My Editor Has Corrupted Me!

I LOVE my editor at Ellora’s Cave! Love, love, love! She is like the Conan-Do-You-Want-to-Live-Forever-Valkyrie editor, I swear. She goes all bad-ass over my books, that’s for sure. Not only is she hilarious, sarcastic, efficient and willing to tell me that yes, I am a brilliant ar-teest who happens to have exquisite taste in shoes, but she is damn good at her job! So far I’ve learned I have a love affair with “that”, am an overstater of the obvious and can’t seem to filter out those doggone pesky filters…did I mention she has the patience of a saint?? Did I also mention the last manuscript I got back from her looked like a holy stigmata?? She is so thorough and so knowledgeable I felt like apologizing for being such a non-specific, filtering, pronoun-abusing schmuck! In a nutshell? She’s awesome!!

One of the cool things about having an editor who knows her stuff is learning from her/him with each book and round. Suddenly I’m aware of certain word choices that may take a reader out of my character’s head. Or I’m able to pinpoint superfluous words or phrases that just muddy up a sentence. I’m learning to write cleaner thanks to her… Yet there is a downside to her brilliant attention to detail. Once the awareness has kicked in, it is impossible to shut off. Self-editing is wonderful—especially when it enables you to turn in a tighter manuscript. But there are certain uh, things, one just should not edit…

* The bible. Do you know how blasphemous it feels to sit during service or bible study and critique scripture? Seriously though has anyone besides me noticed there are a ton of unnecessary “that”s, ambiguous “you”s, “thou”s and “him"s? While I should be concentrating on the patriarchs of faith, I’m restructuring the sentence so the correct nouns are modified and entering proper names instead of pronouns…am I going to hell? ‘Cause I kinda feel nitpicking God is like 10a. of the Ten Commandments…

* School newsletters and memos. A veritable smorgasbord of dangling modifiers, preposition-ending sentences and not enough commas! Okay, the last one is just my personal preference…

* Text messages. As one who is a hater of auto-fill, text messages send my inner editor into a tail spin! I know it is way more expedient to type “ure” and “u” and “btr” and “ty”…but I…can’t…do…it. And when I get a text with those—and a plethora of other abbreviations—in them, I need to type them out. Which makes my return message the size of 3 texts long. And if I notice I made a mistake after I hit send, it’s a compulsion to send a follow-up email apologizing, saying “I meant…” Yes. Really. I am this anal…

I sooo blame this on your beautiful mind, Violet!!