Red-Inked
Ut oh!
Back during school, if ever a paper or test was returned to you looking like this one, or bearing even a single teacher comment in red, it was usually indicative of bad news, and no doubt triggered a reflexive stomach drop or hard swallow.
But when I received these notes from my editor, Lindsay R.A. Dierking of The Awakened Press before the publishing of Lying Down with Dogs, I was delighted. Because this was instead the markings of collaboration, continuity, and creation; a badge of honor for birthing a book that had been in the making for over a dozen years, on and off.
Lindsay and I spent roughly six months of last year on weekly, 90-minute Zoom calls during the developmental editing process whereby, painstakingly at times, we deliberated over a word choice, sentence structure, tense, paragraph placement, location, or character description. Tedious? No way!
For me, it was pure enjoyment like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle . . . if you like that kind of thing. Most fun of all was when Lindsay would ask me to describe to her a character's facial expression or what they were doing with their hands at a given moment, in my mind's eye. That was all the prompting I required. Instinctively, I began typing away to craft a more believable bartender, boyfriend or benefactress.
It's not always the case where two people ebb and flow organically in a non-choreographed dance, and especially in collaborative scenarios. But when that happens, it's magic, and ever so satisfying.
So, the moral of this story is: bring on the red ink! All feedback is an opportunity for improvement, and in my life's experience, the gestalt is always better than its individual parts.
All the best,
Natalie
