inside of me there's still an editor screaming to get out...

[lagilman]

Am currently doing a freelance line-edit for a Major Publisher. It's a light job, not too bad -- the author has a good grasp of grammer, punctuation, all the other things that can make a line edit hell, the characters are solid, and the storyline's pretty sweet.

But as I'm working, the back of my mind is growling things like "they should have tried A before assuming that" and "why didn't the author bring D into play?" and "oh christ, that's SftSoP" (stupid for the sake of plot). And I wish to hell they'd hired me to run this manuscript through a developmental edit, too, because whoever was in-house missed things that could have taken this from 'sweet' to 'wow.'

And it frustrates me so....


(and makes me thankful for my editor, who is currently killing red ink over my manuscript, pointing out all my slops and slips and missed opportunities)

Comments

I hear ya

[nycdeb.livejournal.com]

I know a similar frustration. I get it sometimes when I am indexing. It's not plot related things as I am working on non-fiction - but it seems that the idea of actually editing a lot of these things has been given up. I know a lot of the current events titles are rushed through - "current" being the operative word but gads, the level of sloppiness should have the nonfiction folks at the major houses red faced with embarrassment.

I might be happily indexing away, thinking, "Gosh, I didn't know that. It's quite interesting in light of...- whoops!" and I clank head first into a plethora of personal pronouns so convoluted I lose track of who is who. Or dreadful "story telling" as the author tries to make policy wonk information sound like a blood and thunder thriller (completely obscuring the actual facts and pertinent information in the attempt). Worst of all - especially in the most recent batch current events titles - the evidence that they didn't bother to fact check beyond a very narrow scope.

And I seriously begin to think we should require anyone working on a book dealing with the war on terrorism to have a map of the world with them at all times because the number of instances where they've said one country and meant another is growing at an alarming rate (reflecting badly on both the author and the editors).

It's annoying in a book I don't like but it's depressing and even MORE annoying in a book that COULD be great if only they'd paid it some piddling attention.

Re: I hear ya

[lagilman]

I understand the corporate stresses that editors are going through, in-house (those stresses are part of the reason I don't do it for a living any more), but yeah, you see it, and you wince. Maybe the author refses to make a change, and hey, it's their book. And maybe it was worse in the first go-round and the editor did the best they could. But it's tough to turn off the professional mindset, especially when reading a manuscript, which (in my brain, at least) is still open to reworking.

[vincam.livejournal.com]

I do that with most published work I read, and I'm not even an editor. My threshold for that sort of thing is a lot lower than it used to be. I think I'm just getting old and impatient.