I Needed an Editor …

How the fuck am I (a newb) qualified to select an editor for my first manuscript?

Well, I'm not qualified. Yet, it had to be done anyway. EXTINCTION SPECIES needed it, and was worth it. What was I going to do, just stop? To qoute Elastigirl, “I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

I struggled with this. Some editors were easy to dismiss. The cheapest provided the fewest comments and basic punctuation fixes only. They were dismissed from the running with barely a thought.

I spent a lot of time reviewing the remaining sample edits, comment by comment, while beginning my “final” self-edit of my manuscript. This gave me real-time experience of what editing my manuscript would be like with each editor. This resulted in the first two to three chapters being self-edited multiple times before I was ready to decide on, and submit it to an editor.

And I mean that literally, “submit.” Being a writer means being a weird mix of dominant and submissive personality traits.

Still, I was unsure how to proceed until I had finished applying the edits based on sample edits from editors. When I thought about it, the edit that was the most annoying, frustrating, and difficult to incorporate—that was the one that my manuscript benefited from the most. So, that was the one that I went with. 

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