Next spring, I need to get new windows for this ancient house. Accordingly, if you ever wanted to give yourself the gift of an edit from an experienced editor/writer/teacher who is also a Locus and World Fantasy Award nominee and Nebula award winner, I highly encourage it. All edits/reads include the chance to identify particular spots for feedback in advance and to ask questions afterward.
Here’s what I offer:
Story editorial read
$50 per 5,000 words. This is not an edit. It is a 1-2 page analysis that includes notes on suggested changes, weak spots, and other editorial feedback. Stories over 5,000 words will be pro-rated at $5 per additional 500 words.
Novel editorial read
$1000 per 100.000 words. This is not an edit. It is a chapter by chapter analysis that includes notes on suggested changes, weak spots, and other editorial feedback. I will include a copyedit of the first chapter (up to ten pages) to show patterns and suggestions at the sentence level. Works over 5,000 words will be pro-rated at $10 per additional 1000 words.
Story copyedit
$100 per 5,000 words. This is a rigorous edit of something you consider finished, with changes tracked and explanatory notes. If you are not happy with it, I will return your money. Stories over 5,000 words will be pro-rated at $10 per additional 500 words.
Novel copyedit
Because this can vary greatly, the fee is based on how much work I’m looking at. Send one chapter and the word length and I can provide an estimate.
Got a project that doesn’t fit any of these? Feel free to mail me at cat@kittywumpus.net (it would be handy if you use the subject line “Edit Request”) with the details.
Projects will be added to my work queue in the order they are received. If you need your work prioritized due to a deadline, there is an additional rush fee.
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The flooring saga continues. One guy came and made the repairs to the subfloor that the flooring people had requested — or so I thought! When the flooring people came back, they weren’t happy with things still, and so the other company is coming back to do that, but can’t get here until the latter part of the month, and since they didn’t understand they needed to level the floor the first time, there’s some additional cost, although they are cutting me a deal on it as an apology. At any rate, someday I will have a usable kitchen, but that time is not now.
As you can guess, this is all complicated, time-consuming — and costly, particularly on the heels of replacing the roof last month, which I knew I’d have to do at some point but was hoping to do next summer, thereby bumping any thoughts of a new deck to 2023. Accordingly I’m going to take on some editing work in the next few months.
Accordingly, if you ever wanted to give yourself the gift of an edit from an experienced editor/writer/teacher who is also a Locus and World Fantasy Award nominee and Nebula award winner, this might be the time. All edits/reads include the chance to identify particular spots for feedback in advance and to ask questions afterward.
I will be accepting a limited number of projects, so if you are interested, I would contact me sooner rather than later.
Story editorial read
$50 per 5,000 words. This is not an edit. It is a 1-2 page analysis that includes notes on suggested changes, weak spots, and other editorial feedback. Stories over 5,000 words will be pro-rated at $5 per additional 500 words.
Novel editorial read
$1000 per 100.000 words. This is not an edit. It is a chapter by chapter analysis that includes notes on suggested changes, weak spots, and other editorial feedback. I will include a copyedit of the first chapter (up to ten pages) to show patterns and suggestions at the sentence level. Works over 5,000 words will be pro-rated at $10 per additional 1000 words.
Story copyedit
$100 per 5,000 words. This is a rigorous edit of something you consider finished, with changes tracked and explanatory notes. If you are not happy with it, I will return your money. Stories over 5,000 words will be pro-rated at $10 per additional 500 words.
Novel copyedit
Because this can vary greatly, the fee is based on how much work I’m looking at. Send one chapter and the word length and I can provide an estimate.
Got a project that doesn’t fit any of these? Feel free to mail me at cat@kittywumpus.net (it would be handy if you use the subject line “Edit Request”) with the details.
Projects will be added to my work queue in the order they are received. If you need your work prioritized due to a deadline, there is an additional rush fee.
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I did a number of interviews on my YouTube channel to promote a Kickstarter I’m part of, a trio of theme anthologies from Zombies Need Brains. Here they are, collected.
Cat interviews Andrija Popovic about his contribution to upcoming book, Noir, edited by David B. Coe and John Zakour, produced by Zombies Need Brains.
Cat interviews Juliet Kemp about their contribution to upcoming science fiction theme anthology, Brave New Worlds, edited by S.C. Butler and Joshua Palmatier and produced by Zombies Need Brains.
