Another Essential Editor Publishes this week.

And no sooner had I entered the last post, than another Essential Edits editor has a release:

Halli Lilburn has a story out in the just released Tesseracts 22 from Edge Publishing (co-edited by my former boss, Loria Stevens, and Susan McGregor, whose first novel I edited years ago). Halli's story is "Joint Eaters" and she shares the Table of Contents with some very big names in Canadian speculative fiction.

New book by an Essential Edits editor

Cover reveal for forthcoming book from an Essential Edits editor: Jumpship Hope by Adria Laycraft published by Tyche Books.

Earth is a storm-ravaged wasteland

Humanity has fled the planet, establishing bases off-world. But disaster has struck the food crops of Luna Base, leaving the Orbitals starving, and Mars Colony ignores their pleas for aid.

Hot-headed pilot Janlin Kavanaugh will do anything to save her friends, so when SpaceOp captain Stepper Jordan proposes a sketchy plan to save their people, she immediately volunteers. Anything is better than slow starvation, even a risky voyage to an alien solar system in a ship with unproven Jump technology.

The mission faces unexpected dangers, and the mettle of Janlin and her crew is tested, against each other and the strange, new species they encounter. Can Janlin overcome mistrust and betrayal to salvage the mission and restore hope to her friends and herself?

Book release is set for Summer 2019--i.e., shortly.

Cat Rambo's links for SF&F Writers

Cat Rambo is a prominent SF&F writer and instructor, so her page of links is actually pretty helpful: LINKS FOR WRITERS.

Common Mistake #3 Less is More: Everything

"Less is more" also applies to, well, everything: metaphors, jokes, even surplus characters. I had a manuscript across my desk where a writer used essentially the same line twice within three pages. It was funny and it built up the speaker's character, but you can't get a laugh out of the same punchline twice in three pages; one of them had to go. Later that same day, I was reading another manuscript where the author introduced several characters, spent time describing them, building up their personalities, but then didn't actually have them do anything in the story. They were just sort of there . . . except for one character who sat out the entire story in the barn, and so wasn't even there. Maybe save the barn character for another story . . . Just because you thought of an image, or a metaphor or a character, or a funny line doesn't mean you have to use it. Keep to the point, keep things moving forward, and restrict yourself to your very best material.

Dave Duncan Website

The late Dave Duncan's website has been hacked...his family has moved the content to a new address: https://www.essentialedits.ca/Duncan/updates.htm

I am editing Dave Duncan's unfinished manuscripts for publication. (He's not done yet!) The first of these releases will be The Traitor's Son from Five Rivers in August 2021.

The 2019 Aurora Awards ballot has been announced: File 770 news Very pleased to see TIMEFALL by Alison Lohans, a book I edited for Five Rivers, made the shortlist for best YA novel.

Common Mistake #2 Less is More: Description

Another common mistake I see is beginning authors piling on the images. For example, the protagonist will ride his trusty steed into a forest, and the author will start a description of the forest with a nice image of the trees—and then another, and another and another and another until one cannot see the forest for the imagery....[sorry]. What I mean is, the first image will be striking, and the reader will think, "nice image!" and then read another couple of words and find another striking image, and think, "oh wow, another nice image—I can really see it;" and then bump into yet another image and think, "oh, that's, uh, vivid," and then another image and think, "say, this is really quite dense description". By the next image the reader is either getting impatient to get back to the story—which has likely ground to a halt—or going, "wait, what was that about the leaves again?", because one can only take in so many images piled atop one another before hitting sensory overload. The more images stacked up, the weaker each one becomes. One cannot emphasize the leaves and the trunks and the branches and the roots and the piles of dead leaves and the moss and the ants and that deer over there and the way the sun glints through the trees and the way the pattern of light dapples the forest floor and keep on to cover the entire ecology of the forest...because if everything is emphasized, nothing is.

Or, to put it another way, while it might have taken the writer three days to shape that description of the forest, and so had time to savor each carefully crafted image, the reader is going past at 300 words a minute. Okay, maybe if you're Proust or James Joyce, readers will slow down for you, but, um, you're not. Not yet, anyway. So less is more. Out of the ten images you've come up with, pick the best one; prune the rest. This will usually make the scene—and your writing—leaner, tighter and ever so much better.