Editing Otherwise: Fresh Approaches to Stories and Settings

As a writer, editor, and business owner, it’s important to let you—my friends, colleagues, and (potential) clients—know how I use AI in my editing business. The short answer is that I don’t. Let me clarify that as a policy: I don’t use generative AI tools to generate or assist my work as a developmental editor, consultant, line/copyeditor, or creative writer. Here are some of the reasons why: I’ve experimented with various tools and found them unreliable for copyediting They’

It's very common for newer fantasy writers to focus heavily on worldbuilding and much less on developing their characters. After all, worldbuilding is the main draw of fantasy and speculative fiction more widely, and novels in all genres have characters. Older fantasy novels often had quite flat, undeveloped characters. The current Anglo-American market for fantasy fiction has moved on, though. The popularity of Romantasy links to the increased importance of strong emotional

Have you ever started a year with good intentions for writing, set up a routine, and then just stopped? Many of us have been there at some point! It can be hard to set up and stick to a new routine, especially if your mind craves novelty and switching things up every so often. And even if you don't crave novelty, all it takes is for something else to get in the way and the best made plans come crashing down. So don’t be harsh on yourself if a routine breaks down – I recommend

This blog post describes developmental editing services and how they are different from manuscript critiques. The second half covers...

This blog post describes what a manuscript critique, as a paid developmental editing service , involves. It covers whether authors can really benefit from them, and what kind of specific story advice they might receive. A manuscript critique is a paid service where authors hire a developmental editor to write a critique / assessment / evaluation of their manuscript. The word critique implies that they will tear it to shreds, but this is not a grad school critique. Instead, th

This blog post discusses how social media might be damaging for your business and your well-being, and why the mood has changed so much...

This blog post is packed with tips on how to to navigate the literary magazine space from an editor who writes speculative fiction and translates literary fiction. Literary magazines and overwhelm for new writers When I first became serious about writing fiction, around five years ago, I took some solid advice and used short stories as a canvas to learn fiction writing craft. A novel is a massive investment of time and energy. If you like writing short stories, I heard, why

This blog post is about common story structures used in fantasy fiction, including Save the Cat, the hero’s journey, and the heroine’s journey. Authors don't need to follow these structures, but they have played an important role in the history of the genre, so being familiar with them helps authors make informed choices about story structure in their own writing. The big issue with story structure in fantasy fiction (and beyond) is that there's lots of competing advice out t

This blog post discusses editor salaries, sharing my own experience and figures. I discuss hourly rates and annual salaries, and where...

I used to work as a cultural anthropologist, first in the UK, and then in Serbia, Croatia, and Germany in that order. Before I became a...

The marketplace for editorial services can be really confusing, especially to new authors. There’s a lot of bad writing and editing advice out there. Book editors having different views on topics like prologues, chapter titles, acceptable dialogue tags, and adverb use. But fiction developmental editing has a substantial subjective component, too. Proofreaders will agree on whether a typo needs to be corrected, but who’s to say your dual timeline novel should be completely re

Third person point of view is a tricky thing to get right. At one end of the scale, you have third person omniscient, with a narrator external to the story world who can access characters' thoughts and feelings at leisure. At the other end – and the most popular choice in Anglo-American commercial fiction at present – is close third, told from within the body of a character who narrates the events. This point of view is very direct and immersive, similar to first person. And

From time to time, I receive enquiries from authors who have written a really long novel. I consider really long to be anything over 130K words. So what is the ideal fantasy novel length if you are a debut author wanting to find an agent or self-publish? For established authors with a large audience, that can be fine. But for new authors looking to find an agent or self-publish, a very long novel comes with several problems attached: It will almost certainly receive an automa

Looking to hire a book editor? You can work with one directly or you can use a platform such as Upwork, Fiverr, or Reedsy. Reedsy is the platform most strongly associated with the publishing industry so I’ll offer some tips on the pros and cons of using Reedsy versus hiring an editor directly here: What is Reedsy? Reedsy is a platform that connects writers seeking editorial services with book editors and other publishing professionals (translators, book formatters, etc.). The

This blog post covers: The advantages and disadvantages of using a first-person point of view The two main types of first-person point of view – embedded and retrospective Common problems and how to fix them The use of first-person point of view in ethnography First-person points of view have become increasingly popular in various fiction genres over the past few decades. The reason for this is that they are often highly immersive, and there has been increased appetite for im

When you create a new fantasy world, it’s worth paying attention to the language and metaphors you use to describe it. The English...

Long before G.R.R. Martin’s take on dragons fanned the flames of controversy (Are they wyverns? Are they dragons? Do we need to know?),...

Many authors find fight scenes notoriously difficult to write. Maybe you just skipped the fight scene chapter until last? Or maybe you haven’t even written it yet? Sound familiar? If so – and you’ve written a science fiction or fantasy novel – then this blog post is for you. So why are fight scenes tricky to write? Well, they’re usually high stakes and the outcome is crucial to the plot. In a fight scene, every sentence counts, and most authors don’t have lots of personal fig

What if immersive virtual reality technologies existed and were really really good? Better than the real world, in fact? Ernest Cline's novel – awesome and icky in equal measure – explores a future world with dystopic elements, in which teams are hunting for easter eggs that Halliday, the inventor of this VR world, has embedded in the code. The story is told through the eyes of Wade Watts (online avatar: Parzival) – an orphaned teenager living in the ‘stacks’ in Ohio, the mid

When telling a story or writing a factual narrative in English, you have two main tenses you can use: present tense and past tense. Here...