Cat interviews David B. Coe about his upcoming anthology, NOIR, co-edited with John Zakour, produced by Zombies Need Brains.
Cat interviews writer Jacey Bedford about her contribution to upcoming science fiction theme anthology, Brave New Worlds, edited by S.C. Butler and Joshua Palmatier and produced by Zombies Need Brains.
Cat interviews writer José Pablo Iriarte about their contribution to upcoming science fiction theme anthology, Shattering the Glass Slipper, edited by Crystal Sarakas and Rhondi Salsitz, and produced by Zombies Need Brains.
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I was on two different editing panels at Norwescon this weekend.
I’ve taken the liberty of combining my notes from both panels, but my notes from the first panel are much better and actually contain a page of quotes from participants, while on the second panel, which was my 4th of the day, I was much less energetic and just wrote down the questions and two notes, and am reconstructing some things from my memory, so I cannot vouch for total accuracy. In each panel, we did something that I picked up from Mary Robinette Kowal, taking questions from the audience before starting the panel, and using those to drive the conversation. It’s a great technique for wide-ranging, discussion-driven panels.
Want to Be An Editor?
Where can or do you begin? It’s hard to get an editing position when you don’t have work under your belt. Listen to editors share the details of how they got started and learn some of the pitfalls to avoid.
Chimedum Ohaegbu, Gordon Van Gelder, Cat Rambo, Jasmine Silvera
Need An Editor?
Need an editor? What can you expect? How do you find one that fits within your budget, has a good reputation, and is knowlegeable of your genre?
Cat Rambo, Cory Skerry, Rhiannon Held, Jasmine Silvera
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What if prose were written like music? What if, instead, of a common world, stories in an anthology were steps on a share emotional path? Those are the questions the upcoming anthology Score is attempting to answer.
Emotions are a key part of our experience of art. The books that stick with you are often the ones that made you feel something. Even when we don’t recall the details of a plot (or painting, or movie), we’ll often recall how it made us feel. Even if you don’t recall the details of Watership Down, for example -“” the names of the rabbits, the original warren, etc. “” you probably remember how you felt about the rabbits and what happened to them. You remember how you felt when you closed the book. Even if you mislay every detail of a book, you’ll remember whether it made you laugh or cry or feel wistful.
Score is an attempt to tackle the emotional side of writing head on. A group of almost 20 authors set out not to write about robots or aliens or magic “” though we have all of those “” but to write from emotion.
What does that mean, and how does it work? It means, simply, that each of the authors worked from a coherent emotional score, knowing the emotions in the piece before and after theirs, what emotions they were to emphasize, and … nothing else. They had complete freedom of genre, topic, tone, approach, etc. “” so long as they worked with the emotions they were assigned. The result is a fascinating collection of stories with a distinct emotional progression.
Putting together the score was challenging. As the editor and ‘composer’, I defined fairly early on the emotions we would work with. I knew the direction I wanted to score to take – an overall path of ascending hope that I thought a good fit to the times “” but choosing emotional terminology that would work consistently across many different writers took some work.
In the end, we worked from a palette of six emotional ranges – six emotions with four variants each, two positive, two negative. For example, Hope ranges from Hope at the positive end to Despair at the negative end. These aren’t quite the emotional pairs used by social scientists, and we could have ended up with a wide range of others, but these six emotional ranges allowed ample scope for ups and downs. The emotions are loosely grouped into two sets – the Hope set (Hope, Curiosity, Awe) and the Joy set (Joy, Love, Lust).
Each writer was assigned a specific major and minor emotion, and the score has distinct movements. Using musical terms very approximately, there’s an Overture, a Hope triad, a Joy triad, a Bridge, a Joy triad inversion, a Hope triad inversion, and a Coda. There are high points and low points, but … spoiler alert… it all ends with Hope and Joy.
It’s been a lot of fun putting this together. While I personally often write from an emotional basis, putting together an entire score was an intriguing and challenging exercise. Each writer interpreted the task in their own way, putting their own distinct stamp on it, as artists will. The result is intriguing, and I hope will be as much of an adventure for readers as it was for all of us.
Score: an SFF symphony is out on March 2nd from Metaphorosis Books.
Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.
If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines.
