I didn’t write a blog post for all of June! I don’t think I’ve missed a month in years if any. Time to break the dry spell. The good news is, I was busy. I picked up an editing gig and that took up a lot of my time.

This is the 4th book and 3rd author I’ve worked with and my system of content editing is improving with each one. It’s always interesting to navigate through someone’s work for the first time. A lot of notes are necessary, especially for a first draft, which is what I worked on. A lot isn’t clear or well defined so it takes some extra time to put the dots together when they are often too far apart or even non-existent. First drafts tend to be overwritten and also lacking in detail. What an author thinks is important, may not be to the reader. In most cases, the author thinks they’ve covered enough of a topic or idea for a reader when they haven’t. The second draft is largely filling in those gaps, moving things around, overall getting the pacing right.

Writing the report is an effort of giving useful advice and suggestions without being terrible about it. It’s easy to criticize and when it comes to first draft, there’s a lot of it. That can be brutal to read through so much negative feedback. So writing the report is about become a teacher. Explain things well, don’t just say “this is wrong.” That doesn’t help and it’s not wrong, it’s just not complete. Finishing the first draft doesn’t mean the story is done. That’s the basis I use for all of my notes. Why don’t I think this works and what can be done about it? Say what works and how that can be expanded.

I can frequently find the thread that an author lays out. My job is to grab it, shake it to see what sticks to it, and then do my best to figure out how the author can get more to stick to the thread so they can get their intended message across. One of the worst things to hear from a reader is that they see a character completely different from the way you intended. That has to be fixed.

I handed all the material back last week and it has been received positively. Mission complete!