Process Post: on edit letters

There was a discussion going on over on Bluesky about dealing with edit letters, and this truth came up: “Editors aren’t always right about the solutions, but they’re nearly always right about the problems.” That thread went on to discuss how the person quoting it, who happens to be KJ Charles whose books I read all of last year and who is also an editor, approaches edit letters; her approach involves suggesting ideas to fix the problems, because it opens the writer’s mind to the possiblity that the book could…

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beta readers

I did something very unusual this weekend, which was send a book out to beta readers. Normally I…don’t do that. Broadly speaking I feel writing a book is largely a closed loop between myself and my editor: she’s the source of feedback that I need, and I generally find adding more people in to that cycle to be very stressful. I am, in fact, finding it very stressful, which is totally on me, not the readers: they’re providing feedback in exactly the way a writer wants them to, which is…

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1 down, 34530987 to go…

I have nearly finished the AAs for WALKING DEAD. The rest of the afternoon will be spent reading the last few chapters and typing them in so they’re no longer a burden on my tiny little mind. I’ve also, much more satisfactorily–which should tell you how fond I am of doing AAs–finished converting cemurphy.net back over to WordPress and hacking it until it looks like the rest of the site. The biggest advantage to this is it allows individual entries instead of the flat file I had, but having comments…

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just doin’ the job

So I got revision notes on THE PRETENDER’S CROWN from my agent, the estimable /Jennifer Jackson a couple of days ago. The first screen (which was all I read at the time) wasn’t too terrible (I have gotten *really* gun-shy about revision letters since the one that obliged me to *completely* rewrite HOUSE OF CARDS), so today I held my breath and looked at the rest of it. Really not dreadful at all, except perhaps for the part where she said, “Around page 250 I thought, hm, this is slow…

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