The Writing Life

I've gotten into the portion of the class where we talk about the life of writing (as opposed to the craft), and so I've stopped cross-posting here because, frankly, I find talking about manuscript preparation extremely boring. Important information, but boring to convey. If someone checking in is interested in all that jazz, let me point you to this extremely helpful website: http://www.sfwa.org/writing/. All the articles about writing are great, but the ones about the business of writing are especially useful, in my opinion.

So, I’ve been at a bit of a loss as to what to say here about writing. I stumbled across this question from Jennifer Pelland at the Live Journal community Serious Writers. Which is, "how much attention should a writer expect from an editor?"

Jen is asking in terms of a short story editor, I believe, and my experience with short story editors is that you hear from them three times -- once at acceptance, then just before publication when you're asked to check over your page proofs, and lastly when you get your check and contributors copy(s).

Novel editors... I've found that I like to keep in fairly regular contact with my novel editors, even if we're chatting about something only just tangentally related to the book. My experience is that a talkative novel editor is MUCH preferred to a silent one.