Lawyer and Writer

This is the second installment of my series about hiring a freelance editor. You can see an index here and zero in on the topic that most interests you, or find all of the topics under the 'editing' tag.

Before I began my search for a freelance editor, I knew I really had no idea what I was in for. I wasn't sure if it was going to be like searching for a publisher, where I would need to prove myself and hope someone was willing to look at my work. I also didn't know how long it was going to take. So I came prepared for a long, difficult search.

It turned out not be nearly so difficult as I feared, but I still feel that the steps I took to get organized before I began helped out.

I created myself a spreadsheet, modeled after a spreadsheet that I had seen in the "Writer's Market", which is supposed to be used to organize a search for a traditional publisher or agent. I set the spreadsheet up like this:

Manuscript Title	Organization	Contact Name	Quote Requested	Response Received	Quote	Comments
The Sleeping Death	Jane Doe Editing Ltd.	Jane Doe	04/12/2012	04/13/2012	$800	Liked the website and blog. Referred by John Smith. Sent synopsis and first three chapters on 04/13/2012.

The idea behind the spreadsheet is just to keep track of who you've contacted, where you found them, and how long it's been since you heard from them. This is to prevent you from accidentally contacting the same person multiple times, or from forgetting who people are when they contact you back.

The comments section can be used to record details that don't fit anywhere else. I used it to mention anything unusual about the particular person, and to leave myself reminders about what we had talked about already.

It also gives you an easy way to check whether enough time has passed that it might be worthwhile to follow-up. This basic spreadsheet can be useful for a lot of applications, and you can always add in more columns as needed. I set it up so that I can reuse the spreadsheet for other projects, maybe contacting people I've looked at before, for OtherWhere when I'm ready to do so.

As I did my research, I threw in links and information about various people I had looked at, even if I didn't think I was likely to contact them, so that I wouldn't ever repeat my work or cover ground I had already spent time covering.

In the end, I contacted three people at the end of my first day of research, though I had looked at about ten on various websites. I sent a short, polite email letting them know where I had found them, and describing what I was looking for the editor for - a fantasy novel of approximately 110,000 words - and requested a quote.

Two of them got back to me within 24 hours, both of them to tell me that they didn't have time to deal with my project right now, but both offering to refer me to people they knew who might have time.

I accepted those offers, noted down in the comment section whom they had referred me to, and added new lines for the two new people. In the comment section for those people I also noted who had referred me to them, so I could tell them if they asked. I wound up hiring one of those referrals, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself there.

As you can see, just a tiny bit of organization goes a long way. I immediately had a place where I could compare the people I had spoken to, and knew exactly when I had heard from whom and about what, without having to poke through my emails. And if none of those initial contacts had panned out, I had a central place where I could move on to my next choices and contact others, or recognize that I had to widen my search and go back to the drawing board to get more names.

Next time I'll talk about the places where I found editors, and the various pros and cons of each!

A major thing that's been occupying me lately was the search for a freelance editor for The Sleeping Death. This whole process was completely new to me, and I had to learn a lot in a short time. So I've decided to do a series of posts on what I've learned through this process, hopefully so that it will benefit someone who might want to do what I've done!

The series will be on the following topics:

• Why I decided to hire a freelance editor


• Organization for my search


• Places to look for editors


• Types of edits


• Pricing and legal stuff

The links will take you directly to the specific post, so you can skip over the ones that you're not interested in.

I hope that this information is useful to you, and at least saves you a little time and worry. For any of these topics, if you know anything I've missed, or if I've misconstrued something, I'd very much welcome you sharing your own knowledge for the benefit of everyone.

I'm also doing this series as part of the three_weeks_for_dw fest, so I won't be crossposting it outside of Dreamwidth until after I finish posting all the sections. Enjoy this semi-exclusive content ;)

I had some interest in this so I'm going to make an attempt to do something a little different. This is a bit of an experiment, so we'll see how it goes, and I may do more if people want to see more.

As you may know, I've been taking an editing course through Holly Lisle's Forward Motion Writer's Board for, um, a while now. Law school has stretched this out a lot longer than I would have liked! Forward Motion is a writing support forum, which I will review properly someday when I get around to it.

The course I'm doing is called How To Revise Your Novel. It's a 22-week course, and highly, highly recommended. I'm not even done, and the number of things I've learned about writing is staggering. Again, I'll do a proper review of the course at some point. It's definitely on my list. I just want to finish it first.

Anyway, in a nutshell, the course involves reviewing your novel multiple times, looking for various specific things, such as conflict, character consistency, pacing, etc. You fill out worksheets and make notes, and it's all very structured. In week 17, you finally take everything that you've learned about your novel, good and bad, and start actually revising it. Exciting!

So what I thought I would do is scan my first scene and post it for your edification/amusement and do a bit of a commentary on what I'm changing and why. If there's enough interest, I'd be willing to continue the commentary in future posts, too.

