aroslav: Blog

This is number fifty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I WENT TO GRAD SCHOOL in 1976 to study Design and Technical Theatre. By the end of 1978, I’d designed and built twenty-four shows in twenty-four months. I was utterly burned out. I quit my job in a small college theatre department, quit my marriage, and quit just about everything else in my life. I decided to go into something low-stress—like publishing.

I spent five years working inside a couple of different companies to produce their newsletters and marketing materials. Then the desktop publishing revolution occurred and I started my first business as an independent publisher. I had corporate contracts to publish trade journals, tabloids, and newsletters under my new business name, The Wordsmythe.

For the past forty years, I’ve been involved one way or another in publishing—everything from writing and editing to layout and design to publishing technology and training. It’s been a heady trip, that put me in front of hundreds of industry professionals. We changed an industry.

Back in the early stages of desktop publishing, Robin Williams—the author, not the comedian—wrote a ground-breaking book titled The Mac is Not a Typewriter. It was the first treatise I’m aware of that defined the differences between writing and publishing, and between word processing and typesetting.

One of her first rules was “No double spaces after punctuation!” That had been a principle in typesetting for four hundred years, but typing teachers on typewriters had been teaching double-space after a period since the typewriter was invented in 1868. The difference was that typewriters were monospaced and typesetters had variable spacing.

My 2010 award winning Nathan Everett novel, The Gutenberg Rubric, was the culmination of twenty years of research and teaching printing and publishing. I have previously mentioned the extent of editing this book went through. Developmental editing was provided by The Book Doctor, Jason Black. Line editing was by Michele Palmer. Proofreading was handled by a crew of volunteer editors who each brought a unique perspective to the process. And every native German speaker who has read the book has corrected something different in my German phrasing.

But when it was finally time to produce a book that was print worthy, it came back to me—not as author, but as book designer.

The Gutenberg Rubric was offered in print long before it made its eBook appearance in 2011. But the editing process was far from over when it reached me. I still had to do a mechanical edit.

The Gutenberg Rubric is available in both print and eBook for all formats.

Before I actually produce a book, it goes through at least two and often three levels of mechanical edit.

The first level is done in the word processing program. (MS Word for me.) I am astounded to know how many people who consider themselves experts in using Word have no concept of how to use styles. I have my own Word manuscript template that I immediately copy any received manuscript into before I go through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph to apply appropriate styles to it. The styles are named simple things like “ChapterHead,” “ChapterFirst,” “Body,” “Break,” “BreakFirst,” and “Quote.” There are others and I have a library of styles I can add for complex books.

When all the paragraphs have been properly tagged, I do global search and replace for double-spaces, double-returns, space before a return, space after a return, and many things that I might have noticed in the initial scan. There may be styles in the original manuscript that conflict with the layout styles. Perhaps I want some number of words at the beginning of the chapter to be in all caps. These are all mechanical editing decisions.

When the manuscript is truly clean, including not having stray fonts in it anywhere, I place the text in my layout program. I use Adobe InDesign for all my layout of both print and eBooks. MS Word is a word processing program. It is not a publishing program. Books in either eBook or print that are published from a word processing program are almost always identifiable as amateurish and poorly designed.

Once I set the specifications for the styles that I’ve defined, I go through the entire book line-by-line to make visual adjustments. If I’m laying out a print book, visual adjustments might be to fine-tune spacing or hyphenation for widow and orphan control. Widows and orphans are single words, syllables, or even lines of a paragraph that appear at the end or beginning of a page, or a single word or syllable on a line at the end of a paragraph. It’s one of the characteristics in books that can drive a reader crazy as they lose the train of thought from one page to another.

Setting up introductory paragraphs for chapters may involve a drop capital (first character of the paragraph that is two or three lines tall). In nearly every case, the spacing of those lines needs to be adjusted so the lines don’t all look like they start with the same letter.

I’ll check for hyphenation ladders—instances where a hyphen ends two or more consecutive lines. I’ll check to be sure that all quotation marks and apostrophes have been converted to a curled mark instead of a straight mark, and ensure that inch and foot marks have not been converted to curly quotes. I will check all style overrides (italics, bold, etc.) and verify they are applied only to the word or words they were intended for, and to be sure the software has not aberrantly substituted a different font.

