Editing can be a painful process. You must kill your darlings, taking funny point of dialogue, cool action moves, and even entire scenes and cutting them. It hurts to leave behind something that could have been great, were it not holding your story back. But that’s for the larger edits. For the smaller edits, the copy edits—those are actually sort of fun. Really! Taking a sentence and cutting it down to its essence, carving out an extra “then” or an errant “the”, paring down the descriptive...

I’ve been going over the edits from my copyeditor. Most of them are routine, but the first 10,000 words contain a fascinating lesson. Some background: to start I commissioned only 10,000 words as a test, so I could get a sample of his work and so he could give me an accurate quote. He edited the first few scenes, and since I liked what I saw, I paid him to do the full thing. I didn’t have the time to implement all the suggestions...

I don’t like to get feedback in real time. Not because I can’t take it, but because my response is often far different after I’ve had time to absorb it. I was reminded of this as I went over the notes from my editor’s feedback on my latest draft. I got feedback from him on the same draft three times – initial feedback a few weeks back, more detailed scene-by-scene feedback, and then some extra feedback on an outline I...