Editorial feedback

I finally got some real feedback (other than “you’re doing fine”) from my editor at HRW.

Here’s what she said:

“You’ve done a nice job of retaining the mood and tone of the pieces you are retelling, and have made some good judgments about which episodes to cut.  Please do more than cut, especially when the language seems difficult or concepts require a lot of inference.  Our audience is not good at making inferences, so you may have to state some things more obviously than in the original.  One editor has been having particular problems with “R.M.S. Titanic,” where there are many nautical details that will go right over our audience’s heads; but she finds these problems to some extent in most of your retellings.  I know it’s a tightrope walk, because when we try to be concise we often become elliptical.  We do want the selections to be short:  please really condense larger chunks of text, especially descriptions, and make more of an effort to retell what remains in your own words.

“You might look back at the two example retellings I gave you way back when, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”  Both of these selections were really transformed in the retelling—there’s not all that much of the original language left.”

This is going to present an ongoing challenge for me, because when I’m editing I feel I ought to save as much of the author’s original words as I can.  I went back and fiddled with the Titanic piece some, taking out or changing some words and phrasings that were obviously nautical (e.g., “port,” “starboard”) and a couple that weren’t (e.g., “bulkhead”), and changed the language a little more.  I’ll send it to her over the weekend and see on Monday whether she thinks I improved it any.

Callahan’s Place is red and the pendant is sinister.  Fnord.