Keep in mind that this is going to look really rough. I'm doing the edits by hand, and I will type them all in later, so I apologize if you can't read some of my handwriting.

I've left the pictures as links to another page, because they're extremely large. If you want to be able to easily flip back and forth between the picture and the commentary without having to hit the back button, right-click on the link and select "Open Link in New Tab".

Page 1

As you can see from the crossed-out page number in the upper right-hand corner, this scene was originally page 135 of the manuscript. I was never happy with the original first scene, because I felt it started too slow and was too awkward in terms of revealing the world I have built, without info-dumps and irrelevant exposition. So after a lot of thought and poking around, I decided to pull this scene into the beginning, as a flash-forward. I help to indicate this by including a date at the top of this scene and subsequent ones, as well as indicating that it's the year 316 "After Breakthrough", which won't make sense yet, but will later.

I think it makes a far more intriguing first scene, introduces the main character, Liilan, and one of the main themes of the book, which is about Liilan's conflict between keeping his career intact, and searching out and reporting the truth, which is what journalists are supposed to be doing.

You'll see a lot of weird number codes in my draft. These are references to worksheets that I've filled out. Some of them refer to problems in the manuscript that I want to change (for example, [1Ba10 #8] at the top refers to an entry in a worksheet that points out that Liilan broke his cellphone in a previous scene, but now suddenly he has it. I solved this problem by deciding to make him not break his cellphone, and in fact I will be removing the whole thing that caused him to break it in the first place, because it related to a sub-plot that never went anywhere and which I am cutting from the book)

For plot reasons, I've decided that it's early winter, so I made it colder than it had originally been in the first draft. I also edited those middle paragraphs to account for the fact that the reader won't have read the scene before it, to introduce the existence of two characters, Mortis and Phames, without referring to events that would just confuse the reader.

I also mention that Phames is a vox, but I'm not explaining what that is, yet.

Page 2

On page 2, we introduce Salmo, Liilan's editor. Because this is now the first scene, so Salmo hasn't been seen before, I fiddled with his description. I also added a line to show how tired Liilan is, as he's been dealing with a lot of stuff over the last few days.

Originally when I wrote the first draft, I put all of the new words I invented in italics. This got tiresome pretty quickly, so I made a note to myself to remove the italics. I think this melds the Aerian language into the book more seamlessly, especially since the terms are used so much throughout the course of the book.

Again I fiddled with description to introduce concepts the reader was going to have to understand since this is the first scene of the novel, and removed references to Phames' safehouse, since I think this would be confusing at this stage of the book, and not really necessary. I added more description to show Liilan's been busy, not at work, and dealing with badness, even if the reader doesn't know what that badness is yet.

Also I should mention that in the original draft, Liilan had been shot it the leg before this. I decided that he shouldn't have been shot in that previous scene, so I am taking out references to his injury throughout this scene.

Page 3

The scene goes on with Liilan trying to give his boss the story of the century, and Salmo acting more and more weird and agitated. Liilan suspects far earlier than in the original draft that Salmo's turned on him, even though he doesn't want to believe it, because it's pretty obvious by this point that something is terribly wrong.

I also include a few references to the incredible - almost unbelievable - length of their friendship. Three centuries? How could anyone live that long?

I also had Salmo refuse to say the word 'dead'. Liilan says it for him, in fact, showing far less fear at the concept, and more acceptance of it. This suggests that there's something about death that Salmo is too terrified of to even mention, while Liilan is coming to accept it.

Page 4

The police finally strike, and Liilan's fears are realized. Instead of being totally shocked, he's angry at Salmo for betraying him, while Salmo is almost afraid of him. The police treat Liilan like a dangerous criminal, and it's clear that Salmo has his own problems that he was trying to avoid.

Page 5

The fight with the police officers continues on, with Liilan unable to do much, because he's a journalist, not a fighter, and there are lots of guys holding him. Also for some reason I kept referring to the van as a truck, so I fixed that.

And then the previously-mentioned Mortis and Phames appear - and they have wings. I describe the wings (again, because this is the first scene they haven't been described previously, and I want the reader to have a few extra seconds to notice that something weird is going on). And Mortis does something that shouldn't be physically possible. The police officers try to run, but Liilan thinks that that's pretty pointless - you can't outrun Death. Mortis is Death.

Page 6

Mortis actually has amnesia and doesn't know what she is (though by this point in the story, she's learned that she's the vox of death). In the original draft, she couldn't even remember her name, and Liilan gave her a new one, Umos. But the new-name thing never really was significant and she ultimately learned her real name and started using it, so I am removing all references to the Umos name.

I also decided because of the magical physics of this world that guns are pretty useless weapons. I was fairly inconsistent about the use of guns throughout the first draft, so I'm cleaning up any mention of them. So Liilan wasn't shot in that previous scene, and the police don't carry guns to shoot uselessly at Mortis. Liilan does get shot in this scene, though, by a sniper rifle. It shocks him that anyone would bother using a gun, but for the single shot, it's mortally effective, and we are left at the end of the first scene with a cliffhanger.

