Show me Your Editing Chops

Putting Isarina back into the world has become an unexpected stress test, not just of the book, but of my own understanding of what I built. When someone challenges a fundamental choice, I go back to the manuscript and test it: is this choice actually doing what I think it is doing? Could another solution do it better? Of course I'm open to people who come to me to make the writing and structure stronger, but you cannot build a house if you do not understand the architecture. In the six years since I wrote this book, that structural understanding is something I have not yet found in the industry, but have reason to believe the industry professionals with the sophisticated editorial chops to understand what the book is, and be able to approach me with insightful challengs, improvements, and solutions, are out there. One thing I've been able to use ChatGPT for is running mock interviews with different demographics of agents, helping me tighten my answers, sharpen my reasoning, and practice how I would spar with challenges to the book. I could test what happened when an agent challenged the opening, omniscient POV, Isarina’s psychology, genre positioning, etc. Some challenges I could answer immediately; others forced me back into the manuscript. Some questions forced the agent back to the question, to reevaluate exactly what was being asked or challenged. These simulated conversations sometimes showed the potential to move into new territory, where the conversations could lead to new revelations about what the book was doing. For example, one thing I tell people is that Isarina is Ozma, with a cast of characters around her, and of course that world is designed to have infinite potential books written in that world with different challenges arising in the kingdom, and the cast of characters having various adventures and new discoveries while solving them. The simlulation conversation was able to help explain how Isarina is an adult version of Ozma, and that helped me understand why I kept using that framing, that Ozma was a woman with normalized authority who was not constantly proving why it belonged to her, and Isarina is the adult version that allows the reality of how geopolitical power dynamics actually play out to be explored with the same basic premise. The stress testing of real and simulated challenges to the literary techniques in how the opening was engineered showed the multiple layers my choices had created and the heavy lifting both the opening line, and a flashback sequence, were doing. Opening scenes are the most rewritten part of the book, very hard to get right, and really cannot be successfully constructed until after the book is finished. n my case, the opening became clearer once I knew exactly where the story needed to begin, what that scene needed to contain, and what it needed to establish that would ultimately be echoed in the ending. My stress test revealed that the opening line had been engineered to do many things well: delivering the promise of the book’s scope, putting the reader immediately inside the protagonist’s psychology, establishing her understanding of what was at stake and the pressure of knowing that everything she had built could crumble in an instant, and revealing why this psychology was doing the correct work of characterization rather than conforming to expectations of performative insecurity. These stress tests also revealed why these DIFFERENCES help explain why even the wrong agents, people who do not understand the book, can still respond passionately to it and rave about never having seen anyone else write a book like this. You do not need to know a single thing about architecture to love a gorgeous building whose design capitalizes on its strengths and whose use of space delivers emotional impact. The person I hire and partner with to work with me on that building, however, absolutely has to understand how the architecture is built and how to capitalize on that structure to deliver an even tighter experience for the reader. This is also where publishing can get marketability backwards. Knowing how to market a book built like X does not mean a book has to be built like X to be marketable. That is reverse engineering the wrong thing. Marketability isn't about making a book resemble something the industry already knows how to sell. It is about whether the book can introduce readers to something new while drawing them into an emotional experience powerful enough that they want to go there. My literary tastes are sophisticated. I read for architecture, technique, subtext, negative space, narrative distance, and the relationship between form and meaning. But I also read for lineage: what traditions a book is drawing from, consciously or unconsciously, and how it transforms them into something new. In collaborators, I need people who can meet me there, at that level of sophistication, as the basic common ground and starting point, before further conversation about how the book is built. Just as an architect, engineer, and contractor bring different expertise to a building, understanding a book’s architecture, understanding how its structure works, and executing that structure well are different editorial skills. Ideally, the kinds of conversations I'm having with my future collaborators are people who have read and understood the book's arhictectural structure and sophistication, before anyone jumps into contractor mode of telling me where the front door should go, or how and why moving it to the other side of the house from the entry hall would ever be a good idea. Ideally this book attracts the kinds of editors who have been waiting to work on a book like this and recognize it instantly for what it is when it hits their desk. There is a difference between telling me the front door isn't working and telling me to enter through a window on the other side of the house. At some point, you aren't improving the architecture; you're proposing a different building. I've had people who have not read the whole book tell me that I need to start at the end, and I laugh. They do not even understand when they make the suggestion the impact it has on what it would change about the entire focus of the book. This is a specific example that was proposed during the stress test. Emine is the youngest consort, and from a refugee family which escaped a country where violence against men is prevalent. The proposed change was start with her abduction spoiler alert. That changes the book to now be Emine's danger story. In its current architecture, this event is one of many converging, and while pivotal, is not the inciting incident of the book. It find it baffling how anyone could pull that out of a mere synopsis to think that was the main thrust of the book or should ever be pulled out of the intricate layers of threads woven together to make that event possible. Plucking it out to place it somewhere else would be like taking a dramatic second-floor balcony off a house and using it as the front door. It may be one of the building’s most striking features, but its impact depends on the architecture that gets you there. Pulling it down could cause the structures around it to collapse, changing the façade of the house and forcing other elements to be artificially propped up in ways that could never restore the integral soundness of the original construction. The analogy demonstrates beautifully how editorial hammers wielded without sufficient sophistication can demolish something beautiful without any understanding of the hack job they are attempting, and, by contrast, why I am looking for someone with advanced editorial surgical skills. Sophisticated and advanced editorial abilities allow someone to walk through the architectural design and understand what needs to be moved and why: to create better flow, remove an obstruction from a path, and eliminate structural weaknesses rather than introduce new ones.

I yearn for the person who can say, “Wow, I see exactly what literary lineage you drew from here,” recognize an echo of a powerful writer I may not have consciously drawn inspiration from, and then say, “If you executed this technique here, it would open up all of the light coming through.” Someone with the editorial chops and insight to understand the literary techniques at work in the engineering, and introduce a change that makes me think, “Why didn’t I think of that before?” That is the collaboration I am looking for: complementary skill sets that can support and strengthen the execution I have already begun, bringing insight and expertise to the work that I could not bring to it alone. Usually, the people who love sophisticated work are excited by the opportunity to execute at that level. My hope in articulating exactly what I’m looking for is that those people will come out of the woodwork, and become much easier to identify.