For those of you who don’t know, I’m one of the editors at the new editing service Yellow Bird Editors. The company’s moto is “Stand Out. Get Published.” And in today’s market, writers need to stand out more if they’re going to rise to the top and get published. As Foreward Literary agent and founder…
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Following up from last week’s editing checklist part 1, today I’m focusing on words that are easily confused. Some say English is one of the most difficult languages to master because it has many words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. As writers, we need to know which to…
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When I’m editing manuscripts — my own and others — I’m often fixing the same things. All writers have little mistakes they always make, and many of us stumble over the same ones. Now, when I say “editing,” I don’t mean “revising.” When you’re revising, you’re fixing character and plot issues. When you’re editing, you’re…
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In my 19 years as a journalist and editor, editing was always open document, save as version 2 (or 3 or whatever, we actually used our initials) then clean it up. Don’t waste what you’ve already got. Build up the weak spots, move sections around, polish up the sentences and viola! The final piece. We…
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Staying on the topic of revising, I talked to someone who knows a lot about making children’s literary the best. Deborah Halverson has been on both sides of the desk, working as an editor for Harcourt for 10 years and later as an author of two teen novels, Honk If You Hate Me and Big…
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My friend and fellow blogger Donna Janell Bowman last week ran a series of posts about the benefits of critique groups and how to make the most of them. For her posts, Donna interviewed a bunch of writers inlcuding yours truly! (Yes, that’s me.) Among the questions we answered were: What are the biggest challenges of…
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Catching up on some of my blog reading today, I found a great YouTube video (I can’t display it on here, but check it out at Beth Revis’ Writing It Out blog, it’s worth it) with Looking For Alaska author John Green telling us what NaNoWriMo does: teaches us discipline because you need that if…
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Revision update: Done! Yes, I did make my goal of finishing my novel revision by the end of February. Yay! My husband played videogames with a friend on Saturday night, so I took the opportunity to do three chapters, then I got up early on Sunday to finish the book. Now, the big question is,…
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Revision update: Moving along smoothly. Having been at it for a couple days now, I’m enjoying being back in the story with the characters. On chapter 8 out of 29. Doing this revision, I’m going through the stacks of notes from critique group sessions and my own notes on the print out of the entire…
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Revision update: I buckled down yesterday and jumped in. More today. I’m a computer hound. I have a laptop, and it’s like my good and trusty friend. It’s always with me. If I go on a trip, the computer is packed. When I went to the Austin SCBWI conference a few weeks ago, I stayed…
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