January 27, 2016

Editing someone else's book

Let me sing praises to all editors.

HOW DO YOU DO IT, YOU AMAZING PEOPLE?!?

I'm on the other side for the first time, editing for R. E. Vance his magical series called Paradise Lot (there are all kinds of mythical creatures in them, every single one you have ever heard of and more). Turns out, editing is hard work, dammit. It's so much harder than editing my own shit that it doesn't even compare. And though I have just started doing it this week (Or last week? Something...), it has already taught me a great deal about the process, both about editing for others and about my writing. And since Maximilian Majewski asked me to share, here you go.

1. You have to slip into the skin of the writer.

January 21, 2016

Cutting down to the bones makes your writing stronger

by Ksenia Anske

It's scary to go by your gut when you hardly have experience writing and consider yourself a rookie and tend to look up to the masters and doubt your every decision and agonize, agonize, agonize. You really start to bloom when you stop agonizing, and you don't stop agonizing until you learn to trust your gut. And that is very hard. How can you trust it when there are all these other writers who know better? You think they know better because they've been writing longer than you, they wrote more books than you, better books than you, and so on. You can drive yourself crazy thinking these thoughts.

I'm certainly nowhere near trusting my gut fully yet, but it comes in waves and it happens more often. The latest test of that trust is happening right now in the shape of me hacking and slashing and cutting and ripping at the second draft of TUBE whilst making it into Draft 3, which is resulting in prose that is so lean and minimal and bony that it makes me scared, and yet somewhere in the darkest farthest corners of my gut I feel that what I'm doing is right.

January 2, 2016

10 things I learned from shrinking 3 books into 1

by Ksenia Anske

All of this shrinking was done by Sarah, of course. She wrote a wonderful post about it. When she was finished with the manuscript, she sent it to me. I read it and sent it back with comments and fixes, and Sarah sent new fixes to me, and I sent her more comments and fixes, and so on. But they were minor. And in the process of reading and rereading the new condensed story and comparing it to the original trilogy I have learned a great deal about story structure and maybe even glimpsed how writers adapt their novels to screenplays.

Let me tell you, it's like milking a wild lioness that can crush your head open as a ripe walnut. Better don't attempt it at home alone, unless you know what you're doing. And better yet, have a good reason to do it, as it seems old books rather like to be left alone. It's very tempting to try and convert them to your current writing style, which I almost did. Thank God Sarah slapped my hands and stopped me. At the present moment the clean final FINAL copy of Siren Suicides graces my Inbox and I will get to reading it as soon as I'm done reading TUBE, Draft 2. Then Royce will proofread it one more time, just in case we missed something, and off it goes to Stuart for formatting.

Well then. Here are the 10 things I have learned from this process.

December 19, 2015

Crowdsourcing your editor

by Ksenia Anske

"Hi Ksenia. We tweeted briefly about the matter of not being able to afford an editor. You mentioned the term 'crowdsourcing'. Although I do understand what the word means, am I a little unsure of its meaning in relation to Twitter. Are you saying I should simply ask editors on Twitter if they are willing to help me out? That’s the real trick isn’t it? How does one justify to any person that they will benefit if they offer their services for free? Please explain it, so this simple mind of mine can understand it. I know that you have had success with crowdsourcing, which I’m jealous of. I do of course see the benefit and perhaps necessity for an editor. However, I cannot at this point invest several hundred dollars in an editor. Anyway, I would appreciate your input and advice. Now I’ll get back to finishing my final draft."

Hi Maximilian. I did not understand what crowdsourcing means either until someone told me that that's what I do. I simply ask people for help. The big queen of this is Amanda Palmer (she is excellent at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and crowd-everything), and I highly recommend you read her book The Art of Asking. A lot of what she talks about as a musician we writers could use too. In fact, that is how we got connected. Someone told me, "Hey! You're doing the same thing Amanda does!" And I was like, "Who is Amanda?" The rest is history.

Now allow me to answer your questions one by one, and hopefully by the end of reading this post you will feel that if I could do it, you could do it too. There is no secret to this, really, except for being human (though I do sometimes pretend to be an angry Russian bear, what, with the threat of mauling those who don't write and stuff like that).

December 6, 2015

Why editing is so damn hard

by Ksenia Anske

This post is dedicated to all editors out there, the magnificent people who have the talent to shape the fragile mess of words they receive from writers into something beautiful and yet still FUCKING FRAGILE AND MESSY the way it originally was. And when you look at it, at what they do, you scratch your head and wonder how the hell they do it. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you take it for granted. I know I did. Until last week. I thought, "Hey, that's what they're good at. That's what editors do. It's their job." I didn't know how hard it was until I tried it on my own.

This week I have received from Sarah the final condensed manuscript for Siren Suicides. What she did was squeeze 3 books (262K words) into 1 book (88K words) by doing magic cutting and stitching and reorganizing and yet keeping the story intact. I was elated. I dug into reading it as soon as I could. And guess what happened. I got so disgusted with my old writing that at first I rewrote a sentence. Then a paragraph. Then a whole page. Then I ended up spending a whole day on rewriting 6 first pages by mercilessly lopping off chunks of descriptions and dialogue and exposition and just plain butchering the thing till what I had left was clean gleaming bones. I polished the bones somewhat. When they were shining I was satisfied at last. I intended to do the same for the rest of the thing which at the rate of 6 pages a day would've taken me 55 days to finish which would've put my writing schedule on hold and instead of starting TUBE, Draft 3 in January I would've started it in March. I got gloomy thoughts on shooting myself with a Kalashnikov because, frankly, I didn't want to do this. I'm good at making myself do things I don't like, BUT I AM SO DONE WITH THIS STORY I DON'T WANT TO TOUCH IT.