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Notes to Editors from a writer seeking such ::PLEASE make this a sticky

J

JM_Lansing_52

Virgin
Joined
Nov 30, 2015
Posts
6
TO WOULD-BE EDITORS:

The first line of your profile should include you physical gender and age. (Yea, I know gender-identity is fluid.)

It would also be good to know if you are currently married, ever been, ever divorced, still single,...

Why? Today I spent two hours browsing the editor list. Lots of “I am really great.” And then I display their biography and I get to read: No answer, over 18, No answer, No answer, Nothing, No answer,…. Member since YESTERDAY!

---------------------

I am a sixty three year old male. I have been writing erotica stories for the past three years that are from a first person viewpoint. These first persons are male and female. They are late-teens to late-seventies in age. I am using pseudonyms. This user account has no posted stories.

I want to work with editors that are roughly the same age and sex as is the narrator of the story.

Why? I do have some dim memories of being twenty five and naked. BUT, These memories are thirty-eight years old. And they are from when it was 1977.

I want a mid-twenties “girl” to edit my stories about a mid-twenties girl in college and grad school and married at twenty eight. I do not want a man of my age advising me about what a woman actually feels at that age, at this time.

I want a mid-thirties woman editing my stories about a married woman discovering sex with others.

I want an early forties man working on my early forties guy stories.

I want someone who is there now. Not just remembering as I am.


Status: Another example:

A legally married person has a different view of the world than someone not. A married person will know I am correct. A person who has not been married and attempts to tell me I am incorrect is a moron. I prefer to know that up-front.

The same for someone who is still, or has primarily been, single. I cannot know what that is like now that I have been legally married for more than thirty years.

The same for a person who has been divorced. Never legally divorced? No clue.

---------------
Location:

I have a story that is set in Paris. Would be good to have someone who is located there be clearly identified.

=============

PLEASE: Answer ALL of the questions.

-----------

Also: I am amazed at the number of new editors who have joined in the past four months. Most with no experience. This is not a bad thing. It is just interesting.

J
 
I don't really see the need to start getting into posting personal preference stickies. You should work out all of this yourself with prospective editors. Some of what you ask for is unnecessarily intrusive, I think, and you're not really entitled to someone life story just because you need help.
 
I can see asking that the prospective editor's qualifications and experience should be posted, but I think you're overreaching to ask for more personal information. You need an editor to help with structure, punctuation, grammar, phrasing, and so on, but it seems like you want them to empathize with your character. I think that is beyond the normal role of an editor.
 
OP, I understand why you would like the info you stated. However, there are many people on Lit who don't want to give out that information for privacy reasons. As Sr suggested, this is something that might be worked out with the editor. However, you don't really know who the person is on the other end of the pc. They could tell you what you want to hear, but in reality they may be the opposite.

And even if the editor fits your requirements, they still may not be the right editor for you and your story.

A story set in Paris sounds interesting as I majored in French, but I have never been out of the states.

:rose:
 
Jehoram posted an essay some time ago on the writer-editor relationship, which might be worth reading. (Disclaimer of sorts: specifically he was talking about his experiences as a writer with me as an editor, and vice versa.) The main point, as I recall, is that an editor from a different background can sometimes be helpful in giving the writer a different perspective than the one he or she brings to the work. I agree to some extent, although it may have been more important for him than it was for me.

It did bring up something, though, that got me thinking. If a writer is simply going for high ratings, it might be better to go with an editor who is as much like the writer as possible, since the editor knows what "buttons" are pushed most effectively. If his target was young males, I doubt if I could have done a good job telling him where to go with it. (Thankfully, I didn't have to.) If I said that a certain scene didn't work for me, that information might have been totally irrelevant coming from a sixty-ish woman. The best I could do would be to tell him where he was being blatantly unrealistic, but sometimes it's the very unrealism that makes it good erotica. Maybe the thing to put on your profile is a list of the stuff you've written that you think epitomizes your work, so that the prospective writer can determine how good a fit you might be for her or him.
 
Athalia said:
Jehoram posted an essay some time ago on the writer-editor relationship, which might be worth reading. (Disclaimer of sorts: specifically he was talking about his experiences as a writer with me as an editor, and vice versa.) The main point, as I recall, is that an editor from a different background can sometimes be helpful in giving the writer a different perspective than the one he or she brings to the work. I agree to some extent, although it may have been more important for him than it was for me.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I guess it was. But you've summed up what I had to say pretty well. I've got to add that her suggestions mostly came in the form of "You know, you could broaden your audience to include readers like me if you..." and let me take it from there. That kind of goes outside the usual editorial responsibilities, but since we were friends long before we were collaborators, she knew that I'd want to hear that.

