If you’ve never worked with a professional editor before, you probably have a lot of questions: How does the editing process work? What kinds of changes will the editor make to my manuscript? How will I know what changes he or she made? Most importantly, how do I ensure this remains my manuscript with my [...]

Great stories can be ruined by too many words. Redundancy in particular can make your prose squeak like the clarinetists in a middle school band (I’m allowed to say that because I played clarinet). Not all repetition is bad. It can be used to emphasize or connect important ideas, like “I have a dream” in [...]

Most editors (or maybe it’s just me) like to delude themselves that they are so eagle-eyed, so perfectionist that no error would dare elude them. According to Copyediting.com,1 however, human proofreaders—even professional ones—are at best 95% accurate. Test me, test me! Surely I can beat that. I think. The Cost of Perfection But even if [...]

If you’re an author or screenwriter and you’ve never watched the YouTube series “Everything Wrong with…” by CinemaSins, then I have homework for you. Scan their offerings, find their review of a movie you loved, and then watch every minute of it. Watch and learn. It’s become a tradition for me and my husband after [...]

You've written something. You've poured all your skill, creativity, and time into it. You've made sacrifices to reach the finish line, and you can now congratulate yourself on a job well done. But what's next? You know that something needs to happen between the completed draft and publication. Trouble is, you aren't quite sure what. There [...]