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Have you ever wondered how your favorite story would sound if written by another author? What is it exactly, that makes writers different? What does each one bring to the story they’re writing, in terms of style, mood, tone, etc? How would the story sound as written by someone else?
That’s what the Reading 5X5 anthology explores – twenty-five SFF writers writing five variants of five stories. I asked five groups of five authors to start from the same basic story brief, but write in their own way. The result is fascinating – five wildly different approaches to each of the five briefs, but each telling, at its core, the same story.
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I just finished the first pass on the slushpile for If This Goes On. The anthology is intended to be half solicited manuscripts; half from the open call, and I’m happy to say that I don’t think it’s going to be hard to pull that together. I’ve got five or six definites on my list right now, and I’m setting them aside. I did read through every story except for a handful of less-than-serious ones; thank you to the slushreaders and publisher Colin Coyle for winnowing those out.
If I can, I’ll take one more pass through the first third or so of the slushpile, when I was reading and not knowing how strong some of the submissions would be. I suspect at least a third of those can be winnowed. Then I’ll ask the publisher to send out that round of rejections.
By then I am hoping I’ll have narrowed things down to a few dozen stories. These manuscripts have officially made it to the final round. At this point I’ll be looking at some things that include:
Then will come the final passes, where I’ll be reluctantly saying goodbye to some stories for reasons that might include:
I hope that the slushreaders have learned something from all of this, including a better sense of what submitters may or may not want to avoid, and how varied the slush pile can be. With a few of them we’ve done some talking about stories, but not all. For most slushreaders, I would suggest if you’re passing up more than half the stories, you are not being harsh enough, but if it’s only one in ten, you may be leaving out some stuff the editor will want to see, unless your tastes are perfectly aligned.
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A week or so ago we had the orientation session for the slush readers. I gathered them by posting announcements in my newsletter and other social media, but I also tried to reach out to a range of people in order to ask for recommendations in order to ensure I had a diverse pool. We ended up with over a dozen slushreaders, and one of the things I want all of them to take away from the experience is better understanding of stories and how to sort through things.
We video-recorded the session, and the publisher went over the mechanics of the slush system in that as well. Parvus Press has mentioned recently that I asked to have the slush read blind, which to me seems like a better approach. Studies have shown that perception of the attached name can change the way someone reacts to a scholarly paper, and I’m reasonably sure similar things happen when reading fiction.
One of the things I’ve stressed is that typos and grammatical errors aren’t a dealbreaker – we can fix those. A compelling story with some issues like that is something I want to see. But the world’s most immaculately formatted story won’t do much for me unless there’s a good story attached, by which I mean a story that entertains while at the same informs or engages or makes you think or hopefully some combination of all of that. Look for the stories that startle and amaze you, I told them. Or really piss you off, I added, because sometimes that’s the sign of a good story.
If the story is from a viewpoint radically different than their own, I’d like them to make sure some other eyes check it out. (Nonetheless I’m going to be a pain in the rear and read everything, partly because I want to be able to talk to the slushreaders about stuff as it comes up.)
I emphasized a policy that I have borrowed from John Joseph Adams, who has edited a kerjillion anthologies, and asked people not to talk about the slushreading experience in anything but vague and enthusiastic terms. I know writers will be watching those utterances and often taking stuff to heart that was not intended for them. In my early years, I had the odd experience of having an IGMS slushreader blog about my story submission in mocking terms. This probably would have been more discouraging if the actual editor hadn’t just bought the story, but I will always remember reading through their account of the slushreading party and the lines about all of them laughing about hitting a story written from an elephant’s POV. The vividness of that moment is not something I really want the slushreaders inflicting on other writers.
We closed up by talking a little about how to stay un-depressed in the light of what may well turn out to be a whole bunch of grim stories. It’s okay to step away from the keyboard sometimes, and we have enough slushreaders that plenty of eyes will be looking at the stories.
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Among the things I’ve done in 2017:
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(fantasy, short story)
General Aife Crofadottir was acknowledged the greatest military mind of her generation—perhaps even her century. No wonder then that the sorcerer Balthus recruited her early in her career, setting her to rally armies of Beasts and magically-equipped soldiers, planning campaign after campaign, until finally he stood the ruler of a vast expanse of the continent’s northeastern corner. Once fertile lands, once countries, now only uncontested, devastated territories. Three years after her death, she still labored in his service.
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