Freelance Editing Services Booming?

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red pencil, grammar, comma

(photo: Martijn Nijenhuls, Creative Commons license)

Is there a bit of wishful thinking behind Simon Owens’s article from Mediashift on how self-publishing has been great for freelance designers and editors? I read so much—even real books with covers and an actual publisher—that clearly escaped a firm editorial hand and would have benefited from one. Self-publishing, he says, has created “a rising need for the kind of editors who offered the feedback that could be found at traditional publishing houses.” Recently, I bit the bullet and sent the manuscript of one of my novels to a freelance editor who specializes in mysteries and thrillers—and is an award-winning mystery author in her own right. It was one of the best writing decisions I’ve made. A terrific experience.

Perhaps Owens hopes his words will encourage more editors to enter the author support services field. The numbers are certainly there: An estimated 3,500 new books are published every day in the United States, not including ebooks. This estimate is based on the number of new ISBN numbers, which many ebook authors don’t bother to obtain. The first response to this need was a deluge of unqualified or barely qualified editors and designers, overpriced services of marginal value, and discouragement and frustration among authors. If an editor is not well qualified (including familiarity with genre considerations) or if the author is unwilling to make changes, an expensive and frustrating experience is in store.

If the numbers are there, the dollars may not be. The majority of self-published authors make less than $5,000 a year on their writing. Even established writers (i.e., members of the Authors Guild) are earning 24% less from their writing now versus five years ago, says a new survey.

The acute need for author support services and the highly variable quality of what was out there led to development of invaluable websites like Reedsy and Writer Beware. These sites are true author advocates—pointing out bad actors, scams, and other traps laid for those hopeful souls who say, “I just want to write. I don’t care about all this businessy stuff.”

Owens’s sources say competition among books actually requires “more emphasis on producing a professional product, both in design and editorial standards” and, I’d add, faith that the audience knows the difference, for which evidence is scant. And, of course, if an author isn’t looking to self-publish, a solidly edited product is essential for attracting agents and traditional publishers.

Two reputable-sounding sources for editorial assistance cited by Owens are Reedsy and New York Book Editors, whose freelancers generally are former employees of traditional New York publishing houses. Ideally, says freelance editor Rebecca Heyman, “There should be no gap in quality between independently-published work and traditionally-published work.”

The Names of Love

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Sara Forestier, Jacques Gamblin, The Names of Love

Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin in The Names of Love

I must have watched a French comedy and put the titles of all the films previewed on my Netflix list, because they keep coming. Bienvenue! This 2010 film (trailer) from France is the latest—a pleasant farce directed by Michel Leclerc and written by him and Baya Kasmi. It won three César Awards in 2011, including for best writing.

The story is about a young woman who uses sex as a weapon to persuade conservative politicians—men whom she considers “right-wing” in general—to embrace more liberal attitudes. From this comes some satirical moments, too, touching on the impermanence of supposed firmly held beliefs and the stereotyping of ethnic and religious groups based simply on how they look or what their names are.

Half-Algerian, the young woman’s name is Baya Benmahmoud, and she says, “no one in France has that name.” But she tackles one person too many when she confronts Arthur Martin—“15,207 people in France have the same name,” he tells us—a middle-aged scientist who does necropsies on dead birds, in order to detect possible human illnesses. Why are you scaring people? she demands to know at their first confrontational meeting.

The free spirit and the buttoned-up scientist are, of course, destined to fall for each other. The filmmakers show us how the two protagonists do not escape their childhoods, and we see them as children, as children commenting on their adult selves, and the fireworks when their polar opposite families, alas, meet.

In his New York Times review, Stephen Holden says the movie “has the tone and structure of early-to-middle Woody Allen, but infused with a dose of Gallic identity politics.” Sara Forestier is charming as the irrepressible extrovert Baya (she also snagged a César), and Jacques Gamblin is a persuasive match. A fun movie when you just want to be happily entertained (note: nudity)

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 73%; audiences, 79%. RogerEbert.com gives it 3 stars.