Preparing an eBook in InDesign requires different mechanics. No overriding spacing for widows and orphans or for drop caps. The book designer has limited control over what is seen in the eBook because the reader can change devices from small screens to large screens, can change typefaces to what they prefer, can change type size, and can even change background color. In the mechanical edit, I will test the eBook output on several device simulations to be sure nothing in the book creates a problem, like a static-size picture that won’t fit on some pages!

I will simply mention the third possible mechanical edit most of my own books go through is to convert the book to html and code all the entities in the book. On my own website, entities are correctly rendered, but there are some features that may have overrides in the layout engine for the site. For example, the apostrophe at the beginning of ’60s may be automatically changed to an open single quote, even if I have coded the correct entity in the html. I have had people point out “my error” on that one more than once. Intelligent software really isn’t.

So, yes. Even after the developmental edit, the rewrite, the structural edit, the copy edit, the line edit, and proofreading, a professionally published book still needs a mechanical edit and that is a completely different process.

Next week—let’s get off editing for a while. I recall Kenny Rogers being asked in an interview about his work with Dolly Parton, “Are they real?” He responded, “No. They’re all wigs.” Believe it or not, people ask me the same question—but it isn’t about Dolly! Next week: “Are They Real?”

This is number fifty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing. Apparently, I did everything except Save this blog post yesterday. My apologies.
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“THIS HAS BEEN EDITED and proofread by three different people. Two of them are English teachers. All you need to do is format it for publication.”

That was literally a cover letter I received for a book I planned to publish. I responded by telling Mark that if it went out with my publishing company name on it, the least I would do was proofread it. He thought I was wasting my time and his money.

When I finished my read-through I wrote back to this fine author.

“Mark, I can’t guarantee I found every error in this manuscript, but there are 783 fewer now.”

English teachers are not the same as editors.

I’ve published a hundred books for different authors, and I have yet to see one that was ready when I received it. A top tier literary agent once sent me a manuscript and asked me to publish it because the author was dying and she didn’t feel she had time to put it through the traditional publishing process. The book was written by an English teacher and the manuscript had been sent to a highly recommended professional editor in New York who charged quite a lot to edit the book. I was shocked at the condition of the manuscript I received—things a competent editor should have corrected immediately.

This English teacher author had quoted an article from The New Yorker magazine. Not a sentence, but the entire article! I asked him if he had permission to use it. He said he didn’t think he needed permission because his book was educational. I suggested that he was publishing the book for profit and had plagiarized a very large and famous magazine. He checked with the publisher and after being told it would cost $500 to reprint the article, decided his book didn’t really need that. What he didn’t realize was that it could have cost ten to a hundred times that if he had published the article without permission!

Most of us don’t even know what to look for in an editor or what kind of editor we need. There are many different kinds of editing, and they will all play a part in your successful story.

I’ve mentioned the role of a developmental editor as fundamental to getting a book written in the first place. I’ll come back to that in a future post. Today, I’d like to focus on the line editor and the proofreader.

A line editor will look at each line of your manuscript and examine it for syntax, grammar, understanding, and accuracy. Imagine going through a manuscript line-by-line. The biggest problem many amateur (as in unpaid) editors have is becoming involved in the story and forgetting to edit. That’s one of the problems with alpha readers I could have mentioned in my previous post. They become so caught up in reading the story, they forget to edit it.

Some of the things a line editor will look for include misuse of words like homonyms—their there they’re, your you’re, than then, by buy, to two too, and many more—words that don’t actually mean what the author intended, and words that are used too frequently in a short span. If every story I’ve read had simply had a good line editor, the sum quality across the board would have gone up by fifty percent.

A really good line editor will also spot inaccuracies in the manuscript, though down-and-dirty fact-checking should probably be done by a copy editor.

My recently published fifth book in the “Photo Finish” series contained an error that should have been caught in editing. In Over Exposure, two characters are arrested and charged in court. They post bail and then I made an off-hand comment that by four o’clock, they were released on their own recognizance. I received this immediate response by email when the chapter posted:

No!
Release on your own recognizance means you don't have to pay bail. Simply put, OR release is no-cost bail. Defendants released on their own recognizance need only sign a written promise to appear in court as required. No bail has to be paid, either to the court or to a bail bond seller.

Well, I’ve never been held for bail and didn’t know the distinction. My editor (the one who was a lawyer for forty years) should have! But I spelled it all correctly, so the proofreader didn’t catch it.

