Maybe it’s three weeks before your manuscript is due and you haven’t even looked at the bibliography yet. What? That’s how we often react to that situation. You signed a contract, you promised to deliver. Now you’re panicking. The 80,000-word problem feels like it will take as long to fix than it did to write. […]

When you’re editing a book, you go back and forth through it, stopping to address things like tone and structure. So you’re doing two different kinds of work at the same time. Planning becomes tricky, since most editors estimate how quickly they’ll get through a manuscript by guessing based off the top of their head […]

It’s polished. It’s on the table. Now it’s time to send it out. However, you suspect it would benefit from one last pass. This is the line edit that makes all the difference when your manuscript lands on an agent’s desk. The time has come where the issue isn’t the work itself. Now the issue […]

Then it’s time to send your manuscipt off into the ether with great hope. You envision your beta reader diving into it over a weekend of coffee breaks. In reality, it’s much less romantic: they’re probably staring at ceiling fan for an hour, unable to recall why your protagonist does what she do. They might […]