This week, you’re getting the first killer chapter of Tortured Dreams.

This week, you are getting the first killer chapter of Tortured Dreams.

We are going to continue our editing theme for premium content. What sort of comments does an editor make is a question I have been asked multiple times. It depends on the editor and writer. For example, when I am going through the content of one writer’s book, I tend to write snarky, sarcastic comments to get her to rethink whatever it is that has irked me. Another writer I’ve read content for doesn’t have my sense of humor and doesn’t get sarcasm so I have to be quite detailed about what has raised my ire. However, I will also admit that my snark and sarcasm is reserved for a single author because I know she can and will laugh at it. My editors are less of a jerk than I am as an editor and most of their comments are to the point and lack my sarcasm. So, for this premium content post I’m going to show you guys the section and the comment my editor made on it. Again we are looking at Dysfunctional Dreams. Most of the 134 comments in Dysfunctional Dreams are serious comments that require me to work on a sentence or paragraph or idea, but there are always a few that are fun. I have included a selection of all the types of comments I get in a book. Including the comment that required an entire chapter be added.

Because comments require me to do more than accept/reject, I tackle all comments first. This way when I am accepting/rejecting comments the stuff I have had to change due to a comment to clarify, fix, remove, add, etc, is included. Usually, the number of revisions I start out with is significantly lower than the number of revisions I have after addressing all the comments. Also, as you can see, sometimes a sentence or idea is perfectly clear to me, but not to the editor. I live by the rule that if it isn’t clear to the editor, it won’t be clear to the reader either.

These two posts cover the main “this is what’s involved with editing” points for me. As I said last week, because the first round of edits focus primarily on content, there are way more comments and rewrites involved in the first round of edits and they take more time than the second. Obviously, I did not include all 134 comments from Dysfunctional Dreams, you don’t need to see that I kept switching up the name of the cult even though it was in my plot points document and she started randomly assigning words to the cult name in the comments to draw my attention to it.