Castle Walls Editing

Month: April 2020

  • Staying Connected during Isolation

    Staying Connected during Isolation

    Isolating in our homes during the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly increased the amount of time we’re spending in virtual spaces for business, pleasure, and education. 

    Before the pandemic, I had weekly meetings with clients on Google Hangouts and Skype, but since the shelter-in-place guidance I’ve seen a big increase in meetings via Zoom (not to mention sessions with friends and family on Houseparty).

    I’ve also participated in more online collaboration on Miro, and it’s hard to imagine that virtual collaboration will do anything but increase — whether or not we return to something approaching our old normal. 

    The following fun and informative offerings have popped up in recent weeks:

     

    That Word Chat with Mark Allen

    Former newspaper reporter and longtime copy editor Mark Allen (@EditorMark) has launched That Word Chat on Zoom. 

    Described as a “video chat with lovers of all things lexical,” the episodes air Tuesdays at 4:30 p.m. ET. The first episode featured a conversation with Mary Norris, the author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen.

    During the first episode, I looked from attendee to attendee and was struck by the number of respected editors in the virtual room — a real who’s who of Editor Twitter. It felt good to hang for a bit with these great editors.

    The second episode welcomed Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries author Kory Stamper and Steve Kleinedler, author of Is English Changing? At one point, the two took word suggestions and wrote on-the-fly definitions. 

    Though they made clear that coming up with definitions off the top of their heads was far from the real dictionary-writing process, it was still fascinating to get a glimpse of how they think — and it was also a lot of fun.

     

    Sentence Diagramming with Ellen Jovin

    Known on Twitter for her traveling Grammar Table, Ellen Jovin (@GrammarTable) has launched a series of classes on sentence diagramming.

    Whatever your reaction to sentence diagramming — be it a quizzical Huh? or a nostalgic Oh yes, I remember doing that — the first two classes have been a blast, and I look forward to the third.

    (I remember sentence diagramming from grade school nearly four decades ago and haven’t thought about it a lot since, so I’ve greatly enjoyed the creativity of drawing out sentences with a group of fellow editors.)

     

    ACES and EFA Webinars

    I value my memberships in ACES: The Society for Editors and the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), and both have offered free webinars to members during the pandemic (with ACES offering free webinars to nonmembers as well).

    Whether for learning something new or reinforcing knowledge, ongoing education is an important part of being an editor who provides the best possible service to clients. 

    I also find it can be a boost to mental health, because it feels like such a productive use of time (and while I’ve been lucky to maintain steady work during the crisis, the uncertainty around book publishing is just one of many stressors in this new world).

     

    ACES Annual Conference

    For many, ACES is almost synonymous with the organization’s annual convention, and I’ve been fortunate enough to attend past conventions in St. Petersburg, Portland, and Chicago.

    This year’s convention in Salt Lake City was canceled because of the pandemic, but ACES has scheduled a day of online sessions for May 1. Session topics include the following:

    • The Invention of the Modern American Dictionary with Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large, Merriam-Webster
    • Grammar Arcana with Lisa McLendon, coordinator of the Bremner Editing Center at University of Kansas
    • Developing a Quality Editorial Process End-to-End with Samantha Enslen, president, Dragonfly Editorial, and Cynthia Williams, editor and project manager, Dragonfly Editorial
    • What’s New in the AP Stylebook with Paula Froke, lead editor, AP Stylebook, and Colleen Newvine, product manager, AP Stylebook

     

    I’m looking forward to these sessions and am grateful that the people at ACES have done what they can to replace their beloved convention.

     

    Evident Ink with Nancy Smay

    In addition to serving clients through Castle Walls Editing, I edit romance as a guest editor through editor Nancy Smay’s company Evident Ink, and I am happy to report that Nancy has launched a wonderful series of free live video sessions on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EvidentInk/). 

    Nancy welcomes new guests every week, with upcoming sessions including topics such as boosting your writing productivity and using tropes in fiction. The classes take place on Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. ET and are well worth checking out.

     

    Corona Con

    Because of the cancellation of the Scares That Care horror convention in Wisconsin, author Kelli Owen led the charge to put together a live stream replacement con on April 18.

    Guests included Jonathan Janz, Kelli Owen, Brian Keene, Mary SanGiovanni, Robert Ford, Tim Meyer, Matt Hayward, Wes Southard, Somer Canon, Wile E. Young, Stephen Kozeniewski, Aaron Dries, Bracken MacLeod, and moderators Sadie Hartman (MotherHorror of Nightworms), Bob Pastorella (This Is Horror), Steve Pattee (Horror DNA), and Shane Keene (Ink Heist).

    A link to the day’s events can be found here: 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDnXscKJ4nY&feature=youtu.be

    All the sessions are worth watching, but the Jonathan Janz reading stands out as perhaps the day’s biggest bring-down-the-house moment. Reading from his forthcoming work The Raven, Janz delivered a master class in live reading.

