To Self-Edit or Not to Self-Edit

With so many new authors popping up all over the place, the writing community threads are full of warnings never, ever, to self-edit. True, there are always a few ‘nits’ that escape us. Are we really too close to our work? On the other hand, get the wrong editor (friend, paid hireling, zealot), and you might get a lot more—as well as definitely less—than you bargained for.

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned an early mentor/reader of mine. Let me amuse you with a few instances of this self-appointed and—worse—stubbornly self-righteous 'editor' who thought his English was a lot better than this here humble foreigner’s.

When I started to work on KHAMSIN, I was eager, gullible and naive. Hence, I forked over my floppies--yes, those big black squares that swallowed your words and, if you were lucky, regurgitated them with the right prompt. (There was no e-mail yet.) My Mr. Malaprop simply overwrote the floppies with his edits without annotating what he had changed, or where. A disk-compare revealed so many of his misspellings and malapropisms, that I had to chuck the original disks (clever me: for once, I had made backups).

Here is a sprinkling of his (now actually funny) editing:

Borg:             inciting news (there was a battle brewing)

Mr. M:            exciting news

Borg:              impotent anger

Mr. M.            impatient anger

Borg:              The boat was holed (never doubt a sailor)

Mr. M.            The boat was pierced          

Borg:              roiling waters

Mr. M.            vexing waters (by now I, too, was getting vexed)

Borg:              torment

Mr. M.            termoil [sic] (couldn’t spell worth a damn to boot)

But the funniest was this one (I can laugh about it now):

Borg:              They stomped into battle the image of sustained virility.

(Naked Noba tribes wearing feathers around their neck and a protective penis tube tied around their middle—get the picture?)

Mr. M             They strutted off with a viral [sic] erection. (Evoked howling fit)

I am ashamed to say that I slammed into the misguided man like a German wrecking ball and then followed this up with a scathing letter to tell him to take his ‘viruses’ and buzz off.

All that said, I am fortunate now to have a wonderful Beta-reader who not only knows her grammar but checks my chapters for continuity. For instance, in Sirocco, I was diddling around in the Red Sea when she wrote back: They’ve sailed past Port Said; shouldn’t they already be in the Med? (Oops ... What was that I gloated about not contradicting a sailor?)

Self-edit? Yes. Over and over again.

And then pray for a knowledgeable Beta-reader. A fresh pair of eyes can make or break our reputation as a writer to be taken seriously.

So, be grateful, I say, for those kind and patient souls who read our ARCs and review our books so that the end-consumers, our readers, can be assured to get an almost flawless product. After all, where would we writers be without our readers?