***Mistakes Can Kill You

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A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington, Amon Carter Museum

A Dash for the Timber, Frederic Remington (wikimedia.org)

By Louis L’Amour narrated by Lance Axt– This collection of short fiction is a gallop into the past, not so much into the post-Civil War time period when they take place, but into the decades when stories about the West were part of Americans’ shared cultural currency. These stories feature tough men with consciences, feisty women in need of a gunslinger, prospectors and gamblers, cattlemen and cowboys, clever Indian trackers, and bad hombres trying to steal all they can. In other words, a double-barreled blast of adventure.

L’Amour could spin these tales as well as anyone, and, if they are simple in construct, their impact was long-lasting. They gave Americans of several generations the visceral conviction there was always something more out there to be had—money and women, religious salvation, land and fortunes. They were the dreams that fed people. No matter how dire the circumstances, there was always the possibility of starting fresh, somewhere in the West.

Such innocent dreams created a unique American culture, and here, in this collection, the reader gets a gallon of that intoxicating mix. If your heart hasn’t been irredeemably steeped in the bitter tea of 21st century cynicism, you might enjoy these tales about an era, in fiction at least, when wrongs could be righted. Axt’s narration is pretty good, too, and for these purposes, his name is perfect.

“Where You From?”

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Lonesome DoveThe .Mic website has compiled a map purportedly showing the most popular novel set in each state based on Goodreads scores for books with more than 50,000 ratings. (What I found out from this is that Goodreads lets you search books by place, albeit not very efficiently. Try it here.) Many of these most popular books have been adapted into movies, “perhaps not coincidentally,” says .Mic author Kevin O’Keeffe, demonstrating the symbiosis between the two art forms.

The most popular book set in New York, no surprise, is The Godfather, and California’s the more high-falutin East of Eden. The choice for Texas, Lonesome Dove, seems perfect; Kansas’s is, predictably, The Wizard of Oz; Hawaii’s is Hawaii. The most popular book set in New Jersey is the 1970 Judy Blume classic, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Come on, New Jersey literati—nothing in the last 45 years?

Washingtonians will probably be surprised to see that the most popular book “set in D.C.” is Leaves of Grass, which as far as I know wasn’t set any particular place and isn’t a novel. Perhaps the collection’s ballooning from an original edition of 12 poems to, with multiple revisions over the years, more than 400, is what makes it especially apt for the nation’s capital. (My quick check of the Goodreads data suggests this pick should have been The Exorcist.)

Stephen King’s The Stand captures four states: Idaho, Vermont, Colorado, and Arkansas. The biggest surprise, however, was seeing Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet as the most popular book set in Utah. Really? Most of that book is set in London and the information about Utah is second-hand and none-too-accurate. And here we hit upon the biggest flaw in the method used to create this map. The story merely has to be plunked into a state, it does not necessarily have to reflect the people, geography, history, or culture of the place. Not at all the same thing as Faulkner’s Mississippi, or Cheever’s Manhattan and suburbs. This is how the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven—a novel whose catastrophes erase all borders and whose setting represents no locales that are more than names—can be picked to represent Michigan.

Of course, anyone can quibble. Still, it’s an interesting exercise and revealing something about how people’s opinions form about states they do not know. When we think of Staten Island, do we picture the Corleone family? When we think of Mississippi, do we recall The Help, and Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird? Sure we do.

Mr. Darcy Revealed?

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Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

(drawing: C.E. Brock, 1895, wikipedia)

At last! According to numerous media stories, including this one in The Express of London, British journalist and historian Dr. Susan Law has discovered the real-life model for that Pride and Prejudice heart-throb, Fitzwilliam Darcy. Law says Darcy was patterned after “the intense, charming and often controversial 1st Earl of Morley John Parker.”

According to Law, Austen became acquainted with Parker when she spent time at his home, Saltram House in Plymouth (pictured below), which happened to coincide with her work on P&P. Parker’s second wife, Frances, was one of Austen’s near friends. Frances also had a literary bent and, Law says, initially Austen’s anonymously published novels P&P and Sense and Sensibility were believed to have been written by Frances.

