Now that I am officially middle-aged, I can say that the most pressing urge is not the need to buy a convertible or meditate under the moon or urinate (thankfully). It is the desire to Pass Along Advice. Here is the top tip I wish I’d stumbled across when I …
What’s not to like about What Editors Do? This collection of essays traces the role of book editors from acquisition to publication and samples niches like editing genre fiction and working with self-publishing authors. What’s more, the 27 contributors represent a “who’s who” of American publishing: Betsy Lerner, Carol Fisher …
A Quill and Quire article popped up in my Twitter feed in late June: “Humber becomes new home for Indigenous Editors Circle.” I was thrilled that the Circle had found a home at Humber College’s Lakeshore campus in Toronto’s west end. Even better: a workshop on editing Indigenous manuscripts was …
I’ve always loved trying to understand things — investigating ideas and concepts to make sense of them, seeking clearer ways to view them. I was delighted, therefore, when I discovered that there’s a kind of editing rooted in exactly that pursuit: developmental editing. The name describes it well: you’re helping …
Editors enjoy their careers for various reasons — the opportunity to work in the exciting literary world or the more lucrative realms of government or business, or to specialize in particular areas of expertise. For me the major attraction is the simple fact that every project is different — I …
I’m thinking more about empathy these days. So are other editors — witness last week’s post on the editor-author relationship. So are Canadians in general, judging by Google searches over the past decade. Source: Google Trends. Y-axis shows interest over …
As the oft-paraphrased Leonardo da Vinci would have it, art [or poetry or writing or editing] is never finished, only abandoned. Writing is like a teenager. Eventually you have to send it out into the world to fend for itself. (Or should I say it’s like a young adult? Most …
When I was following the editors’ chat group, I often found myself silently screaming, “Who cares?” Or perhaps not so silently. The conversation frequently dealt with moving the words around in a sentence to make it “perfect” or correcting a fine point of grammar or checking what Chicago says about …
We’ve all had them – those manuscripts that arrive on our desks that should not be published. They have little merit in either content or expression, and our initial impulse is to return them immediately. How do we deal with them? If the project comes from a trade publisher, the contract …
Lately, I find myself wishing I’d picked a profession where I didn’t need to look at computer screens. Or read a lot. Or use my eyes at all, really. (Being a taste tester at a chocolate factory sounds like an attractive career change right about now.) My distance vision has …