Showing posts with label Editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Editing. Show all posts

Saturday, July 12, 2014


Since I'm still short on cash I decided to take a free proofreading offer a few days ago. Madeleine Faye offered her services to gather experience and took on my entire horror collection, even though she didn't need to do more than a single story.

I'm mostly content with what she did, as she showed me a lot of mistakes, gave me suggestions on how to improve certain passages, and also mentioned when the tone didn't seem to fit the story, like in a scene where I talked about kids even though children might have been more appropriate.

There's just a single problem: she overlooked quite a bit of obvious mistakes.
One sentence talked about interruption even though it should have been interrupting, another used a instead of an, one passage repeated the same word in three consecutive sentences, one sentence talked about while week instead of whole week and I even misspelled the name of a character in a passage that was bold and much bigger than the rest of the text.

She's still human and allowed to make mistakes, of course, but I would have been a bit disappointed if I had to pay for a proofreader who didn't get rid of most mistakes. It should have been obvious, though, since she went through the entire collection (30k words) in a single day.

So there's only one thing left to say: Madeleine, your feedback is good, but please take your time to get rid of as much errors as possible.


Tuesday, April 1, 2014


A few days ago, I stumbled upon a free editing offer by Jim Rion on Reddit, and since real editing is quite expensive I decided to try it out. Since Mortaevum is too long and still in its draft phase I decided to send him a copy of Carcerus instead.

His feedback was quite interesting to look at. He added missing words, removed superfluous ones and told me when another word would have been more fitting. He also highlighted a few sections where the tone of the narration didn't fit into the overall picture.
One example would be that he replaced "connecting the dots" with "realized", since the first phrase seemed too casual.

Fixing the grammar and style is certainly a worthwile endeavor, but most people might be able to overlook these mistakes as long as they don't get out of hand. However, Jim also called attention to a few passages that weren't clear enough or made no sense, like the fact that it took a whole week for the protagonist to realize that he had nothing to drink. That's something I will have to look out for in my next stories, which is one of the reasons everyone should have at least a few beta-readers, especially if they can't afford a professional editor.

Overall I'm very satisfied with the results and would recommend Jim Rion to anyone. He did make a couple of mistakes, but they were negligible as I still knew what he was getting at. Even an editor is allowed ot make a few mistakes here and there.


I'm going to fix Carcerus after I'm done with the next Mortaevum chapter, which shouldn't take too long now. But I will not post the revised edition on this blog! It will be published in an anthology when I've got enough short stories to fill it with.