An Editor, I have an Editor

I’d thought the news that Carina Press had agreed to publish my book was big. Then I learned I’d been assigned an editor. I’d been assigned an editor—editor with a Capital E, I was sure. I was filled with a shaking terror as I imagined this formidable personage (surely he or she would have a British accent!)—a ruler-wielding mother superior ready to rap knuckles over every split infinitive, misplaced comma and dangling participle (though really what is, I wondered, an m/m romance without a few dangling participles?)

But she was surprisingly gentle with me (it was my first time, after all) as she beat, shaped and twisted this wordsmith into a writer then an author and a manuscript into a book.

She introduced herself via email. All of our meetings would be virtual as I was in Philadelphia and she worked from home in Cleveland, Ohio; “so I’m in the same time zone as New York (though without the super-cool night life, haha),” she wrote.

Virtual? What? What about my dreams of Very Important Meetings in walnut-paneled New York offices overlooking the Hudson? What about drinks at the Algonquin?

For first round edits, we focused on elements such as story structure, plot, characterization and pacing. The first scene she wanted to cut was one involving ice cream. She said it slowed the pacing and it was irrelevant to the story. It was not, I thought defensively—I wrote it and it’s a key scene, a glimpse into the very soul of Dondi. She was gently insistent. I thought about the anecdote some more and realized it was actually an inside joke, a sly reference that only my college roommate and his girl friend and I would understand. She was right it was irrelevant to the story. Out it went.

One of the main characters, Dondi, had a very distinctive way of speaking (think Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show , yet when he was around his mother he was different , even his manner of speech was different. To convey this, I wrote: “If he spoke in italics to his friends, to his mother, he spoke lower case Times New Roman.” Rhonda would have none of it saying, “Italics isn’t a font, to be technical. It’s a tweaking of a font…change this…Also, you can’t speak a font type.”

Now I loved that description. In the end I saw she was right and that sentence was excised from the manuscript. Still it haunts me like a lost love: we’d still be together if we had just done things differently. Maybe…If I had just written that sentence a little differently…maybe…

I’m working on my next book and looking forward to working with Rhonda. I’m thinking of slipping that sentence in just for old times’ sake. Maybe she’ll let me get away with it this time. Maybe…