DeeBee: Blog

Update: Thanks for all of you who volunteered to help with proofreading & editing. I have now agreed to work with one of you and I hope that that we can start posting soon.

Looking proofreader/editor for a new, fully written, story:

"Revenge. Coming back home after two years of torture and banishment only one things is sure for Joel: There will be revenge for those involved. But will there also be reconciliation and forgiveness? Or are the wounds too deep, too infected? And if his enemies did not worry about the collateral damage why should he?"

Being non-native writer there probably are some really silly errors, wrong words etc. - so the task may not be that easy. If you are interested I can send the first chapter so that the volunteer can get sample what to expect. 23 chapters total, 200k in single text file. Certainly not the greatest example of fiction but something I needed to write out.

It seems managed to scare my first editor away with my text - it was only 700k plain text ;-) and terrible English... ...but I already started contacting another possible victim. In any case I intend to post the whole story as it has already been finished. For your readers' sake I hope that the rest of the chapters will be edited before posting.

Another, shorter, and a bit darker story is also 'almost there'. That one I'll probably proofread at least twice before asking any editors. Even if I hate reading my own stories. I know what will happen - and if I change it it is like chancing history, cheating. Or more likely these are just excuses to avoid seeing the clumsiness of your own stories.

I had never thought that I should be explaining anything to anybody - I just had that silly urge to write. But the response I have now received made me reconsider things a bit and therefore I decided to add this.

First of all, I come from Northern Europe, have been reading damned lot all my age but I had never ever considered to start writing fiction, really. I have been writing technical jargon in English for most of my adult life and I'm quite sure that nobody really WANTS to read it. I don't. And now I'm sidestepping. My wife says that I'm quite good at it.

In the beginning there was no idea to start writing, just some day- - or in fact 'nightdreaming' I was doing to amuse myself while lying awake in the middle of the night. You can probably thank our cats for that. Those daydreams started to form serial stories with a beginning and an end and at some point I got the tiniest of an idea that maybe, just maybe I could write it out - and publish it. As you can do it anonymously in the net what is there to lose? Besides, writing out those stories seemed to be the only way to get rid of them ;-/

So yes, what can you lose when you publish your stories - except your dignity, self-esteem and a few other things? I had my story and suddenly also very cold feet. For some time I considered asking randomly for editors to correct my text as I have no delusion about my grammar and vocabulary. Or maybe I do as I published the first four chapters of my first finalized story anyway.

But now, thanks to some fine people around here I have some offers form some people who really are not afraid of hard work. Since I'm quite sure editing and correcting my texts to be somewhat readable will be hard work. I thank for all the comments this far and maybe I'll be able to steal some time to finish some other stories, too. The ideas are already there and I have this feeling that they need to written out. Which is somewhat scary.