Meet the Bitch: My Inner Editor

She really is a bitch.  She's precise and cranky and perfectionistic.  I don't mind so much, cause I need her to be that way when she's editing what I write, but that Inner Editor, she can scare people away.

And that worries me, because I just handed off a manuscript to a great friend, one of the sweetest, kindest, loveliest ladies I know, and Miss Inner Editor had been having her way with that script.  She ran out two pens doing so.  She likes ink, Miss IE.

The first time I let Miss IE loose on a friend, it changed our relationship forever.  When I let her loose on my husband's writing, his reaction broke my heart.  I've tried to tame her, and I can rein her in at first, but that godawful honesty gets in the way sometimes.

I love to read as much as I love to write... maybe even more... and I tend to even get Miss IE's ire up when I'm reading badly written prose.  She was rewriting passages of Twilight madly, frantically, as I read that series.  Lately she's been getting all giggly over reading "Mahalo" being thrown around in a book I'm reading - "Spider Bones" - which is taking place in Hawaii.  It shouldn't be funny, it's just where I work, but for some reason, Miss IE is tickled by it.

So, you're wondering how things are going at Mahalo, are you? Me too, kind of.  I've been having issues with being sick with an unbelievable sinus infection, and it's made meeting my minimums a sketchy prospect at best.  So far I'm managing, though I find myself sometimes inwardly cussing at my outer editors - the ones on the site.  It's not really their fault, it's an issue where they may not catch everything they want me to change on their first read-through, and then on the second read-through, after I've made the changes they did ask for, there are more changes to be made on the second go.  Confusing enough for you?  Yeah, me too.

It's just frustrating, when I think I've fixed something to still have more work on it.  It makes my hourly wage go down (which is averaging at Mahalo something like $4 an hour I guess, counting revision work).  I haven't been sleeping much, which isn't helping the sinus infection, and have had a two day migraine, so I'm probably just cranky about it all.  These are two of the pages that required double revisions: http://www.mahalo.com/trenton-nj and http://www.mahalo.com/toledo-oh It was purely a matter of something no one had on the gold standard guide page, but that appeared on the gold standard page itself.  What I mean by that is, we have a page that lists what you have to do for each type of page, then an example.  You obviously can't follow everything on the sample page, because every city (or author or movie or whatever) is different, but you kind of have to figure out what's wanted.  If you can't, you'll be revising it once the editor lets you know!

Where have all the Novels gone?

When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher assigned us to write a paper on where we would be in ten years.  I know now that this was a pretty typical assignment, but at the time I completely adored my teacher - Mr Bob Sheldon, I wonder where he's at now? - and not just because he wrote in my yearbook that I was his bright and shining star.  I really, genuinely wanted to impress him.  And so, as a result, I wrote a long and impressive essay that detailed how in ten years I would have graduated college, married, had three children and produced no less than five New York Times bestselling novels.

Yeah.

I wanted to be a writer from pretty far back, much before that essay, but it surprises me now how easy I thought it would be.  Everyone told me I had talent; friends, teachers, even the parents of friends, and so I decided it would be easy to write novels and get them published.  My favourite authors at the time - Stephen King especially - seemed to publish prolifically, and I saw no reason why I couldn't do the same thing.

Unfortunately for me, I came of age in a time when short story magazines were dying rapidly, and the novel didn't seem far behind.  No one was buying books, I was told, everyone cared about this new thing - the INTERNET, and print media was on the way out.

It may still be hanging on by a shoestring, but I think people weren't far off with that assessment.  I agreed with the predictions and went on to pursue other things that interested me.  By 25, I had done none of the things in my essay, but had explored a multitude of other areas that turned out to be just right for me to explore.  Today I do write to pay my bills... just not bestselling novels, or novels of any kind for that matter.  I still write fiction, but it's just for fun.  To pay  my bills, I write for a few different freelance agencies, and that's what this blog is all about - the life of a freelance writer in a digital age.

The primary site I'm working for is Mahalo, where I'm what's known as a guide.  My husband works there as well - but as a walkthrough writer, and we have vastly different experiences, connections, and types of interactions there.  I'll see if at some point I can convince him to ghostblog for me and talk about what it's like to write walkthroughs.  From my POV, writing walkthroughs means getting to play games all day, but what do I know? Check out the very first walkthrough he did for the site here:  http://www.mahalo.com/splatterhouse-walkthrough