The best I could do would be to tell him where he was being blatantly unrealistic, but sometimes it's the very unrealism that makes it good erotica.
Click to expand...

It's that whole thing about writing fantasy, right? Writing about a world with people with 36DDD tits and 10" wangs, for people who like that kind of thing. You'd have been a horrible editor then, although you could still do things like proofread, check grammar, and tell me when I started out with six people in the room and ended up with twelve, and like that.

Maybe the thing to put on your profile is a list of the stuff you've written that you think epitomizes your work, so that the prospective writer can determine how good a fit you might be for her or him.
Click to expand...

Not a bad idea.
 
Since when is age and sexual identity a real necessary point of being able to edit? It is possible for a heterosexual woman of 50, to edit a sex scene of a homosexual male couple in their 30's without any issues.
 
itotia said:
Since when is age and sexual identity a real necessary point of being able to edit? It is possible for a heterosexual woman of 50, to edit a sex scene of a homosexual male couple in their 30's without any issues.
Click to expand...

Copyediting is possible, certainly. There would be a bit of a shortfall if anything content-wise had to do with some detailed aspect of the emotions and sensations of a sex scene. I'm bisexual, and fucking a woman is not quite the same thing--in sensation or my emotions (or even in some technical aspects), at least--as fucking or being fucked by a man. So, yes, there could be "issues." But editing for grammar, spelling (except maybe the blond/blonde thing), and punctuation shouldn't be much of an issue, though.

For that matter, there could even be issues involved in a twenty-year-old GM editor editing a sex scene between two men in their thirties. The sensations and emotions (and even positions) are different, in my experience at twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty in one dimension and with a partner the same age, appreciably younger, or appreciably older in another dimension. The twenty-year GM editor quite possibly would be out to sea on anything involving an older man than twenty.

That said, my editor for a GM story has always been--and will always be--a gay male--and if it were my choice it would be a GM from the age period of my characters' sexual coupling.
 
itotia said:
Since when is age and sexual identity a real necessary point of being able to edit? It is possible for a heterosexual woman of 50, to edit a sex scene of a homosexual male couple in their 30's without any issues.
Click to expand...

Depends what kind of editing's required. If you just need spelling and grammar edits per Chicago Manual of Style etc, then yeah, the author's age and sexual identity are pretty much irrelevant.

But, let me put it this way: if you frequent the First Time category on this site, you'll find quite a few male-female-first-time stories written by guys who think the hymen is about six inches inside the vagina. There was an infamous bit of fanfic that featured the breaking of a guy's hymen during first-time male-male sex, because apparently the author was not exactly an expert on M-M and really thought butt hymens were a thing.

Sooner or later most of us want to write something that's outside our personal experience. Research is important, but it can be very helpful to have an editor who can catch mistakes that slip through.
 
I can't see how personal details are relevant. Age? There are a lot of very bright teenagers who have edited school newspapers and run their own websites. A nineteen year old can certainly be capable of editing fiction, erotic or not, while a lot of 60 year olds aren't.

Knowledge of the content is another matter. Some of that can be learned, some has to be experienced first hand.

I see no reason a good, experienced editor can't be essentially anonymous.
 
JM_Lansing_52 said:
TO WOULD-BE EDITORS:

The first line of your profile should include you physical gender and age. (Yea, I know gender-identity is fluid.)

It would also be good to know if you are currently married, ever been, ever divorced, still single,...
Click to expand...

I can appreciate why you want to know these things, but as per LadyVer's response many people have good reasons for not making them public.

I'd add to that - as far as I can tell, it's much harder for authors to find competent editors here than vice versa, so editors don't have much incentive to post that info. My profile is mostly "no answer" and I already get as much editing work as I have time for.

If you want an editor from a specific demographic, probably your best bet is to post on the forum indicating what you're looking for, and see what bites you get.
 
Five_Inch_Heels said:
I can't see how personal details are relevant. Age? There are a lot of very bright teenagers who have edited school newspapers and run their own websites. A nineteen year old can certainly be capable of editing fiction, erotic or not, while a lot of 60 year olds aren't.

Knowledge of the content is another matter. Some of that can be learned, some has to be experienced first hand.

I see no reason a good, experienced editor can't be essentially anonymous.
Click to expand...

I think maybe you're speaking of pretty shallow stories, and offer me a trained editor of fifty-five who had edited 150 books in my genre and a nineteen-year-old high school newspaper editor to work on my story, and I'll pick the fifty-five-year-old 153 times out of 100. Let's not be ridiculous here.
 
