Castle Walls Editing

Tag: editors

  • Starting an Accountability Group

    Starting an Accountability Group

    [vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Even with all the advantages of freelancing (avoiding the commute, setting your own hours, protecting yourself with multiple income streams), you still might find yourself missing the kinds of discussions and professional camaraderie that come with in-office jobs. 

    Accountability (or mastermind) groups can help, and it’s wholly within your power to start one. (I did it, and I assure you I am far from a social butterfly.)

    Overcoming Anxiety

    There’s no way around it: organizing an accountability group means contacting people and setting yourself up for rejection. No matter how accomplished you are, you might still find yourself subject to negative self-questioning and impostor syndrome: Would anyone join my group? Do I want to be part of a group that would have me as a member?

    Your inner voice can be cruel, but remember a few things:

    1. The fact that you’re trying to learn and increase your connections in the editing community (or any professional community) speaks well of you.
    2. Most people will be flattered that you respect them enough to ask them to join your group.
    3. People might decline for reasons that have nothing to do with you. They may already be in another group. They may be feeling their own anxiety. But even if they decline, you’ve still paid them the compliment of an invitation, and they’re likely to remember that.

    Reaching Out

    Once I committed to forming the group, I had to find members. The editing community on Twitter is generally welcoming and informative, and I follow a lot of great editors. 

    I have always been uncomfortable on social media, but I interact just enough that I had in mind some people who might want to join the group (as well as someone I met at a breakout session during the last ACES conference).

    Six struck me as the perfect number of people for the group (I wanted enough people to offer different perspectives and still maintain a good group number when a member inevitably couldn’t make a meeting, but I didn’t want a number that would make the group unwieldy or limit the ability of everyone to participate).

    I sent out five invitations. One declined, as the person was already in another group, and one person had another participant in mind, and that person subsequently accepted, so we hit our six.

    It couldn’t have gone better.

    Defining Your Intent

    I had a rough idea of what I wanted to accomplish with the group, but sending out invitations forced me to define it better. The following are the main goals I had in mind for the group:

    • Share knowledge about tools and processes
    • Engage in discussions about our work lives
    • Promote accountability
    • Support each other
    • Share opportunities
    • Celebrate our accomplishments
    • Network

    Those are my goals, but I also wanted it to be a group of equal voices, and I looked forward to hearing what other members hoped to get out of the group. One of the main benefits of the group, I hoped, would be to inspire each other with ideas that wouldn’t occur to us otherwise.

    Managing the Logistics

    Once five members accepted invitations to the group, I had to set up our first meeting. I queried the group for best times and a good date. 

    My initial thought was to host our first meeting on Zoom, but I don’t have a paid Zoom account (with free accounts, your meetings are limited to forty minutes), so I sent out meeting requests on Google Meet (I have a Gmail account). 

    Enjoying the Ride

    The first meeting was a great success. One of the members couldn’t attend because work got in the way, and she was missed, but that will surely happen from time to time, and I wanted everyone to be assured that that’s fine, and that work and life take priority.

    Everyone seemed happy with Google Meet, the only inconvenience being that I have to admit people who aren’t part of the network (and that’s a minor inconvenience).

    Before the meeting I sent out a brief PowerPoint deck that included our purpose and three simple ground rules:

    • Be kind
    • Respect privacy of discussions
    • Do no harm

    This first meeting had the simple agenda of introducing ourselves and covering a few basics, such as the best day of the week and the best time to meet going forward, as well as the duration for the meetings.

    We decided to meet every two weeks on Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m., and we set the target at an hour, with the idea that we might want to keep the meetings going longer, but that anyone was free to drop off at any time, for whatever reason.

    The members are all wonderful editors, and as we introduced ourselves, I enjoyed learning about everyone’s experience and specialties. We seemed to have differences and commonalities that strike a nice balance, so my hopes for the group are high. 

    A Name

    We’re tentatively set with a group name of Pens & Pilcrows. 

    A name for the group might not be essential, but I could also get carried away thinking about the potential to set up a website so the group can share resources and promote its members, providing another gateway to our individual sites. I could also see us creating publications or helping other editors in any number of ways, but hosting successful, productive meetings is a great first step. 

    A name is also a unifying banner to work under and should increase our sense of unity. It also makes the group feel more official, more legitimate.

    Final Thoughts 

    I’m proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone and forming the group. I hope to learn a lot from the other members, and getting to know five other editors better has already been well worth the effort.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

  • Don’t Lift the Lid! Slow Cookers and Editing

    Don’t Lift the Lid! Slow Cookers and Editing

    Lifting the lid on a slow cooker, even for a second, supposedly adds thirty minutes to cooking time. In much the same way, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of time lost when an interruption takes editors out of their editing groove.

    If I’m editing a manuscript and have to stop to address a completely different matter, this shifting of gears takes my mind off the project and interrupts my flow. When you have forty or more hours ahead of you on a book edit, little bits of time lost can add up quickly and affect your ability to hit your deadlines.

