A friend of mine, who is also a writer, told me that editors
are not your friends. I didn’t believe
her at first. I believe her now. I went from having an editor who was probably
just recently working behind the counter at McDonald’s, to an editor who is
even worse. Maybe I shouldn’t have
complained about the first one…years ago I placed a lot of ‘hads’ and ‘had
beens’ in my manuscript, thinking they were needed. I learned that they weren’t needed and they
just made the finished product frustrating to read. I spent days taking them out and changed the
way I wrote. My previous editor added
some ‘hads.’ I thought, ‘I can live with
that.’ Her grammar was bad though and
she took out the quotation marks from the characters' thoughts. I decided I could live with that too but I
couldn’t handle a couple of other things.
My new editor is drowning my story with ‘hads’ and ‘had beens.’ She keeps commenting on my “bad grammar” and “bad
English” and I’ve only read her notes on the first chapter. My personal editor, is a college instructor and is my best friend. He
says my only faults with grammar is my use of commas and that the majority of
readers don’t notice such things. I’m
very tempted to tell the publishing house to go fuck themselves and I’ll find
another publisher. Can I do that? I’m a first time author, would that be a smart thing to do? Sigh…
Thursday, May 1, 2014
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