some notes as I go. I'll probably end up doing some more editing work sometime, so could use the practice.
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think I'm just a control freak about the line delivery. A lot of the effect I want depends on hearing it with the cadence I hear in my head, but I may just need to stop being neurotic and trust my readers to fill in the blanks.
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