  • Don’t Lift the Lid! Slow Cookers and Editing

    Don’t Lift the Lid! Slow Cookers and Editing

    Lifting the lid on a slow cooker, even for a second, supposedly adds thirty minutes to cooking time. In much the same way, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of time lost when an interruption takes editors out of their editing groove.

    If I’m editing a manuscript and have to stop to address a completely different matter, this shifting of gears takes my mind off the project and interrupts my flow. When you have forty or more hours ahead of you on a book edit, little bits of time lost can add up quickly and affect your ability to hit your deadlines.

    Most editors have to play a kind of scheduling Tetris to ensure they hit their deadlines and get their clients their edited manuscripts. Delays on one job can easily affect every other job on the schedule, so it’s no wonder editors are so serious about keeping their work moving.

    Managing interruptions is therefore a vital editing skill.

    Interruptions can include emergency requests for quick-turn assignments, personal and professional emails, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions with coworkers or family.

    The extent to which an editor is affected by an interruption depends on the following:

    • Nature of the interruption. Answering a quick question will obviously affect the job you’re working on less than needing to completely break to spend an hour proofing an emergency job. For such an emergency request, there might be research involved, or you might have to wait for more information from that client (and trying to work on one job while keeping an eye out for information needed for an emergency request is less than ideal, because it splits your thoughts).
    • Where you are in the editing process. An interruption might be easier to process if the work you’re doing is more mechanical (invoicing or answering emails or cleaning up your style sheet) than if you’re in the midst of hard-core, concentration-intensive editing.
    • Your state of mind. The more pressure you’re under to hit a deadline on your current job and the more concentration required by that job, the more likely you are to have trouble recovering from an interruption. Stress from outside sources (a pandemic affecting lives the world over comes to mind) will also likely have an outsize effect on how you handle interruptions.

     

    Interruptions are inevitable

    Interruptions, of course, are inevitable, especially for work-at-homers whose offices are no longer the quiet places they were before the COVID-19 crisis prevented family members from heading off to school or places of employment.

    While interruptions are unavoidable, they can be minimized by policing yourself (refraining from answering the phone or checking email and social media) and by communicating with those in your vicinity so they understand why you need quiet time and when it’s okay to break into that time.

    (Corporate clients are most likely to have emergency requests, and because corporate clients often pay higher fees, they enable editors to perform the lower-paying manuscript work that may be the editor’s true love. Editors, therefore, often need to accept emergency requests to keep paying their bills.)

     

    Breaks are not interruptions

    Interruptions can negatively affect your work, but breaks are a whole different ball game. After a ten-minute break at the top of the hour, you’re more likely to concentrate better than if you’d worked straight through.

    While an interruption can break your flow and make you feel like you’re not making the progress you want to make, little breaks can refresh you and enable you to work longer and more effectively. 

    These breaks can also have physical benefits if you use them to stretch, move around a bit, or even do a few arm curls. I don’t adhere to it as well as I should, but the 20/20/20 rule, in which every 20 minutes you focus on something 20 feet away for 20 seconds, can do wonders for eye strain.

     

    Low and slow

    As with a slow cooker meal, editing is usually best when done low and slow. This, however, isn’t always possible. If something drops on your desk and it’s needed in an hour, you might have to take that baby out of the slow cooker and throw it in the microwave.

    With this kind of triage editing, prioritization is everything, because you might not have time to address every aspect of the work. In these cases you have to identify the most important aspects of the work, ensure those are correct, and only then address less prioritized matters, if time allows.

    But I’ll always prefer the slow cooker to the microwave, and whenever possible, I’ll be taking it low and slow.

     

    Lots of ingredients

    As I continue to stretch the comparison, I’ll add that slow cookers are so effective because they (like editors) meld ingredients (skills) over consistent heat (effort and concentration). 

    For clients, the editor (slow cooker) they need is a complicated combination of specialty (developmental editor, line editor, copy editor, proofreader) and bona fides (certifications, client list, books published, referrals, fact-checking cred, familiarity with style guides, ability to work with tech tools, and knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and spelling).

     

    Preparation

    Slow cookers are all about preparation. That’s the magic: assemble all your ingredients, set the slow cooker, and let it do its thing for the next eight hours. 

    Preparation is just as important for enabling editors to edit, and preparation can take many forms:

    • Workspace: A dedicated workspace with plenty of room to operate, multiple monitors, and ergonomic accommodations makes for happy, healthy editors.
    • References: Whether accessing dictionaries, style guides, and other resources online or through your personal library, quick access to the references you need is essential.
    • Prework: Creating invoices, setting up your style sheet, and formatting your document all allow editors to get on with the business of editing their documents. 

     

    The flavors meld

    Editors spend long hours on any given job. While interruptions can’t be avoided entirely, they can often be minimized or dealt with effectively, leading to a meal (edited manuscript) that will have clients drooling.

