Easy to lose focus sometimes. An idea for a fantasy story popped into my head, and I wanted to pursue it. A follow-up story then came to me, so I pursued that. And then another …
And then I saw how far afield it was all leading me, so it’s back to The Freelan Novels.
My brief detour took my head out of that narrative, so I had to spend some time reading to get back to it. All good now and making progress.
As a side note, today I read an article by someone claiming to be a book editor. It illustrated how bad a lot of advice out there is. This person is obviously a frustrated author who, instead of helping your work be better, will be trying to interject her ideas and thoughts into your work. Good editors are hard to find, and most editors, good or bad, seem to follow certain formulas. She certainly seemed to be. In one example, she made the dialogue harder to follow. In another, she took a sentence out of context and mangled it so badly that if it had been part of an action scene, bango goes the action in a bog of irrelevant detail
This reminds me of an incident about a year ago. An editor read through the first few pages of my manuscript for Hammil Valley Rising, and then she came back with a litany of changes based on that little bit and without knowing anything that followed, for example, wanting me to show how sad a MC was at the death of her husband, except that she wasn’t. She was feeling a bit lost at being a widow after only six months of marriage and living out in a rural area instead of her hometown of Los Angeles. But the editor based her comments on her own experience and suppositions – not to mention past novels she’s written. This is my book, not theirs. Different characters, plot, and situation. Sigh!
Editors can be great, but they need to stick with editing, not taking over from the author and giving characters motivations they don’t have.
Just a few thoughts here. Time to get back to my writing. And thanks for stopping by!
Please check out my WIPs.
A.C. Cargill, Author 