Over Exposure and all six of the Photo Finish books are now available on Bookapy.
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Line editing will reveal awkward sentences that just need to be rearranged. A good line editor will find inconsistencies in what has been said. I recently wrote about a four-and-a-half-year-old girl in one section of a chapter and just a few pages later talked about her upcoming fourth birthday. Line editing catches that kind of error.

But even though a line editor will correct spelling and punctuation, the final pass on that is done by the proofreader. On the surface, you’ll think the proofreader and the line editor do the same thing because they both look for syntax, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation. They both have to read carefully, not for entertainment. The best distinction I can draw is that a line editor goes line-by-line through the manuscript and a proofreader goes word-by-word.

While a proofreader will also spot misuse of words, homonyms, and repeated words, most of those should already have been corrected. The proofreader will spot a missing closed quotation mark at the end of a paragraph. She’ll determine if the correct spelling of a word is transferal or transferral. (And probably note that the correct word would simply be transfer.) He’ll correctly note that an additional comma is needed in the statement, “I’d like to thank my parents, Paul McCartney and Martin Luther King Jr.” She’ll correct whether a closed quotation mark falls inside or outside the period in the sentence.

And sometimes the author will disagree with the editor. He will say, “That’s not what I meant!” In most cases, if the editor has tried to correct something to a statement the author didn’t mean, then the author should consider rewriting the entire sentence to be clearer. And there are differences of dialect, education, and even region. I have an editor who insisted that nearly every instance of the word “anymore” should be “any more.” I hold that it should only be two words if I can answer the question “more what?”

I, the author, got the last word on the matter, whether I was right or wrong!
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Really? You mean there is more editing to be done? When is the book ever finished? If your book is going to market for sale on any of the major websites in either eBook or print, then someone has to actually prepare it and lay it out. Next week, “Mechanical Editing.”

This is number fifty-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“JUST GET IT DOWN on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it.”

If you are a rapid writer like I am, that statement might be your byword. But this was Maxwell Perkins’ advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1919; it applies even if you are using a pencil and paper to capture your first draft. You see, Maxwell Perkins was an editor—possibly one of the most famous editors of all time. He started his career at Scribner’s in 1919 when he signed F. Scott Fitzgerald. No one else at Scribner’s wanted Fitzgerald’s book, The Romantic Egotist, but Perkins worked with Fitzgerald on rewriting the book until Scribner’s agreed to publish it as This Side of Paradise in 1920.

Perkins was of a breed of editor that is difficult to find and build a relationship with today. Most of the time these days, we are lucky to find a competent proofreader, let alone someone who actually understands how to get the most out of an author’s manuscript. After all, what are we willing to pay them?

And that doesn’t surprise me. Over 4 million new books were published in 2023. Of those, 2.3 million were self-published. The sheer volume of new titles spreads the number of editors pretty thinly across the landscape. There are around 74,500 editors “employed” in the United States.

“Would you like fries with that?”

The derogatory statement, often applied to English majors, implies there is no job market for them. The average wage of an employed editor is a little over $51,000. Those with a master’s degree earn substantially more, boosting the mean wage to over $71,000.

What do they do to earn their money?

I had the great good fortune to work with The Book Doctor, Jason Black, on several of my books over the years, including the series of Devon Layne’s “Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures.” He even worked with me on the titles of the books.

I’d managed to title the first one Redtail, because the initial concept had been that the bird’s call would trigger the transfer of Cole from his present to the 1800s. But I hadn’t really planned out a series of books, so I had no idea what to call the second and third books when I started working on them. I considered one being titled Wapiti and having an elk’s bugle be the trigger. Another idea was Greywolf, with the howl of a wolf being the trigger.

“You know, Redtail isn’t just the name of a type of hawk,” Jason said. “It’s also descriptive of a characteristic of that bird. Instead of trying to think of another name of an animal, try thinking of a description that you can encapsulate into just as concise a word.”

I want to point out, he did not suggest the name. He pointed me in a direction that enabled me to arrive at the names, Blackfeather (a raven) and Yelloweye (an owl). That is certainly not the only way he helped me on the series, but it is exemplary of the kind of help a developmental editor can give.

It was that kind of story and character arc work that enabled me to create the Clitorides Award-winning Best Erotic Western Story of 2015 (Blackfeather) and 2017 (Yelloweye) available on Bookapy.

