Somewhere across the manuscripts I've turned back to writers over the years — a rough count puts it near forty, though I stopped keeping an exact tally a long time ago — a pattern eventually became hard to ignore. Almost none of them were rejected because the underlying idea ...Read More
Writers tell me some version of the same thing often enough that I've stopped being surprised by it: they do their best work with a deadline bearing down, and their worst work when a project has no fixed end date at all. It sounds like a confession of bad ...Read More
The first draft of a chapter comes out of a writer in a rush some mornings — messy, but moving. Then the second pass arrives, and the same writer sits in front of the same document for an hour and produces four changed sentences. Ask them what happened ...Read More
The manuscript arrives three weeks late, and the covering email always says the same thing: "Sorry — I’ve been so busy." But editors see the file’s revision history, the timestamps, the chapter written in one desperate weekend after two months of silence. The author wasn’t busy. The author ...Read More
I marked mathematics papers for the better part of four decades — first as a teacher, later as an assistant principal who still couldn’t leave a red pen alone. When I moved into editing other people’s writing, colleagues assumed I was starting over. I wasn’t. Marking a proof ...Read More
Every editor knows the manuscript. It arrives with an apology attached: the author has been working on it for four years, has rewritten the opening chapter eleven times, and wants "one more pass" before anyone else sees it. The prose in that opening chapter is polished to a ...Read More