    Most editors have to play a kind of scheduling Tetris to ensure they hit their deadlines and get their clients their edited manuscripts. Delays on one job can easily affect every other job on the schedule, so it’s no wonder editors are so serious about keeping their work moving.

    Managing interruptions is therefore a vital editing skill.

    Interruptions can include emergency requests for quick-turn assignments, personal and professional emails, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions with coworkers or family.

    The extent to which an editor is affected by an interruption depends on the following:

    • Nature of the interruption. Answering a quick question will obviously affect the job you’re working on less than needing to completely break to spend an hour proofing an emergency job. For such an emergency request, there might be research involved, or you might have to wait for more information from that client (and trying to work on one job while keeping an eye out for information needed for an emergency request is less than ideal, because it splits your thoughts).
    • Where you are in the editing process. An interruption might be easier to process if the work you’re doing is more mechanical (invoicing or answering emails or cleaning up your style sheet) than if you’re in the midst of hard-core, concentration-intensive editing.
    • Your state of mind. The more pressure you’re under to hit a deadline on your current job and the more concentration required by that job, the more likely you are to have trouble recovering from an interruption. Stress from outside sources (a pandemic affecting lives the world over comes to mind) will also likely have an outsize effect on how you handle interruptions.

     

    Interruptions are inevitable

    Interruptions, of course, are inevitable, especially for work-at-homers whose offices are no longer the quiet places they were before the COVID-19 crisis prevented family members from heading off to school or places of employment.

    While interruptions are unavoidable, they can be minimized by policing yourself (refraining from answering the phone or checking email and social media) and by communicating with those in your vicinity so they understand why you need quiet time and when it’s okay to break into that time.

    (Corporate clients are most likely to have emergency requests, and because corporate clients often pay higher fees, they enable editors to perform the lower-paying manuscript work that may be the editor’s true love. Editors, therefore, often need to accept emergency requests to keep paying their bills.)

     

    Breaks are not interruptions

    Interruptions can negatively affect your work, but breaks are a whole different ball game. After a ten-minute break at the top of the hour, you’re more likely to concentrate better than if you’d worked straight through.

    While an interruption can break your flow and make you feel like you’re not making the progress you want to make, little breaks can refresh you and enable you to work longer and more effectively. 

    These breaks can also have physical benefits if you use them to stretch, move around a bit, or even do a few arm curls. I don’t adhere to it as well as I should, but the 20/20/20 rule, in which every 20 minutes you focus on something 20 feet away for 20 seconds, can do wonders for eye strain.

     

    Low and slow

    As with a slow cooker meal, editing is usually best when done low and slow. This, however, isn’t always possible. If something drops on your desk and it’s needed in an hour, you might have to take that baby out of the slow cooker and throw it in the microwave.

    With this kind of triage editing, prioritization is everything, because you might not have time to address every aspect of the work. In these cases you have to identify the most important aspects of the work, ensure those are correct, and only then address less prioritized matters, if time allows.

    But I’ll always prefer the slow cooker to the microwave, and whenever possible, I’ll be taking it low and slow.

     

    Lots of ingredients

    As I continue to stretch the comparison, I’ll add that slow cookers are so effective because they (like editors) meld ingredients (skills) over consistent heat (effort and concentration). 

    For clients, the editor (slow cooker) they need is a complicated combination of specialty (developmental editor, line editor, copy editor, proofreader) and bona fides (certifications, client list, books published, referrals, fact-checking cred, familiarity with style guides, ability to work with tech tools, and knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and spelling).

     

    Preparation

    Slow cookers are all about preparation. That’s the magic: assemble all your ingredients, set the slow cooker, and let it do its thing for the next eight hours. 

    Preparation is just as important for enabling editors to edit, and preparation can take many forms:

    • Workspace: A dedicated workspace with plenty of room to operate, multiple monitors, and ergonomic accommodations makes for happy, healthy editors.
    • References: Whether accessing dictionaries, style guides, and other resources online or through your personal library, quick access to the references you need is essential.
    • Prework: Creating invoices, setting up your style sheet, and formatting your document all allow editors to get on with the business of editing their documents. 

     

    The flavors meld

    Editors spend long hours on any given job. While interruptions can’t be avoided entirely, they can often be minimized or dealt with effectively, leading to a meal (edited manuscript) that will have clients drooling.

  • Shh! What Do Editors Mean by ‘Silent’ Changes?

    Shh! What Do Editors Mean by ‘Silent’ Changes?

    With Word’s Track Changes turned on, every insertion or deletion an editor makes is visible to the author. Silent changes happen when the editor switches Track Changes off so that the author can’t see what’s been changed.

    Sounds sneaky, doesn’t it?

    Almost nefarious.

    It’s easy to imagine authors bristling at the notion. But there’s a reason for a certain type of silent edits, and in these cases the editor is trying to help the author.

    Why Make Silent Changes?

