Good Saturday to you! The edited manuscript arrived with a letter from the editor, as opposed to your normal letter to the editor from the local newspaper. This letter gave the editor's overall impression of my work and made suggestions about the plot lines, the characters, dialogue, and structure of the novel. I have some work to do, but again, as a first time author, this was expected. Other interesting problems that I carried throughout the book included: grammatical errors, punctuation, a lack of wases and wereses, and that dreaded passive voice.
The most interesting to me is how I learned through three years of college to avoid using 'was' or 'were' like they were some sort of transmittable disease. In academic writing this is a major rule, but the editor made liberal use of the two little words. The story is set in 1893 and narrated by one of the characters in 1958 so using wases and wereses does make it much easier. It seems such a small thing, but when telling a story don't you use was and were all the time? I know I do. Speaking of that college writing, I had at one time trained the passive voice out of my writing, but it crept back in somehow. I'll have to blame it on the blogging.
Larger issues have to do with my trying to write too much into the novel. Is the novel an epic journey as Ted is tossed out of England and ends up in the West, or is it the story of the coming together of the team to fight crime, or even a story about the changing West from Old West to the Industrial Age? Now that the editor kindly mentioned this, it does make clear the dilemma. I have so many ideas, but not all of them can fit in the first book. I wanted Ted in his home much more quickly, but added in more stories to the journey west. Some of it must wait for future novels, I'll get the team together in Sidney quickly and focus on the incidents that add up to someone trying to knock off my new state marshal. A major rewrite, but not an impossible task. I just need to give up some of my precious words. But I get to write new ones too!
Compliments on my dialogue and characters though, except for the overuse of he said/she said. Not a problem there, I had no idea how often that should be put in, so I went kind of whole hog on it. Time to go in and trim that porker down a bit! Good questions from the editor on the likelihood of some events in the story. If the editor is confused by something, no doubt readers would be as well. More work to do on explaining some things better. So where do I stand on getting the book to the reader? For that, I came up with one of those crude western analogies.
Imagine for a moment that I am a cattle rancher. I want to serve a nice steak, my novel, to a diner who is the reader. The diner comes into a restaurant some miles away, but I have no way to get the steer made into a steak on the plate. Through some stumbling about in the world of publishing, I have found a butcher for my steer. This butcher is the editor.
My first submission turned out to be three steers, but the butcher only needed one. I must decide which steer will be the first steak and store the other two carcasses for later use. The butcher then started trimming away the parts that don't belong on a steak. Too much fat is the redundant paragraphs, sentences, and phrases where I said the same thing too many times over and over again, redundantly, like hammering on the same nail until the wood is all dinged up, and pounding the same point home too many times, and you get the picture. Other parts were missing, like trying to serve up a steak with an odd hole in the center. As I rework the steer(novel), the future submissions will become a nice steak, the broiling of it, and the addition of the nice side dishes such as the book cover, descriptive blurb and so on to make a satisfying meal for the customer.
The story ideas are good and the characters are loveable. Learning can be difficult when a person is at that point of feeling pretty dern stupid. No, the editor's letter didn't make me feel that way. Like many new authors, I want my first work to be just by-golly, wow, perfect! The kind of skipping past the learning and getting better part we tend to want in this 'get it shipped the next day and pay for it later' world we live in. More good news: I can take much of this criticism and put it to use on the other book that is nearly complete as I have most likely made many of the same mistakes.
Enjoy the Thanksgiving Saturday! Bucky
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