NOW AVAILABLE!

NOW AVAILABLE!
A HERO'S SPARK: the final book in the Wicked Women series!

Thursday, May 20, 2010

There's no such thing as over-editing...or is there?

Good morning!

I'm back from conference and now I'm faced with not one, but two stories I must edit to submit. Call it the perfect storm of emails...whatever. The fact is, I have 50 pages of "Lies in Chance" that I must get to the agent yesterday and now, The Wild Rose Press has requested some chapters of my "Lies in Chance" prequel, "Love is Elementary."

Now, this should be ready to go right? Should just be a matter of cutting, pasting, attaching, and emailing.

Nope...not even close.

I don't know about most writers, but I have yet to send anything that's requested without hours of editing. Working under the idea that there's no such thing as over editing, I labor over phrase after phrase of a document that's already been edited several times.

Am I over doing it? Quite possibly.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of the show "Project Runway." One of the comments I hear all the time is that the garment looks "overworked." I have gotten comments on "Lies in Chance" that the book is obviously the product of very, very careful editing.

Am I going too far? Do we all go too far?

I had a writing instructor once, Elliott, you know her, who said, "Because the technology is in place to put out letter perfect documents, editors and agents expect letter perfect documents." In the days of turning in hand written manuscripts (I often envy the authors of yesteryear, like Edgar Allen Poe. He had time for drug addiction...he didn't have to deal with Spellcheck. Authors today have no time to engage in anything illicit or fun. We're too busy being perfect.)

So off I go to edit. Maybe I'm over doing it. Maybe I'll be rejected because it's too perfect.

Okay, I can hear you laughing at that.

I'll just keep editing until someone tells me to stop.

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