Saltram House, Jane Austen

(artwork: wikipedia)

Coincidentally, Saltram House was used in filming S&S in 1995. It represented “Norland,” the home Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters were forced to leave after Mr. Dashwood died. A scandalous end to John Parker’s first marriage may have inspired the adultery that shakes the family of Mansfield Park, Austen’s third novel.

Law maintains that in five years of research she has found letters and documents that bolster her case. These claims are detailed in her new book, provocatively titled Through The Keyhole: Sex, Scandal And The Secret Life of The Country House (I’m not planning to read and review this one, so I’ve provided the link below now, in case you want to). “The physical similarities in them are obvious,” she says. “The Earl was tall, dark, handsome and slightly brooding.”

Although she’s yet to find that “cast iron bit of evidence,” after spending so much time and effort on her researches, she says, “I am pretty convinced.” I haven’t read her evidence, OK, but I can’t believe the wife of my Mr. Darcy would ever cheat on him.

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Far From the Madding Crowd

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Far from the Madding Crowd, Carey MulliganPeople who love the classics, 19th century romance, the beauty of rural England, and juicy costume dramas should be lining up to see the new movie version of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd (trailer), starring Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge, and Michael Sheen. The casting is practically perfect, especially Mulligan in the lead and Sheen as the frustrated middle-aged suitor William Boldwood. Sturridge may be a little too pretty as the dashing Sergeant Troy, though many of Troy’s best scenes have been truncated, denying him the opportunity to become a more fully realized character.

As you may recall, in Hardy’s novel, Bathsheba Everdene (Mulligan) is a headstrong young woman with a habit of rejecting marriage proposals: “What do I need a husband for?” She inherits a large farm and sets about managing her fields, animals, and workers. One of these is Gabriel Oak (Schoenaerts), who, as Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review notes, “is as unfellable as his name suggests” and saves Bathsheba’s bacon—or mutton—on more than one occasion.

But the course of true love never runs smooth and whom she will pick to marry is a lingering question that held my interest throughout, despite having read the book and having seen two previous dramatizations (the classic 1967 film with Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, and Alan Bates and the 1998 Granada Television one). Kudos to Danish director Thomas Vinterberg and screenwriter David Nicholls for preserving the best of Hardy.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences: 79%.

8 Exciting Summer Reads

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reading

(photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simōes, Creative Commons license)

With publishers so intent on finding the next blockbuster, it’s easy for good books, make that Very Good Books, to slip by unnoticed. I’d like to suggest that my writing coach Lauren Davis’s new book, Against a Darkening Sky, which is on top of my “to read” pile, is a book I hope escapes that fate. I also trust that the flow of good will and good media coming its way will continue.

Set in 7th century Northumbria, as Christianity sweeps the countryside, it considers issues that are universal and timeless. Says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, it “brilliantly achieves the ideal for a historical novel: period and milieu seem utterly inextricable from characters and theme.” I’m looking forward to reading—and savoring!—it this summer.

More Recommendations

In case you missed Nancy Pearl’s “under the radar reads” segment on NPR’s Morning Edition late last week, here are her recommendations for intriguing and beautifully written works of fiction beyond the B&N front table that are well worth seeking out.

  • The Revolutions by Felix Gilman – A little steam punk, a little sci fi, a little magic and the occult—and the perils of dabbling in them. Says Pearl, “I’ve always believed that people learn from every book they read, . . . I think reading about the past in the context of the present is just fascinating.”
  • The Swimmer by Joakim Zander – in this fast-paced thriller a former spy tries to help a young woman with whom he has a strange connection. She’s seen something she shouldn’t have . . . and she’s on the run.
  • Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper – Says Pearl, this is another page-turner, not because of the speed of the plot, but because the characters from two time periods (around World War I and late 20th century) are so interesting. The story is set in motion when 83-year-old Etta decides she must see the ocean before she dies and sets out to walk there—from Saskatchewan.
  • Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm – which is, Pearl says, “a novel about lying.” Not only is lying “unbecoming” in the old-fashioned sense, but the main character gradually “unbecomes” who she is. In a Paris antiquities shop she waits for her crimes to catch up with her.
  • The Half Brother by Holly LeCraw – We’ve all had strange coincidences in our lives, situations about which one says “if that were in a novel, no one would believe it!” Well, this novel takes on the issue of coincidence versus fate. How one choice would have created a totally different self—in other words, the spiraling kind of speculation that can drive you crazy.
  • The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter – Carter is a historian, who can provide the convincing details of the exotic setting this novel uses. In 1837 India, its two British protagonists journey all over the subcontinent to find a missing writer. The first of a series, about which Pearl says, “I personally cannot wait for the second one.” (Awesome cover!)

