Many of my writer friends do a “year in review” post around this time of year.

But I’m an editor, not a writer–or at least I don’t write all that often. So I just want to say that my clients are awesome and I worked on some fantastic books as their editor this year. I mostly developmentally edit novels for new writers in the same way that Abyss & Apex very often publishes new writers in the short form. Some of these authors go indie; some of them submit to major publishers. Other client’s novels end up getting picked up by small presses. This last path has the nasty side effect of them having the small press edit the books from that point on, but since I am mainly here to help their careers that makes me happy. Poorer, but happier! And I still get mentioned in dedications and acknowledgments so that’s always nice.

The inescapable fact is that if you want to submit something to the major publishers or the small presses, you’ll give yourself your the best shot at publication if you’ve had at it professionally edited first. And getting your work noticed as an indie author is hard enough without catching the errors that are invisible to you in your own work. So hire an editor!

I look forward to a new year of making your writing shine, and adding to my bookcase of contributor copies for the projects I’ve edited.

May your New Year be grammatically correct, contain awesome characters, and no plot holes.

May you have as much joy this holiday season as our kitten Tucker is giving us, and then some!

Merry Christmas from Wendy, Brian and Tucker.

Whoo-whee that was a job and a half, but when we’ve finished the second pass on this novel it’s going to shine. Without going into names or too much detail, here were the main issues:

• The novel has a braided plot, like The Empire Strikes Back–where half the action is Luke training with Yoda on Daggoba, and half is Han and the crew being betrayed on Cloud City. Except in this case the two halves of the story were 200 years apart, on various spaceships and two planets. How to make that clockwork run smoothly took serious thought for two weeks.
• It comes across as a tragedy (it’s not). The struggle was to keep it readable until the hope shows up in some slam-bang reveals.
• A really boring-but-necessary character (just one, the rest were fantastic) who made me want to skim when he showed up.

All are fixed if my client likes my suggestions.

I love my work.