Beta-reading and Editing

I’m not a professional proofreader, nor a professional editor. I do it all for free and for fun.

Why?

I do it because I enjoy reading a good and well-written story. I also understand that sometimes, even after you put the story down, you can’t find all the mistakes yourself. This is human nature, not finding simple mistakes in a piece of work you’ve written.

James Melzer, author of the The Zombie Chronicles, put his book away for a little while, then sat in a pizza place or a coffee shop and edited his own work. Impressive that he had the patience to do this. His book is coming out this year, he also has publishers and editors who can find the stuff he needs to produce an awesome book.  If you’ve kept up with James’ blog and podcast, you would know that everything he reads to us is first draft. Having the publishing deal and the book coming out, he doesn’t exactly have time to wait for his friends and family to read over it make grammar and spelling checks.

I know when I was reading through the PDFs, there were several typos, and grammatical errors that I found. This was before I knew that it was first draft. Once I seen it was first draft, I stopped reading the PDFs because my instant corrector would kick in and I didn’t want to offend him by saying “Yo, you spelled some things wrong.” Keep in mind this was also before I was a huge fan girl.

For those of us who don’t have a publishing deal, we rely on beta readers.  Friends and family who was hope give us the dead honest truth and point out our mistakes. This is where I come in. I’m a beta-reader. People ask me to read over their stuff and point out mistakes. But when it comes to my work, I don’t touch it. I ask a my own friends to go over my stuff and point out how badly I write.

If you’ve read one of my previous posts, you can see how much further I have come in just a few years time. Learning and relearning grammar and punctuation is time consuming and even infuriating at times. For some people it comes naturally, for me not so much. I know the basics; when to use a comma, period, apostrophe. I recently learned how to correctly use ellipses (…, ….) and a semicolon. The semicolon I’m still learning, so I probably have used them wrong. But the point is I’m using them, whereas before I wasn’t using them at all.

Two of the story I am beta reading for are Tim’s Black Mask and Pale Rider, which you can find on our blog by clicking on the Other Worlds page. Tim’s favorite unconscious writing thing to do is start a sentence with ‘And.’ I tease him about all the time, and he has gotten better about it. However, Tim writes like his brain thinks. He doesn’t focus on everything being correct first time round. Many a time he’s told me “that’s for second draft.”

He and I go through chapter by chapter and correct everything. He’ll laugh at my snarky comments, or tell me if he doesn’t agree with something.  Fair enough. What matters is that he is happy with the final product.

The other book I am beta-reading is one by Moondancer Drake that she is hoping to mainstream. So far I’m five chapters and hooked on the main characters. Just because I favor her characters, doesn’t mean that I’m going to be any more gentle. When Moon asked me to beta-read, I told her exactly what my comments would be like. I even explained to her that I am a smart ass about some of the more silly ones. However, I have a bit more professionalism towards her work because I don’t know how she will react to some comments. The last thing I want to do is offend someone.

I’m honest about the stuff I read, I couldn’t lie to a friend and tell them “yeah sure you can get this published,” if I didn’t enjoy it. Sure, it’s my opinion but a good friend values their friends opinions right? I do what I can to point out misspellings, punctuations, and sentence structures. I do not suggest using me a final beta-reader, maybe a first, second or third reader. If you want a really good thorough examination and to really have your work ripped to shreds get an English major to look your work over. Trust me you’ll cry when you see how much needs to be redone.

Some good things to keep on hand when you are editing are a dictionary and thesaurus. If you want some quick tips to learn some common grammatical errors, please go listen to Grammar Girl. I’ve learned loads from her like who and whom, the over use of of and many other things that people commonly misuse.

You can also find many grammar websites on the Great Internets.  Just Google grammar tips. Also use your spellchecker, it is your friend.

Keep it real and rockin’

❤

Ps. I bet you there are tons of grammatical errors on this page alone.

Tim’s hijack and Zodi’s hijack of a hijack

Ya know, I was gonna write a simple comment, but I’m totally cool with simply hijacking Zodi’s blog. I told you to hijack it.

She’s not wrong when she says that she’s brutally honest.  And(You did that on purpose.) in truth, it is because we’re good friends.  She doesn’t sugar coat something if there’s a problem, and she knows that I don’t want accolades for my writing.  I already know she’s a fan of Black Mask & Pale Rider and of my Canyons of Steel series (maybe I should do something about the latter, huh?)(One thing at a time dear, you aren’t going back to CoS until BMPR is done and complete.) So I don’t need to hear more about how she loved it. (Yet I still tell you.) What I want is to hear how much better it’ll sound when I fix errors, detail things a bit better, make things flow more correctly.  I would rather have that then a pat on the back.  I already got that back when I finished the first draft when James Melzer told me to crack that bottle of wine, when E.G. Talbot congratulated me for the work done.

The work isn’t over.  The first two chapters in Black Mask & Pale Rider are now past second edits, and I don’t expect that to be the last.  I think I may have mentioned it before, but I spoke with Mercedes Lackey a while back about writing and I asked her about her very first book she wrote.  She said that it didn’t go to press until she had completed 17 drafts of it. (I’m not doing this 17 times. Sorry but if we have to do this more than 5 times between the two of us, you’ll be told to kiss it. Even fangirl editors have their limits.) That’s a lot of work, (Toooooo much) and if I expect to create something which is worth a look by a publisher, then I can’t be satisfied with just a first draft. (Yet I’m content I know I got something written.) I know there’s a lot of work to come, and thanks to Zodi, that work just gets more and more easy. (I’ll take my payment in for of CoH cards and booster packs 😉 Kidding of course.)

Until next time…

…keep ’em flyin’! Real and rockin’ too

❤

PSS. Check out the comments, you’ll see one of the things I came across while editing BM & PR. Also feel free to leave one.