A Sad History Tale

Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep himself has a new book out, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. It’s the true story of an Indian leader who used the tools of American democracy to try to make the case for his people and their land rights. His futile legal battle continued for two decades and ended in the Trail of Tears.

Any of these books would make for memorable summer reading. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on them and to reading at least some myself!

Five Mile Lake

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lake, dock

(photo: Greg Seitz, Creative Commons license)

McCarter Theatre’s final production of the season, Rachel Bonds’s new play, Five Mile Lake, explores the differences and similarities between two pairs of young people. Brother Rufus makes a surprise visit to the “small, somewhat desolate town near Scranton,” bringing his Manhattan girlfriend (Peta) with him. His brother Jamie works in a coffee-and-muffin shop and talks about hockey to his co-worker Mary, whom he is obviously desperate to talk love to. The small town and the lake and the old house he’s fixing up are his world, but Mary just wants to get away. All of them, on the cusp of full adulthood, are settling into their lives, and, looking at what’s ahead, they’re filled with satisfaction or horror.

As in life, everything is not as it seems. The brother who “got out” is facing an abyss of failure on all fronts. His supposedly successful girlfriend also feels the loss of possibilities. The young coffee shop worker who wants to leave believes she’s held back by her brother, but her own shrinking ambitions hem her in. All the characters except Peta have known each other essentially all their lives, and the dynamics among them spring in many directions.

Bonds’s dialog is modern and witty and totally believable. Totally. It’s delivered with precision and heart by a super cast. Kristen Bush, who was outstanding in McCarter’s recent production of Proof, is Mary; Tobias Segal is a moving Jamie, saying much with every body posture—the polar opposite of the constrained Octavius Caesar he portrayed in McCarter’s season-opener, Antony and Cleopatra. Nathan Darrow’s Rufus breezes in from the big city reeking of success that soon becomes the stink of something else. Mahira Kakkar is the girlfriend, desperate to talk about her real situation, and finally, Jason Babinsky is Mary’s PTSD-afflicted brother Danny, manic and wheedling. On stage until May 31. Watch for this play in your area—90 minutes of excellent drama.

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Laurel Highlands Travel — Back to 1754

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George Washington, Fort Necessity, Laurel Highlands

Recreated Fort Necessity (photo: wikimedia)

George Washington definitely slept here! Last year, the excellent (and highly readable) Joseph J. Ellis biography, His Excellency George Washington (my review here), interested me in Washington’s early career as a Virginia regimental officer during the French and Indian Wars—“crash courses in the art of soldiering,” says Ellis. At age 22, Washington was second in command of troops bushwhacking in through the dense forests of the Allegheny Mountains toward the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to create the Ohio River. Today, Pittsburgh.

This was the Laurel Highlands, and Washington was leading Virginia troops whose aim was to recapture an old fort the French had seized at Three Rivers. One early morning in late May, Indian guides led the colonials through the forest to a stone outcrop from which they surprised a French patrol below. In the ensuing skirmish, in which Washington’s forces prevailed, the French Commander Monsieur De Jumonville was killed. Who shot first in the battle of Jumonville Glen has been long-debated, and Washington’s own explanations changed over time. Nevertheless, this tiny Laurel Highlands encounter ignited the Seven Years’ War, which eventually embroiled many European countries and their colonies scattered across the globe.

