Airy Tales

Posted By Inflate123 on January 10, 2010

Lately I have quietly edited a few stories-in-progress for different writers in the community. I have done this on and off for years, because my day job is in an editorial capacity, and this is arguably more fun to edit than my “real” work. But there’s been a run of them lately, and I’m still quite happy to help, but I wanted to suggest a few things if you are one such writer thinking of having me do a pass on your porn:

- I’d prefer a Microsoft Word document to a plain text document. If you’re using MS Word in any flavor from Word 97 to now, I prefer to offer my suggestions, edits, and comments with the Track Changes function. That lets me comment without being destructive, and you can overrule my edits or suggestions with ease. But if you send me a text file or an RTF file, I’m assuming you don’t have access to Word, so I don’t do Track Changes, which is messier for both of us. It takes me longer to add my stuff that way, and it takes you longer to remove it. (In those cases, you will get it back as an RTF file, which opens in TextEdit on Mac and WordPad on Windows, so I can add things like colored text to denote my changes.)

- If you have any specific questions or areas you would like feedback on, please note them somewhere in the document, preferably at the beginning or end.

- If I spend the time doing a deep edit, I will assume that you do actually want constructive critique and not just a pat on the back. I’m not cruel, but I am direct. I generally comment on everything from characterization to plot holes to awkward dialogue, but I will always do it with a suggested alternate approach. I will also point out things that I felt worked just as they were; editing is not simply a matter of finding the faults.

- Should go without saying, but everything is kept confidential, including the basic fact that I ever edited it at all. I do not require payment or public credit. Also, I only keep your draft until I see you release the final story yourself. Hard drives crash; I don’t want to have to re-edit it any more than you want to re-write it. Once I see the real story out there in the wild, I toss my edit and put your final in my smutty archive.

So if you have a story and you’d like an Edit123, hit me in email.

Category: Etc
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