A Few More Thoughts on Editors and Editing...

While I don't know Tonya personally, of course, I'm guessing she was a lot like me before an editor worked her magic on my first novel—afraid that her much-beloved baby was about to get chopped and hacked into something that barely resembled its former self.

If you have the right editor, and mine has been downright fabulous, they will also love your baby, but a bit more objectively. They won't have quite the same mother-to-manuscript attachment that you'll have, but they'll love it enough to suggest a few ways that it can even be more lovable to the masses.

I'm sure there are plenty of editors out there who get a major rush while marking up someone's work with the proverbial red ink. But the truly great editors are your friend, not your enemy. If anything, they are working with you toward a common goal—of producing the best novel possible.

Now, I'm going to lie, the process involves some serious pain. You'll quibble over minor points and argue (respectfully, of course) about the ones that matter the most to you. You'll spend time rewriting scenes that you thought were fine in the first place but will realize are much, much better with a bit of tweaking.

But no matter how painful the process, in the end, you'll have a draft that's even better than the first, and if you're lucky like I've been, you'll even learn quite a bit along the way, too. For the record, my second novel was way, way easier to write than my first, and a lot of that is because I had such good developmental editing notes the first time around.