So you want to work with an editor...
or do you? I did. Here's how I went about it.
Welcome to the Sunday post at Mommy’s El Camino! Apologies for the empty email you received on Thursday at 10am. We hit a pothole and accidentally let an unfinished scheduled post out of the moving vehicle.
There are two CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS at the end of today’s post. xo
In the past two years I’ve received a number of rejections. Rejections are part of the process of submitting work and/but they also take their toll. I’ve received rejections that didn’t make me blink, and I’ve received rejections that left me ruminating on what I imagine I fells short of in a piece of writing. After I terminated my contract with my former agent last year, I decided to do something I’d never done before: seek out an editor.
Part of why I had never paid someone to edit my work before is because 1) I’ve occasionally had trusted friends who had the time and energy to read my work and offer constructive criticism, 2) I could not afford to pay someone, 3) my agent, in the past year, made herself available to read and edit my work. If I placed a piece somewhere, the editorial component was built in to the piece being published, so I had the benefit of a “free” editor. I’m not in a writing group where I might get more eyes on my work, though I’ve been a part of several different small groups in the past, and at the moment I don’t have the bandwidth to be a part of one now. The absolute thrill of working with an editor who gets the piece, sharpens it, pushes you to think through it more rigorously—all of this used to be more available to me, but without an agent, and with more rejections than I was comfortable with, I decided to get some help.