Editing in Brain Fog

Normally, I do my own editing. That drives readers and a lot of other writers damn near psychotic. I'm not sure why. I had to edit any tech manuals or legal documents I wrote during my other two professional incarnations.

In indie publishing, I'm also the first person to advocate do what you're good at and hire out the rest. I can edit. I still can't quite get the hang of covers. I'm practicing, but I simply don't have the eye my cover artists do.

However, I didn't realize how deep my brain fog from the COVID-19 pandemic was until I started to come out of it a couple of weeks ago. I'm in the process of re-editing Hero De Jure. Holy Cthulu! What a mess. I am usually much, MUCH cleaner than this.

That damn brain fog is also the reason I pulled the Millersburg Mystery series from Amazon.

Now, I could sit here and berate myself, but is that really doing any good? That's the reason I advocate being kind to yourself right now. We're all going through some variation of brain fog with our jobs.

Even the rare times we've done carry-out for dinner over the last couple of months, our orders have been screwed up more times than not. The poor kids working at the local restaurants are having as much trouble with brain fog as the rest of us.

However, life goes on, and I'm working on fixing my work. Luckily, the story I'm releasing for July is already written. Hopefully, that will give me a little time to clean up shit and get back on track with my writing.

The World Is Mad I Tell You! Mad!

DH's dad is still in the hospital (complication from his surgery Wednesday) so this is a round-up of stuff y'all may be interested in.

First off, my self-editing post got a few comments yesterday. Just a reminder that there is no "right" way to edit. If you can proofread your own stuff, more power to you! Honestly, I proof my own short stories. However, it's the only area of where I think money can be wisely spent, just like it's overall cheaper and faster for me to hire out my formatting these days.

Ironically, Kris Rusch posted about the nightmares of dealing with trad publisher editors.

In that same blog, Kris also talked about the recent bloodbath at Penguin Random House. The layoffs included several editors.

And that led to this little bon mot my friend Angie e-mailed me this morning. Just how bad are things at PRH that la Nora jumps ship?

Are publishers in that much trouble? Yeah, they are. Data Guy's recent talk at the Digital Book World Conference shows trad publishers are sort of acknowledging that they sail in iceberg infested waters, but they still believe the icebergs pose no danger. *sigh*

On the other hand, anything that improves DG's scraping and analysis of book sales can help us indies in the long run.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!