I think your request is ludicrous. The best thing about editors is their non-biased, professional ability to edit a story without going through the lens of their own biases. If you, as a writer, can write characters of all different ages and sexes, why can't an editor edit any age or sex? As for not giving personal info on Lit. , most of us write under pseudonyms because we don't want our real info out in Lit. I'd say, get over it. Any editor who is so biased as to alter your work through his own lens, isn't worth his salt as an editor. It is as if you were saying: "I am looking for a certain bias so my stories won't have to meet the strict requirements of generality, That is, appeal to a wide audience.

I also agree with Pilot that experience counts for a hell of a lot, but an editor can cite experience when asked, without revealing personal information. Damned if I want some 18 year old editor telling me my stories are boring because they think all sex lasts 5 minutes.
 
JM_Lansing_52 said:
TO WOULD-BE EDITORS:

The first line of your profile should include you physical gender and age. (Yea, I know gender-identity is fluid.)

It would also be good to know if you are currently married, ever been, ever divorced, still single,...

Why? Today I spent two hours browsing the editor list. Lots of “I am really great.” And then I display their biography and I get to read: No answer, over 18, No answer, No answer, Nothing, No answer,…. Member since YESTERDAY!

---------------------

I am a sixty three year old male. I have been writing erotica stories for the past three years that are from a first person viewpoint. These first persons are male and female. They are late-teens to late-seventies in age. I am using pseudonyms. This user account has no posted stories.

I want to work with editors that are roughly the same age and sex as is the narrator of the story.

Why? I do have some dim memories of being twenty five and naked. BUT, These memories are thirty-eight years old. And they are from when it was 1977.

I want a mid-twenties “girl” to edit my stories about a mid-twenties girl in college and grad school and married at twenty eight. I do not want a man of my age advising me about what a woman actually feels at that age, at this time.

I want a mid-thirties woman editing my stories about a married woman discovering sex with others.

I want an early forties man working on my early forties guy stories.

I want someone who is there now. Not just remembering as I am.


Status: Another example:

A legally married person has a different view of the world than someone not. A married person will know I am correct. A person who has not been married and attempts to tell me I am incorrect is a moron. I prefer to know that up-front.

The same for someone who is still, or has primarily been, single. I cannot know what that is like now that I have been legally married for more than thirty years.

The same for a person who has been divorced. Never legally divorced? No clue.

---------------
Location:

I have a story that is set in Paris. Would be good to have someone who is located there be clearly identified.

=============

PLEASE: Answer ALL of the questions.

-----------

Also: I am amazed at the number of new editors who have joined in the past four months. Most with no experience. This is not a bad thing. It is just interesting.

J
Click to expand...

Don't forget to specify which readers you want for your stories as well. It's not as if you are supposed to paint such a great picture with your writing that the reader gets immersed. It's up to him to bring his relevant experience to your story. Makes it much easier to write, I'm sure!! Of course you won't have any female characters since you have no experience with being one...

*Making myself a quick note to not read or edit anything you write*
 
sr71plt said:
And do remember to name them by full name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and body parts stats. :D
Click to expand...


We all know how important it is to put in a cup size. Otherwise she isn't real!

It doesn't feel very sticky yet, I'm not going to hold my breath :)
 
sr71plt said:
Copyediting is possible, certainly. There would be a bit of a shortfall if anything content-wise had to do with some detailed aspect of the emotions and sensations of a sex scene. I'm bisexual, and fucking a woman is not quite the same thing--in sensation or my emotions (or even in some technical aspects), at least--as fucking or being fucked by a man. So, yes, there could be "issues." But editing for grammar, spelling (except maybe the blond/blonde thing), and punctuation shouldn't be much of an issue, though.

For that matter, there could even be issues involved in a twenty-year-old GM editor editing a sex scene between two men in their thirties. The sensations and emotions (and even positions) are different, in my experience at twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty in one dimension and with a partner the same age, appreciably younger, or appreciably older in another dimension. The twenty-year GM editor quite possibly would be out to sea on anything involving an older man than twenty.

That said, my editor for a GM story has always been--and will always be--a gay male--and if it were my choice it would be a GM from the age period of my characters' sexual coupling.
Click to expand...

Thank you. That was what I was trying to say.

As others have pointed out, editing can be, at some level, simply checking for spelling and grammar. There are many people who are competent at this. But when it comes to reality-checking copy, and if realism is important to the writer, then some life-experience is essential, or at least a familiarity with the genre extensive enough that you know which tropes can pass for reality for the intended reader.
 
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