That type of editor is rare these days, especially when we ask them to work for free. I indicated there were 74,500 “employed” editors in the US. But we are looking for editors who will work for the same wage we do: nothing.

Instead, we attempt to substitute the Alpha Reader.

This is a person (or people) who will read the first draft of a story (sometimes as it’s written) and respond to it with comments. I have several alpha readers, but only a couple give me useful feedback. The typical Alpha Reader is often reading your story because he already likes what you write and doesn’t really want to challenge you too much. If you have one or more alpha readers who will thoroughly and thoughtfully comment on the story line and the character development, you will have a treasure.

But since alpha readers are what we depend on for those all-important developmental edits, perhaps it would be a good idea to list out what is expected in alpha reader feedback.

First, we all love to have our egos stroked by the reader/friend who likes what we’ve written. “Nice work!” “Good chapter.” “Keep up the good work.” Those are all nice to have, but don’t advance our development of the story.

Second, alpha readers need to not be afraid to constructively criticize. Yes, constructively. None of us need to hear “This sucks.” We need statements like,
“It’s hard to believe this character would do this. I don’t see the motivation.”
“We seem to have jumped an awful long way without a transition here. I was lost for several paragraphs.”
“Everything seems too easy for the hero. There’s no excuse for him/her to fail. Steal his shoes!”

Of course, as authors, we need to be willing to accept criticism as well as we do praise. Responding to the criticism with the statement, “You obviously don’t understand the point of the story,” only puts down the attempt to help and will result in the reader backing off in his criticism. If you truly believe the reader doesn’t understand the point, then perhaps you should work on making the point more understandable!

Third, the alpha reader should be aware of and point out obstacles and barriers.
“I couldn’t keep track of who was speaking in this section of dialog. I got the characters switched.”
“I can’t tell if this section is supposed to be a flashback or a dream or if it’s really happening now.”
“The names are all so similar (Carl, Karla, Karlene, and Carol) that I forget who is who. They all sound the same.”

Finally, it’s important for the alpha reader to understand he or she is not the author. “You should have Carl get in trouble with Karla and Karlene will find out and break up with Carl right before he meets Carol.” Sure, that might be one storyline that could be pursued, but it may not be the story the author is writing. The author is the author. The reader is not.

I would be remiss if I did not remind you that when you read a story that has been published, for example on SOL, you are not an alpha reader. It’s not that describing your response to the work is inappropriate. We usually love to hear the comments of readers and even engage with them. But the work isn’t going to change at that point. It’s been published, perhaps as an eBook or even paperback in addition to the serial you are reading. Think in terms of providing feedback that will help the author in his or her next book.

You probably thought this was going to be about proofreading and sentence structure. That is another level of editing and I’ll talk about line editors and proofreaders next week in, “That’s Not What I Meant!”

This is number fifty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“I’VE VISITED a lot of places I’ve never been.” That’s kind of a typical statement for an avid reader. Every book takes them someplace they’ve never been. They store up vivid memories of exotic locations, alien planets, fantasy jungles—all from the books they read.

It’s a little different than that for me. Yes, there are places I read about that became very real to me. But I dream.

My dreams are often so vivid that when I remember them later, I assume they were real and not dreams at all. I remember holding Pam W. in my arms in high school. I pressed her to me and felt her breath on my cheek. I spent a week thinking I was dating Pam W. and waiting to hold hands with her as we walked out of school. As if Pam W. would ever even say hello to me!

Last night I woke up at 3:30 a.m. during a dream. I’d entered a rather bizarre theatre. The stage was a proscenium—just a hole cut in a wall with a platform behind it to perform on. The seats were gym bleachers that went up six or eight rows and started about twenty feet back from the stage. But they weren’t just in front of the stage. They extended a hundred feet left and right of the stage, just facing a bare wall.

I was trying to find a seat where I could at least partially see the stage when I saw two women come into the theatre. I recognized them as the new owners of a favorite RV park where I intended to camp soon. That led to the realization that I hadn’t made a reservation. I rushed to the women to ask if they could still get me in and we were discussing whether that would require a $50 deposit… When I woke up.

I lay in bed, smiling, thinking I really needed to stop at that RV park again soon. Then I started asking myself where it was, because I needed to plan my next trip. I racked my brain to remember where exactly that park was located. I retraced my trips over the past ten years and could not remember where it was! It had the feeling of California, but I could remember nearly all the major places I’d camped in California. It wasn’t there. I continued to go state-by-state through all the routes I’d taken and places I’d camped.

