Kristen sent me her finished review of my full manuscript, three days after I concluded my book cover contest. I'll be honest, her feedback wasn't at all what I expected.

You'll laugh to hear that I spent a full day convinced that I hadn't gotten my money's worth, that perhaps I had picked the wrong editor, or that she had rushed the job because she was two weeks late.

All because she had no major structural recommendations. 

While I did end up receiving over 100 cover submissions, they were only from 22 designers (many of those being revisions per our mid-contest conversations). 117 covers sound like a lot, but it's surprisingly easy to disqualify options. No to obvious AI use; no to hair on fire or planet eyes or lava, lightning, portals, or designs that relied solely on a single piece of non-copyrightable stock imagery.

Each editor's approach is different. The tricky part, is learning to adopt their unique lens for a time to examine your writing, and discern for yourself how much you can improve while staying true to the story you want to tell.

I have to laugh. The editor who read the first chapter in April said it was too bogged down with world-building and backstory. I removed most of the backstory (which probably created lack of clarity for Susan and also forced some of the exposition into dialogue), and wrote an entirely new, shorter Chapter 1. I was pretty confident, in fact, that I had finally resolved my Achilles heel opening.

Not so!

Well, after last month's first foray into professional editing, I dove straight off the deep end. I reached out to four different editors, asked them for sample edits (some did a page, others a whole chapter), and then compared their feedback. 

Funny how much you can tell about a person just through email correspondence: one editor's form response started with her qualifications (with publishers from 20 years ago).

Recently, I hired a developmental editor to read my synopsis and the first 4,000 words of my story (first page is above). These first pages often require multiple rewrites.

Perhaps you've never analyzed the first line or first chapter much, but there is tracked and subtle psychology at work here. My job as a writer is to "hook" without you noticing, "Ah, I see what you did there," or pause because too much/little info is pulling you out of the story. 

To catch you up, for the last few years I've been writing sci-fantasy; a sub-category of sci-fi. Dune and Star Wars fit here, "a hybrid genre blending advanced technology, space travel, etc. with magic, supernatural powers, etc.". 

Attempting to wrestle a collection of scenes into a novel with young children while co-running a clinic with Kyle—well, it happens seasonally; almost none in the summer, lots in the winter, and variable shoulder months.