Uncomfortable Editing

Most editing recommendations from the publisher are straightforward.  Change this, tighten up that, change this description or fix this weird wording.  I get through all of those edits pretty easily, even the ones where I need to rewrite large sections.

But it reaches a whole new level of weirdness when the editor makes changes in the intimate scenes.  At the time, I edited appropriately and moved on, but later, I kept thinking, “it’s really weird when your editor suggests changes in a sex scene.”  The sex scenes are easy enough to write, and the fix she recommended needed to happen, but still.  Because I’m an American woman of a certain age, sex is still one of those things you don’t really talk about.  Or, you talk about it with plenty of euphemisms or descriptive language.

So, editing the sex scene at the request of the editor was kind of uncomfortable.  It shouldn’t have been, of course.  But it was.  I guess it never occurred to me that I would need to edit those scenes just like I would need to edit the rest of the book.

So far, however, those edits have been small, and more a matter of being clear about who was touching who at the beginning of the scene.  Of course, I’d read that scene a hundred times when I was editing and didn’t catch the confusion.  But that’s why I have an editor, right?

Still.  Most uncomfortable editing notes ever!