Since the French had a strong force in the area, the colonials built a modest circular fort in a small clearing, Fort Necessity. In early July a large French and Indian contingent attacked. Washington was forced to surrender, and in return for leaving the Ohio Valley for a year, he and his men were allowed to evacuate.

Meanwhile, the French built Fort Duquesne where the three rivers joined. But the British weren’t giving up. The following year they re-invaded the area, led by General Edward Braddock, who “knew all there was to know about drilling troops in garrison, something about waging war in the arenas of Europe, and nothing whatsoever about the kind of savage conditions and equally savage battlefields he would encounter in the American interior,” says Ellis.

Washington joined Braddock’s forces as an aide-de-camp, knowing the campaign’s planned route through more than a hundred miles of wilderness terrain was “almost impassable.” The steep hills and dense forests in many parts of the Laurel Highlands today give only a taste of how difficult traversing this country must have been. Unprepared as he was, Braddock’s forces were routed. From experiences like this, Washington developed a strategy of avoiding a fight his troops were sure to lose that stood him in good stead throughout the American Revolution.

Eventually the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, and the British replaced it with Fort Pitt. Fort Pitt was Britain’s most extensive fortification in North America, indicating the strategic importance of this position.

You can tour The National Park Service’s Fort Necessity museum (724-329-5512), and nearby sites, including a monument to Braddock, as well as follow the easy walking path (today!) through the woods to see Jumonville Glen. The outlines of the earlier forts, including Fort Duquesne, are recreated in granite on the grass of Pittsburgh’s Point State Park, which also includes a museum about Fort Pitt, within a replica of one of the fort’s five original bastions, as well as an original block house, the oldest architectural landmark in Western Pennsylvania, dating from 1764. Museum phone: 412-281-9284.

*****The Orphan Master’s Son

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Kim Jong Un, North Korea

Kim Jong Un, the Dear Leader (photo: petersnoopy, Creative Commons License)

By Adam Johnson – A prodigious creative imagination put together this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Few Americans have visited North Korea in recent decades; if they have, they’ve seen little other than what their minders are authorized to show them, and they’ve talked with no one outside their official itinerary. We cannot “see for ourselves” what living in such a massively regulated, brutal nation is like. In such a circumstance, it’s daunting to create a fully developed world, and it would be easy to create fictional characters who are two-dimensional, stereotypic. But Johnson has created such a world and peopled his book with true individuals who act believably, even when what they must do is unbelievably horrifying.

While the reader acquires a bone-chilling sense of North Korean life and how survival requires quick wits and artful deception, in no way does this novel feel like a political tract. What the reader comes to understand are the daily accommodations of action and speech and even thought that the system under Kim Jong Un, the Dear Leader, requires.

The first third of the book is about Jun Do (John Doe), the orphan master’s son who declares he is not an orphan. At various points, Jun Do has chances to escape, to defect to South Korea, to abandon ship in Japan, to hide out in the United States, but he doesn’t take them, in part because of the danger such an action would create for his companions and because (speaking of South Korea) “he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.”

Yet the book is rich in both love and humor. Seeing Jun Do cope with the disconnect between reality and the government’s constant diet of lies can be simultaneously amusing and heart-breaking.

In the second part of the book, the narration alternates among several sources, and includes this story told by a young interrogator of political prisoners about the talk every father has with his son, “in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family”:

father and son

(photo: pixshark)

 I was eight when my father had this talk with me . . . [After denouncing the boy in a terrifying way] . . [m]y father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If . . . someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”

Some chapters of this section are told via the official and ubiquitous government loudspeakers, which blare constantly in homes, factories, and public places. The extent to which the population is taken in by these jingoistic broadcasts is unclear, since cracks in the façade of total loyalty to the Dear Leader are dangerous.

Regarding the relentless suffering, one character says, “When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose.” He gave Jun Do love in the person of actress Sun Moon, and contrary to the Dear Leader’s expectation, love saved them both.

Despite all the paranoia, torture, starvation, slave labor camps, and dark and dripping prison cells, incredibly, I found this beautifully written novel uplifting; it engenders the feeling that the North Koreans will ultimately free themselves from their repressive government because the burden of believing in it will become too great.