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.

June is the second best month in our backyard. Of course, first place must be reserved for August, when the garden is overflowing with peppers, heirloom cherry tomatoes, and early apples—but there's nothing quite like that flood of flowers in every colour. The air is either spiked with daphne, honeysuckle, mock orange, or roses—wow. We call our just-under-an-acreage Freedman's Eden for good reason!

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.