How Long Does It Take to Edit a Book? Part 1

Depends on what I need to do, what the problems are, and what it’s like at work, honestly. If there’s low call-volume, I have more time to work between calls. Also, if I have a lot of passive voice (which I do sometimes), that involves a lot of reordering my sentences or sometimes my entire paragraphs to get rid of it. I tend to have repetitive info in each chapter - a holdover from writing fanfiction that only updates every few weeks - so when editing w/ a pen, I have to cross all that out and then delete it later from my docs. 

Like, I don’t edit out of a doc. I edit off a hard-copy of a document, so a big stack of about 400 pages. I’ll go through with colored pens and underline, circle, make notes, cross stuff out. And then I go back to my manuscript doc on my computer, make all those corrections - usually rearranging masses of sentences and possibly adding new scenes, scrapping old ones, enhancing some that are already there, reassigning actions and dialogue between my characters, etc. 

Then I print out another 400 pages, hole-punch them again, stick them in a binder again, sit on it for a few weeks, and then come back to it to edit it all over again. Rinse and repeat until the number of the issues I’ve found have dwindled down to “oh, I just went 30 pages without making any notes, awesome.” Which can take up to 5 or 6, sometimes even 7 printings. Especially because once I get to printing #3 or #4, I’m looking for particular things I notice that keep slipping by me - mostly passive voice, overwriting, and repetition. Those 3 things tend to be my downfall until I get to like, draft 8.

Luckily my mom buys my paper. :D

A Good Question (With a Reasonable Answer)

Honestly, what's up with all your hate? It's completely unnecessary. You seem like a wonderful person.

Thank you. Part of it is that I get a lot in general, so I tend to not answer my asks for several months and they accumulate and then it takes like, a week to get through 3-5 months of asks. I should probably stop doing that…

Another thing is that I ran afoul of the Chris Colfer fandom (although many of them are sending me private messages saying that it’s actually mean trolls trying to stir up trouble and distress the fandom, but I find that difficult to believe in its entirety considering the barrage of hate I got last time his books came up - some of these are old anon messages from January when I left a negative comment about one book and a somewhat negative review of another book).

Finally, I accidentally offended 2 big-name Booklr book-dragon queens (whereas I am naught but a book-dragon lady, with far less clout) and am now reaping the fallout from that. They have a lot of fans - including me - and they’re both very nice, so I’m not surprised their fans want me to die for upsetting them. If somebody upset someone like @books-and-cookies, I’d probably eat their face off, too. Although not anonymously.

SILKPUNK! (It's the Silkiest)

Silkpunk is an offshoot of steampunk (sort of), similar to clockpunk, candlepunk, gearpunk, cyberpunk, dieselpunk, solarpunk, and decopunk. But silkpunk takes things waaay, waaay back in time and to a different part of the world than where -punk usually goes. It was invented/established by the author Ken Liu, who wrote The Grace of Kings.

“The technology aesthetic I’m going for is what I call ‘silkpunk,’ which is of course analogous to steampunk,” he says. “[There are] battle kites, giant airships that are propelled by oars through the air instead of propellers, and even underwater boats.”

And though the book features much that’s pure fantasy—sea monsters, meddling gods, and telepathic books—all the silkpunk technology has a basis in real history.

“All of these are based on direct East Asian analogs or extensions of what was done,” says Liu. “So it’s a fun tech fantasy world that I think people will enjoy.” (x, emphasis added by me)

Hopefully this takes off because it sounds freaking awesome.

For more information:

INTERVIEW: Ken Liu Discusses Silk Punk Fantasy and THE GRACE OF KINGS

Tired of Steampunk? Try Silkpunk on for Size

‘Silkpunk’: Redefining Technology for ‘The Grace of Kings' 

Silkpunk - Playing Engineer in an Imaginary World

Why I Like World-Hopping Fanfics

I think the dynamic would be more interesting if more than one person fell into another world because maybe not everyone likes the fandom? Also they may have different goals, different priorities, and they’ll definitely have different reactions to the situations they find themselves in, but then they also have to balance out how they handle everything with how it affects the group as a whole, and that makes the whole world-hopping thing so much more interesting than just one girl or one guy (it’s usually a girl) being sucked into a television or something and having just their agenda to deal with.

People Have Asked What I Think of JK Rowling

Oh, goodness, I’m afraid. O.O

Okay, but in seriousness…this is gonna take me a minute. Because my feelings for the author herself are a bit complicated. And this is going to be a bit long, too. Sorry.

