And that is all I've been doing now for a week....proof reading and doing my secondary edits for an incredible new book that is set to be released in just a few more weeks. I am in love with this book!
This was my second pass of edits, and it's amazing that I still found all kinds of little tweaks that I wanted to make on this second read-through. It probably has more to do with being able to focus on the flow of the story itself, where with the first pass I concentrated on the structured edits. I could zero in on things like common words that were being used too much....and break out my trusty thesaurus.
Again, just blown away by the talent of new authors that are up and coming. The ability to tell a story that keeps the reader engrossed and invested is an incredible feat!
May 24, 2013
It's not all bubbles and sunshine, you know.
I'm new here, and I know most of you don't know me know me, but apparently I have some kind of weird switch in my head that alerts me to bad writing. I am a voracious reader, and go through books kinda like Pez. Because of this, I've been exposed to all kinds of writers and all types of writing. I can usually spot a bad piece of grammar and/or punctuation from a mile away, and due to this dubious talent I've always had people search me out to review their work.
It started in high school....I was that nerdy art class girl with the glasses. (And if you've watched any of the teen movies of the past two decades, you'd be well aware of the fact that ALL nerdy art girls with glasses are really super smart. Oh, and take off those glasses and paint-spattered overalls and WHAM-O! She's amazin'! But I digress.)
Ahem. So anyway - my friends started giving me their papers to look over and critique, and I found that I actually enjoyed it. I didn't understand why they couldn't see those crappy mistakes the same way I could, but then I discovered that they had other abilities that I didn't have. Like an understanding of math. Never quite grasped that one. And well, it just never stopped. Friends still give me their papers to look over, but now instead of Mrs. Hoffpauir's (*shudder*) English lit papers, it's resumes and PowerPoints and awesome exciting stuff like that.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my point.
It's not all bubbles and sunshine, you know.
I can't turn this thing off. It is ALWAYS there. Do you even KNOW how many misspelled signs I pass on any given day?
I mean, I like homey dew meloms as much as the next girl, but it's enough to make me burst a blood vessel. And every time I see another example, the first thing that pops out of my mouth is, 'Why couldn't they have just paid ME to look over their sign first?'
'Cause I get it. I mean, I.GET.IT. You have two kinds of people in the world: creators and bean counters. Creators make the world go round. They give us all the things we see and hear and touch. Books, movies, art, rugs (who doesn't love a soft rug?), etc. Bean counters make sure that the creators look good. I think of myself as a bean counter, except that I probably couldn't really count those beans. Not good at math, remember? But I do like to make my creators look good.
I want them to have the best possible representation of themselves out there in the world, because beautiful things make me happy. It's purely selfish on my part. It makes my eyelid twitch when I stumble across a bad book....I want to reach out to the author and shake them, and then offer to be their bean counter.
I want to be your glasses-wearing, paint-spattered-overalls arty bean counter girl. Please let me help you, so that my eyes will stop twitching.
'Mkay?
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