Three hours later, I got out of bed, finally convinced that there was no such RV park or highway and city. Sometime in the past ten years or so, while traveling with my truck and trailer, I’d dreamed that location and it was so complete and vivid, I thought I’d been there. Now, I don’t think it exists at all!

Vividly realistic dreams are not a unique occurrence for me. Many years ago, I dreamed that I’d injured my knee. It didn’t hurt when I woke up, but I carried with me the conviction that I had bad knees. I considered running at one time, but simply shook my head and said “My knees won’t let me do that!” It wasn’t until I went to a trainer to lose some weight and he questioned me about what I’d done to ruin my knees that I realized I couldn’t think of having done anything that ruined them. That day, I started running and had no problem with my knees at all!

My dreams have influenced my writing many times. When I was still a child (sometime between 10 and 14), I had a dream that was repeated periodically over the years with exactly the same scenario, so realistic to me that despite its impossibilities, it had the power of being a memory. Twenty years later, when I had the dream again, I incorporated it into the first novel I wrote, Behind the Ivory Veil.

In my dream, I was disturbed from my sleep in my attic bedroom and looked out the vent window to see neighbors and strangers alike, lighting bonfires and setting everything they could find ablaze. I rushed downstairs and out to find out what was wrong and was told it was a sign from God that it was the end of the world and they were lighting the hellfire. They pointed up and I saw dozens of moons crossing the sky. They were in all phases: new, quarter, waning, waxing, full.

I had a new Bible and had been studying faithfully. I attempted to convince the people that this wasn’t a sign of the end, but was a fulfillment of the scripture that said “Many moons shall come and go, but my Word lives on.” Let’s ignore the blatant misquoting of scripture as well as the ridiculousness of the moons in the sky.

Suffice it to say that this prophet was not received in his own country and was pursued by the fanatics. I had a sure sense of direction at that age. East was history: Washington, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, and even Europe. South was the backwoods and hillbillies. I’d been to the Ozarks and to Kentucky. West was the City, not just the comparably small city I was used to, but Chicago. The real city. But North was a sacred direction. I knew that in the North was safety. I fled to the North to escape to the Northern Steppes, which I interpreted as literal steps that I had to climb. They led to the temple of Aurora Borealis, the Northern Light. There, the three sacred sisters, Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy, would follow me all the days of my life and I would dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Imagine how vivid and real that repeating dream was that I can recount it so accurately sixty years later. And ultimately, that dream became the basis of Wesley’s captivity in Behind the Ivory Veil. Perhaps it has become as real to readers as it was to me.

Behind the Ivory Veil is available as The Props Master Prequel on Bookapy.

The point—there is a point to this—is that the reason places become real to people in stories… the reason Narnia and Middle Earth and Metropolis and the Matrix and Olympus and Valhalla and Barsoom and Calahan’s Place are so memorably real, is because those places were real to the authors. That erotic scene in which Brian can feel the breath of his girlfriend on his cheek just before they kiss is real because it was real to me in my dream. The Temple of Aurora Borealis is real to Wesley because it was so vividly real to me in my adolescent dreams.

And who knows? In a future story somewhere along the line, there is an RV park waiting that is as real to me as any of the parks I’ve stayed in over the past ten years. If I do it right, it will be real to you, as well.

I’ve mentioned my editors in this and other blog posts. I think next week it will be time to take a first look at what an editor is and how to use one. We’ll call this one, “All hail the editor!”

The sixth book in the Photo Finish Trilogy, Follow Focus, has started posting on SOL this morning, and is available in eBook form. What a long ride it's been.

When I started this series, I had in mind that it would be just three books: one in high school, one in college, and one after graduation. But as memories took over my thoughts, the writing went on and on. Some might say too long, but others clamor for more words. More I say!

Well, Follow Focus is certainly more. This volume, spanning the three years following Nate's graduation from Columbia College Chicago has 45 chapters and will post twice a week until July 11!

In this book, Nate and his family have a variety of challenges to overcome. There's the draft board and former village constable, the new job and its travel demands, a new family member or two, and the challenge of going places he never thought he would go! Most of all, in this book, Nate is challenged to build a life that doesn't revolve around his studio, school, or dick.

I hope you enjoy this chapter in Nate's story as much as I enjoyed writing it.