So…I know a bit about JK Rowling’s personal life before she published HP1. I know she had an abusive signif and at one point I think she was on food stamps or something and she basically overcame a lot of hardships. I know she’s a big supporter of LGBT+ rights and is very open about that on her social media. I know she’s also very responsive in a positive way to her fans, which is great, because some celebs can be just awful to their fans. I know that this woman is wildly creative and it took a lot of imagination to come up with the first Harry Potter book. I know that she is very dedicated to her series and the world of Harry Potter. None of these are bad things and are, in fact, really good things that impress me a lot. I think she tries to be a genuinely nice lady.

However. I think she has a few problems.

I think when Harry Potter started with book 1, despite her claims that she had literally everything plotted out, I don’t think HP was originally intended to be as dark and adult as it became. The reason I bring this up in relationship to how I feel about the author is this - I don’t think, as the books got darker, that she really knew what she was doing in all aspects of the story and where it was going. I think she set up a world in book 1 and 2 that wasn’t really sustainable at the level she was pushing it to as the series went on, and she didn’t realize this somehow.

And she still doesn’t realize it. She doesn’t consider Merope Gaunt to be a rapist. She doesn’t consider James, Lily, Remus, and Sirius to be bad people at any point (”a bit of a prat” isn’t the same as a legit bad person). She doesn’t acknowledge the severely abusive nature of Ron and Hermione’s early romantic relationship before they acknowledged they were in love. She doesn’t consider Neville’s grandmother to be abusive or a bad person. She doesn’t show Dumbledore to be a bad person in any way (he comes across more as “complicated” and as an older version of the somewhat bad boy doing bad things for good reasons trope). The inherent evilness of all the Slytherin kids. And while this impacts my ability to enjoy the books as much as I used to when I try to reread them, it also informs me quite a bit about the kind of person JK Rowling is herself.

Then we have things like the lack of racial diversity in the original books, what she did with Newt Scamander being a racist dirtbag, Ilvermorny, her appropriation of sacred topics, complete lack of understanding of American culture, the whitewashing/cultural erasure of characters like the Patil twins and Cho Chang, her blatantly impossible idea that racism based on skin color doesn’t exist in the Wizarding World…things she doesn’t acknowledge are an issue. She’s been notoriously silent any time anyone brings this stuff up.

So…what do I think of JK Rowling? She reminds me of my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law tries to be nice to everyone. She tries to be very loving and friendly and she’s generally sweet-tempered. But she’s also very ignorant, very non-aggressively racist, very non-aggressively against various demographics (one of those sweet, little ladies who stays in her house and knits socks for homeless people while murmuring, “Oh, my goodness gracious, well, all lives matter, especially the blue ones, and transgender bathroom laws are to prevent child molesters from taking advantage, everyone knows that”).

And that’s what I think of JK Rowling. I think she’s just ignorant of certain things. I think, for whatever reason, she doesn’t notice the fallout from things. She doesn’t see rape sometimes when it’s right there in front of her (or she does and just didn’t handle it right at all). She doesn’t see abuse every time it’s right there in front of her. Institutionalized racism seems to be a thing she is unaware of as it applies to British minorities like Indians and the Chinese. And she seems to be unaware of writer resources that are now available called sensitivity readers that can help her to avoid the pitfalls she’s already tripped and fallen into…

Unless she does know about them but is too set in her ways to change now. After all, she’s like 50 or something, and she used to be a billionaire, and Harry Potter is still one of the biggest money-making franchises in the book world to ever happen.

And the thing is, I don’t know her personally. So I’m not going to say she’s a racist evil witch who hates gay people or whatever because I don’t know that. And I’m not going to say she’s deliberately trying to hurt marginalized people because I don’t know that either. But she seems to be doing most of what is hurtful in ignorance. And she is a strong advocate for the oppressed in many, many ways. So I’m not going to say she’s all bad or mostly bad or even half bad. And she has accomplished a great deal that she has every right to be proud of, and overcome things that I don’t know I ever could. But she’s also made mistakes and so far, she hasn’t acknowledged or fixed any of them.

So that’s what I think about JK Rowling. It’s a 50-50 thing, basically. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, even when they muck up something beneath the umbrella of a cause or causes I’m violently passionate about…which she did. And even though sometimes I see a thing and I kind of want to throw something (I have a bad temper; it’s no reflection on her, to be honest. More on me). Still gonna give her the benefit of the doubt, though. Just not going to be rereading HP anytime soon because I just can’t and I’m not buying The Cursed Child because it sounds ridiculous.