  • Over 3.5 Million Words Served

    Over 3.5 Million Words Served

    The other day I summed the word counts on my books-edited spreadsheet and saw that in the last two years I’ve edited over 3.5 million words.

    That’s a big number, the kind of number that’s impossible to fully imagine. Most of the books I copy edit or proofread range from 70,000 to 100,000 words, so the number starts to come into focus when you realize that editing ten 100,000-word books will get you to your first million.

    Before I devoted myself full-time to Castle Walls Editing around two years ago, I’d worked for nearly fifteen years as an editor for Recorded Books. During that time I ran Castle Walls on the side, doing occasion freelance work, so I’d have to do some digging to attempt a guess at a lifetime number for words edited.

    A word, however, is not a word is not a word is not a word. By that I mean that, while most editors base estimates for jobs partially on word count (noting that the number of pages is not a reliable indicator of word count because of variations in font, margins, and line spacing), word count alone will not let you estimate how long a job will take.

    With new authors, editors need to see a sample of the work to determine the level of editing required. An author might ask for a simple “last check” proofread but need a developmental edit.

    Or a job might be riddled with typos and punctuation errors or tangled grammar. Or require fact-checking. Or have time-consuming notes and reference lists. Or be remarkably clean.

    But whatever the case, if the level of edit does not match what’s needed, neither the editor nor the author is well served. As with anything in life, a calm assessment of the work ahead is a good first step for ensuring everyone is happy. 

     

  • Four on the Floor with Gwendolyn Kiste

    Four on the Floor with Gwendolyn Kiste

    Gwendolyn Kiste is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of The Rust Maidens, from Trepidatio Publishing; And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, from JournalStone; and the dark fantasy novella Pretty Marys All in a Row, from Broken Eye Books.

    Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Shimmer, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.

    James Gallagher: Why is horror such a powerful medium for delving into the human condition?
     
    Gwendolyn Kiste: Horror is such a visceral, unapologetic genre. It isn’t afraid to expose the things that unsettle and haunt us. This allows us as horror writers to stare down aspects of being human in an unvarnished and often wrenching way.

    Also, because horror so often features a supernatural element, the genre can explore the human condition in strange and symbolic ways. In that regard, horror can work in the same way as dreams: to give us an outlet to dive into our fears while not being in any actual danger.

    Despite its reputation for just being “blood and guts,” horror can help us feel less alone in our trauma because it can show us that there are others out there who share our same pain and experience. That can be such a tremendously comforting feeling, especially when the world is at its darkest and most hopeless. Horror can be that light to get us through.
     
    JG: Are there any persistent themes you find recurring in your work?
     
    GK: Absolutely. Outsiders trying to find their place in the world is one of the major themes that I tackle. My stories frequently feature characters who are fighting for somewhere to belong or fighting to escape the past or an oppressive world.

    I also often write stories that deal with sisters, loss, rebirth, hauntings as well as birds, though usually not all of those things in the same story. Body horror and fairy tales both serve as pretty big inspirations for me too.

    At times, it’s a strange, primordial vat of ideas and imagery that I’m pulling from, but I like to believe that it all works once I get it on the page!
     
    JG: What role does editing play in your writing process?
     
    GK: To me, editing is where the proverbial magic happens in the writing process. While early drafts of a story help to get the plot and characters down, it’s the editing phase where the prose really comes to life.

    Editing gives you a chance to take your vision and really refine it and get it right. On average, I usually do anywhere from two to four drafts of a given story. Each version gets a little closer to what I want to say, with the last draft being the smallest amount of fine-tuning.

    Again, though, that’s where the story really happens. I’ve had works I’ve nearly given up on but that I stuck with through one more draft of editing, and it was that last round of fine-tuning that finally brought the story together. Editing can be so remarkable in that way.
     
     JG: Are there any recent TV series, books, or movies that you’ve found particularly compelling?
     
    GK: I’m a huge Sharon Tate fan, so Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood was a really unusual experience for me as a viewer. I had tremendous reservations about the film prior to its release, and it still has its fair share of issues, but overall, I adored the nostalgic and loving nod to the late 1960s and the way that the film honors Sharon’s life rather than focusing on her death.

    I’m still holding out hope for the forthcoming Sharon Tate biopic that’s been rumored for a couple of years, but until then, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood was an auspicious step in the direction of reclaiming Sharon’s legacy.

    Also, while I’m talking about Sharon, I always love to recommend her film Eye of the Devil, which is a strange and dreamy folk-horror film that’s all about the occult, witches, and family secrets. A great offbeat film for horror fans as well as classic film fans.
     
    As for recent books, I was lucky enough over the summer to read advanced copies of Sarah Read’s collection, Out of Water, and Sara Tantlinger’s vulture-horror novella, To Be Devoured. Two incredible horror books and both highly recommended!
     

    Don’t forget to follow Gwendolyn on Twitter (@GwendolynKiste)!