    When an editor returns a manuscript, authors are often surprised by the number of edits. Tracked changes can splash red all over the page, and this can be alarming. As authors review their edited manuscript, they are faced with the task of contending with these edits.

    To reduce the amount of electronic marks on the page, editors sometimes make silent changes for edits the author wouldn’t question. Not tracking these changes makes it easier for authors to see the changes they care about without getting lost in a sea of red.

    Candidates for silent editing include the replacement of straight quotes with smart (curly) quotes, the movement of punctuation inside quotation marks, and the elimination of extra spaces. Editors might also make silent edits for 100 percent typos (“carts” for “cats”).

    I generally only make silent edits for things like extra spaces, but I always clear this with authors beforehand so they know what kinds of changes will be done silently.

    Because authors place a great deal of trust in editors, there should be no surprises. Editors need to be fully transparent with their actions, and there is no reason not to be.

    Editors, after all, want to help authors, not trick them.

    What About When Authors Make Silent Changes?

    Depending on the arrangement, authors may want the editor to take another look at the manuscript after the authors have responded to comments and accepted or rejected changes.

    Because editors feel responsible for the quality of the work, they want to be aware of any changes authors make at this point, so no typos slip through. For this reason, editors will often lock the file so that Track Changes cannot be turned off.

    With all of the above in mind, I hope silent changes sound less less like a sneaky intrusion and more like a helpful part of the editing process.

    About James Gallagher

    James Gallagher is a copyeditor and the owner of Castle Walls Editing. For more information about how he can help with your writing projects, send email to James@castlewallsediting.com.

  • 5 Reasons Authors Need Style Sheets

    At Castle Walls Editing, I supply style sheets when returning edited manuscripts to authors. But, you might ask, what the heck is a style sheet?

    The style sheet is a separate document (or documents) used to ensure consistency in a manuscript or across a series.

    While editors usually work in accordance with specific style guides, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, style sheets cover instances not covered by the guide or instances that conflict with the guide.

    Style sheets usually address the following areas:

    • Spelling and Styles
      Editors will specify the dictionary they follow (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, for example), but there are still any number of spelling decisions an editor has to make. The style sheet tracks the spellings of made-up words and words with alternate spellings. The style sheet also helps the editor, author, and proofreader use consistent styles for formatting and punctuation of quotation marks, ellipses, and other features of the manuscript.
    • Characters
      Consistent spelling of character names is obviously important (you don’t want Sara on page five and Sarah one hundred pages later—and family names can get even more complicated). Style sheets also track character traits and histories, so you don’t end up with characters switching eye color midway through the manuscript or performing an action that conflicts with a previous action.
    • Locations
      The style sheet tracks the spelling of place names and indicates characteristics of those places. This is important so that characters don’t head east out of a door that earlier faced west, or any number of other logical inconsistencies that can occur. The style sheet also helps track the physical layout and features of rooms, buildings, and locales for consistent presentation in the work.
    • Timeline/Plot
      It can be surprisingly easy for the author and editor to miss time gaffes and plot holes while focusing on the micro-level action in the manuscript. A timeline by day (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) or whatever time division works best for the manuscript helps keep time elements straight while noting basic plot points.

     

    Benefits for the Author

    No author or editor can remember everything or keep track of all the information involved in a novel without some sort of handy reference. The style sheet is therefore a necessary tool that helps editors do their job while providing a multitude of benefits to the author.

    And now for the promised five reasons authors need style sheets.

    Style sheets supply the author with the following:

    1. An explanation of edits. When authors review the edits an editor has made in a document, the style sheet shows why the edits were made, thereby preventing authors from sending unnecessary queries to the editor. This reassures the author and saves the author time and money.
    2. An invaluable resource. After editing, authors may still rework their novel or they may move on to sequels or additional books in a series. The style sheet provides a helpful tool for keeping track of names and styles, especially useful for SF, fantasy, and other genre work with unusual naming conventions.
    3. Insight into their own work. The style sheet provides authors with another tool for viewing their work. Some authors create story maps or chart out their novels on index cards. The style sheet acts as another lens through which authors can view their work, and seeing their story from another angle often helps writers identify flaws and improve their novels.
    4. Lessons on style. After reviewing a style sheet, it’s not uncommon for an author to have an “Oh, I didn’t know that” reaction. Some authors may be talented storytellers but fall short on the technical aspects of writing. Style sheets help in this area, and authors are usually more than happy to learn something new.
    5. A peek inside the editor’s mind. In many ways, the style sheet maps the editor’s process and demonstrates his or her competence. The style sheet is, therefore, a useful tool for helping an author grade an editor and decide whether or not to use that editor again.

     

    A writer might take a manuscript to a copyeditor with no idea of what a style sheet is or that one will be provided with the edited manuscript. Once writers start enjoying the benefits of style sheets, however, they usually find that the sheets are something they don’t want to do without.

    For more information about style sheets or the services that Castle Walls Editing provides, select Contact from the menu to your left.