I hope you enjoyed this, and I'd welcome comments and feedback! What do you think of the scene so far? Does it intrigue you and would it make you want to read more? Or are the number of things I leave out to whet the appetite making it a little confusing?

Also if there's else anything that I've changed and you're curious why, please ask! I pointed out most of the major ones, but I'd be happy to discuss any of it. I have reasons for pretty much every word I've changed or added.

Wow, that was an intense weekend.

I had really focused on getting law school homework done on Friday and Saturday, specifically to clear off Sunday for some relaxed fun. Between my workload, my financial, er, situation (that's the nicest way I can think of to refer to it at this point) and several major crises last week at work (involving baseball bats being waved at one client and children of another client possibly being kidnapped to the Congo by his ex) I was pretty much in freakout mode and I needed a nice vacation.

I figured on Sunday I'd kick back, watch a movie or two, maybe get online and do some roleplaying with friends.

Instead, I spent over 7 hours working on The Sleeping Death.

So I thought I'd babble about this book for a bit, and about what I'm doing with it, since it's been a few days since my last post and I haven't really talked about my own writing yet.

*ahem*

So The Sleeping Death is a fantasy novel, set in a world where all of the natural forces (heat, light, motive energy, death, entropy, anything you can imagine, basically) are powered by magical spirits known as vox. If you want to heat something up, all the heat-vox (covox) will go cling to that object and more and more will gather until it is at the right temperature. In most cases, no one can actually see this happening, but mages in this world are able to capture the spirits in glass bottles and force them to obey commands instead of acting naturally, so that they can have all kinds of nice things like cars, coffee makers and cellphones.

Three hundred years ago, the mages of a tiny country called Laxam trapped Death in a bottle. Congratulations, world, you have instant immortality, worldwide. The same country also trapped War, and put him to work on their side. Yes, there's a Famine, too, and the fourth Horseman is Order (not Pestilence), the white Horseman according to some versions of the legend. He's the mastermind. They don't actually ride horses in this book, though.

Anyway! At the beginning of the book, Death manages to escape her prison. And she's...not happy. She's also rather confused, and she latches onto a jaded journalist named Liilan Uwis, who can't resist a pretty face, and who agrees to help her out before finding out that she's the personification of Death itself.

It's pretty wild.

I completed the first draft of my novel some time ago, and I had been letting it sit while I finished another novel, called Otherwhere, which I will talk about in a later blog entry. Then Holly Lisle, professional author and maintainer of the Forward Motion writing board, put out a new writing course called How to Revise Your Novel.

(I will no doubt talk about Forward Motion in more detail in future blog posts, and if you're an aspiring writer and you don't know Forward Motion, click that link or hang up your pen)

I'd never properly revised a novel before and I knew I didn't really know how to do it properly. Oh sure, I could take a stab at it, try to figure out if my characters were all necessary and if there was conflict in every scene, and I could do line edits like a boss. But I didn't really know how to do it in a systematic, efficient way.

I'd written one novel (Keystone), completely rewritten it from scratch, and found it just as broken as when I started and abandoned it in despair. I really didn't want to do that with Sleeping Death, and I really felt that it was solid. I got all the way to the end, and I still liked it! I had started trying to revise it in the only haphazard way I knew, but I like learning techniques and following instructions from people who know better than I do (before I figure out a better way, incorporating their ideas with ones of my own, that is).

So I signed up. Law school made it hard to really devote a lot of time to this project, but I poked away at it as best I could. I spent four months on the Week 7: Triage Your World step, and had to upgrade my worksheet binder to a larger size. I thought it was going to kill me.

But on Saturday I finally finished that painful, painful step. And then it was like the floodgates opened. I did weeks 8, 9, and 10 yesterday in a rather intense 7 hour stint with only short breaks for like, eating, and stuff like that. (I know, I know, write first, eat later, but dude, I was hungry).

And you know what? I'm really jazzed about editing, and I haven't actually changed a word of my manuscript yet. But I'm starting to see the overall picture of what needs to be done, and realize that I can actually make it better. I know that editing is the part that many writers really hate, especially writers who, like me, haven't sold a book yet. But there's something so incredibly freeing about taking a framework that you've already written, and just fixing the problems it has, rather than trying to get it right the first time as you create raw material.

It's like writing the draft is mining for gold. You dig down into the earth, and sweat and strain and cut through stone and pull up a nugget of gold, but it's kinda wobbly and dirty and not that shiny. But then you start editing, and you wash it off and melt it down and shape it and finally you have something beautiful and precious. I like this!

Right now I've pretty much finished identifying all of the major problems with the book. Over the next several weeks of the course I'm supposed to figure out how to fix those problems, and then I start cutting. I don't know how far I'll get as I work on papers and such - I have an outline and bibliography due next week and I haven't started researching yet. But I'll keep you posted.