When I was 16 my maternal grandfather, who had a high opinion of my intelligence was very disappointed at first seeing my writing. You see, I’d never be a professional. My writing would require someone to clean-copy it so other people could read it, and it would require the person doing the clean copy to have supernatural powers of reading my scrawl.

You see, grandad knew what it took to be a writer. He was friends with most of the luminaries of late 19th century Portuguese letters when he himself was a very young man. (The stories he told too. Those people were worse than anything any science fiction people got up to.)

At the time I thought he was silly. I had a typewriter.

Years later, when writing my first book (in English. The first I submitted for publication), I was very happy I had a computer, even if I needed to save it every chapter into tape, because the memory was… well, never mind. Anyway, my husband was not so happy because he had to copy-edit it and I had about ten typos per paragraph and one grammatical mistake as well.

Yes, I had a graduate degree in English, but I typo like I breathe, and besides I typed slowly enough back then that my head was often ten sentences behind the typing, and sentences got glopped together. (Totally valid technical term.)

So he hated the process, and upgraded my computer three months later (taking all our combined savings) so he could get me a word processor with spell checker.

Since then, of course, books come out of my immortal pen (metaphorically) completely ready to be published, and I need no help.

Ah! Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells.

I actually do recommend working with spell checker on, if you are a raging dyslexic, which I am. (I misspell in seven languages, some of them not fluently anymore ;)) Over time, I have typed and corrected enough that I don’t normally make a lot of typos. Even on blog posts written too late or too early and on half a functioning brain cell.

But over the course of a book, it’s amazing how often I misspell important passages, change characters names (or the spelling, particularly when working with a sufficiently different language. Don’t ask.) or their ages, or just merrily type things that are not what I mean. Like I seem to have a disturbing tendency to confuse century and millennium. In typing only. Just in typing.

Beyond that, I tend to fall in love with certain words or phrases. This is okay, sometimes, if the word or phrase is a character’s signature. (I didn’t realize for most of A Few Good Men Nate starts answers with “yah.” until I heard the audio book. But it worked because it was his thing, and it made his voice distinctive.) It’s stupid when the word is something like “bubble” used as a verb. You might buy that memory is bubbling up once, but if it keeps bubbling and then something else bubbles, and your voice bubbles from your mouth, and– after a while you want to cross through the kindle screen and beat the author to death with a bubble-blower.

So, of course, I never publish any books and–

BAH. I am the despair of copy editors. Or I was, back when I worked for trad pub.

Which was fair, because some of them were my despair as well.

The thing that truly annoyed me about copy editors was those who over marked things that actually weren’t mistakes (ever) while at the same time not noticing real typos. At one point this got so bad I started paying someone to copy edit my stuff after the copy editor had done it.

Oh, another copy editor sin was those who tried to correct foreign languages with the help of google translate. (This was particularly annoying since the only foreign languages in my books are either languages I know or alternately made up languages. But, yeah….) Or those who decided they were editors — not copy editors — and put in their opinions about the flow of plot, the names I gave the characters, the historical accuracy of my writing, etc. etc. etc.

You see, editors and copy editors are not the same. And chances are you need them both.

Now that I’m indie, I sure as heck need them both, and pay both of them. Now for short novels, I don’t strictly speaking need an editor. I can keep the structure in my head. Usually the betas will catch all slip ups. But if I had a dime for each time after all the betas have gone through my editor says something like “You know, you never explained why they don’t just buy a spaceship. It’s you, so I know there’s a reason, but you never told us.”

BTW as a side note, it helps to have an editor who has done a lot of your books and started out as a fan. He knows the things you’re likely to miss/forget. He’s also likely to not assume you lost your mind and don’t have an explanation. There’s mutual trust and a willingness to work together.

Now, for the longer books I need it. The 250 k words (and growing) thing is taking forever to edit, just because it’s huge and unwieldy, and without my editor I’d never have figured out where to divide it. Other people had made suggestions, but they felt wrong to me. He pinned it right.

Anyway, things my editor does for me: Figure out if I embuggered the plot. It happens. The plot can make sense in my head, but I tell two incidents out of order, or repeat an incident almost exactly, or– It happens to everyone. He also figures out if I parked a character (or a car) somewhere and then he/she/it magically appears elsewhere when it’s not a magical world. He’ll tell me if I didn’t establish character well enough to pull off the bravura ending, if I’m cramming an unrelated bit of plot into a book (or why Bowl of Red has a follow-on novel.) etc. etc. etc.

What he doesn’t do is fix typos. (Though he reserves the right to laugh uproariously at misspellings of my own character names.)

My copyeditor, meanwhile, checks my spellings, my commas, my grammar, and makes a note if I’m driving her nuts by bubbling this or that or by someone saying things “languorously” (not me. the latest JA Fanfic I was reading. EVERYTHING is languorous. ARGH.)

Now, here’s the thing: with both editor and copy editor, you’re in charge.

This is a lot less madness-inducing now they work for me. When there was a publisher in the middle, having ownership of my books was way harder. Technically I always had control, but telling the editor to go take a flying leap could (and did on two occasions) get me fired from a publishing house, even though the editor was (in both cases) a raving lunatic who hadn’t really read the book.

Now if my editor should come back with a complete misread of the book and tell me, say, that my heroine should be joining the French revolution in the future, I would, first, check him for diabetic shock or something, because he’s way too good for that. BUT if he persisted, I’d pay him, thank him, and not do anything he said. Because, for whatever reason, even if just hating that particular book, he’d be wrong, and it’s my book.

He’s my failsafe in case I f*ckup. He’s not the author. If he has opinions I disagree with, they’re just that, his opinions. I pay him. I thank him. I don’t do whatever I disagree with.

(Mind you this has never actually happened. The closest has been his pinpointing something and after much thought my realizing he was right about there being a problem, but wrong about the solution, then implementing my own solution.)

The same goes for my copyeditor, who is actually pretty wonderful. She doesn’t have a theory of style. She doesn’t care if I’m doing some things for rhythm (I often am. I started out in poetry.) And she really, really couldn’t give a hang if my mental glitch calls for commas where man has never commaed before.

What she does is go over it and mark it by-the-book with eagle eyed attention to grammar.

Now, do I accept everything she does?

No. Actually I reject 10% of her markings. Not because she’s wrong, but because my books are often first person and have a colloquial rhythm. Other times because while it might be wrong, it’s intentionally wrong, to convey a certain impression. THIS IS MY JOB NOT HERS.
Her job is to tell me when it’s wrong, and let me decide if I want it to remain wrong, because it’s doing the job I want it to do.

The other 70% I accept, but really couldn’t care much one way or another. I never saw any point dying over the placement or a comma, and I’m not wedded to every single word I put down on the page.

It’s in the other 20% though in which I am conscious of being in her debt and of her being worth every penny I pay her. Because those are the things I KNOW ARE WRONG but never saw in twenty times of reading it. She saves me from embarrassment and confusion and makes my books immeasurably better.

The important thing is to remember they’re your books. The “help” — yes, I know both my editor and copy editor will read this and am pre-giggling at what will greet me when I log into discord — are just there to help me do my job and do it the best I can.

I might refuse to hire a cleaning lady and insist on doing it myself. But my house is not published for the world to read. The books are.

I’d rather not have messy books in front of the whole world.

I’m very grateful to “the help” (giggle) for helping me clean them up and make them the best they can be.