Hi everyone, you may know me from around the IF community, probably primarily from here, but you may also be familiar with some projects I've worked on as an editor (the two most prominent being @bodycountgame and @nyehilismwriting's Project Hadea) or other things I've done around the place. Regardless, it's my intention to set up a place here to provide proof-reading and other editing services in order to help people in the IF community who may struggle with doing it themselves for whatever reason (be that due to time, or difficulty, or anything else).
What's on Offer?
We all know that being an interactive fiction author is a HUGE undertaking - we're our own planners, publicists, programmers and also editors a large amount of the time - and sometimes it can be a lot to grapple with. I also know from personally interacting with a lot of authors that editing in particular can feel intimidating for people who don't do it often, and lots of people feel like they don't get it right or don't trust their own judgement with it. That's a normal feeling for anyone inexperienced in a certain skill to go through, but also it turns out that luckily, the internet exists!
For a fee, I can hopefully take some of the stress out of the process by doing copy, line or developmental editing for you, or a combination of the three in some way, shape or form. This doesn't give me any control over your work, obviously, and any suggestions that I make will be just that, suggestions - though like any editor worth their salt, I'll always do my best to explain what I'm suggesting and why, so that you can hopefully make an informed decision about what you want to do about it.
See below the cut for more information, along with pricing and some basic FAQs. Thanks for reading!
So, how does it work?
Well, it's pretty simple, really - you reach out and talk to me about what you want edited, I'll let you know how many (if any) jobs are in my queue currently, we'll confirm what the price will be, and then you decide if you want to go ahead with contracting my services. If we agree to work together, you'll sit back and relax after finishing the exhausting writing process, or, if you're really a glutton for punishment, start writing something new, and I'll do the editing. Then I'll return it to you, and send you an invoice. Easy!
I'm not going to hover over your shoulder demanding certain changes be made or be offended if you disagree with me - that's not a good editor's function, in my personal opinion. What you choose to do with my editing suggestions afterwards is entirely up to you!
FAQs
What's the difference between copy editing, line editing and developmental editing?
Most people editing for themselves do all three different types of these at once, but they are actually three separate skillsets. Copy editing is another term for what's sometimes called proof-reading; basically, it's checking for spelling and grammar mistakes (including homophones and so forth) but not for other purely textual elements like ineffective word usage or weak sentence structures. Anything beyond basic grammatical correctness is covered by what's called line editing, which looks at some common things people worry about like overused words, weak metaphors or other imagery, and sentences or segments of the text that can possibly be written in a way to more effectively convey the message they're trying to get across.
Developmental editing is a whole other ballgame - this is the part that most often makes authors nervous, the act of considering the text in terms of the effectiveness of each paragraph and story beat, analysing which parts of the narrative and various character arcs are working and which aren't, and so forth. This is a type of editing that is heavy on critique, and very subjective: it's akin to the kind of feedback you might get from beta readers in many senses.
You don't have to want all three types of editing in order to contract my services for, say, just one, but developmental editing on its own will be by negotiation, and likely be an hourly fee rather than a per word cost. You also can't have line editing without copy editing, as it would be impossible to make sure it's effectively-written without making sure it's correct. (You can have copy editing without line editing, however.)
Do you accept works from people whose first language is something other than English?
Yes, this is not a mitigating factor for me. I've worked on some pieces by French- and Brazilian Portuguese-speaking authors before. My editing suggestions come with explanations of why I'm making them, so it should be clear even for ESL authors what I'm suggesting and for what reason. I'm not a translator (unless you're talking about from Akkadian or Sindarin), but as long as you're capable of having a conversation in English, we should be fine.
How should I format my files for you to work on? And how will I get them to you/receive them back?
The two most preferable options are either in a Word Document, or a GoogleDoc document, as these formats both allow me to highlight parts of the work and comment on it directly so that you can see my suggestions. Any other format will make the whole process difficult for both of us as it will require cross-referencing between your work and my responses.
It doesn't have to be formatted in any fancy way, though - as long as it's in the document and readable, even just via basic copy/paste from wherever else you write, that's fine.
We can exchange the files via email or discord, whichever makes you feel more comfortable.
Do you accept jobs unrelated to interactive fiction?
Yes! I've edited novels and short stories before as well, and done work specifically providing developmental editing on outlines so that authors can feel they have a well fleshed-out plan before they begin writing. It's just that there's not many editors out there who are familiar with the IF scene, so that's my marketing focus, so to speak.
You write using British spellings... do you know how to edit for American spellings, too?
Yes, I know how to edit for AusE and AmE as well as BrE. Many authors also use a combination of multiple spelling systems, which I can work with as long as you let me know your style and parameters.
My game is written in the style of Shakespeare... can you handle that?
Individual style, both affected and inherent, is not really a roadblock for most editors. The job of a good editor is to consider each author's personal style and make sure to respect it, rather than try to overwrite it with their own voice, so if you're writing a Tolkienian or Arthurian or epic poetry piece, I'm capable of working with that as long as you let me know what you're aiming for beforehand.
If you have a style guide with particular specifications, feel free to submit it along with your documents, and I'll abide by its specifications. I've worked on projects ranging from high fantasy to scifi to modern fiction in the past.
Can I break my writing up into multiple parts to give to you over time?
Sure! All of the interactive fiction work I've done thus far has been chapter-by-chapter, and you can break it down smaller if you like. However, I can't necessarily bring forward developmental editing concerns from one job into another at peak reliability, particularly if a long period of time has passed between the different jobs.
That's probably all for the FAQs for now - if you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out and ask!
Pricing
How much the editing will cost is based on the length of what you would like me to edit, split up into three length categories: under 10k words, 10k-100k words, and over 100k words. Prices are in AUD, Australian dollars. Per-word rates round up (ie., at a rate of 1c per 5 words, 6 words would incur the cost for 10 words).
Under 10,000 words
Copy editing: 1c per word.
Line editing: a flat $15 fee on top of the price of copy editing.
Developmental editing: a flat $20 fee on top of any other costs, or an hourly fee by negotiation if without the other two services.
10,000 to 100,000 words
Copy editing: 1c per word for the first 10,000 words, followed by 1c per each 3 words for the remainder.
Line editing: a flat $30 fee on top of the price of copy editing.
Developmental editing: a flat $80 fee on top of any other costs, or an hourly fee by negotiation if without the other two services.
Over 100,000 words
Copy editing: 1c per word for the first 10,000 words, followed by 1c per each 3 words for the remainder, plus a flat $20 fee for each 100k words after the first (ie., 150,000 words will incur a $20 fee on top of the per-word price, while 250,000 words will incur $40).
Line editing: a flat $40 fee on top of the price of copy editing, rising incrementally per 100k words after the first (ie., 150,000 words will incur a $40 fee, while 250,000 words will incur $80).
Developmental editing: a flat $80 fee on top of any other costs, rising incrementally per 100k words after the first (ie., 150,000 words will incur an $80 fee, while 250,000 words will incur $160), or an hourly fee by negotiation if without the other two services.
Code-checking
If you're able to include your code with your writing (such as by viewing a proofing copy of a game via twine), and provide me with an outline of your variables and what you're using them for, I can by request check for possible errors (such as adding to a stat when it seems like it should be subtracting instead, or using a wrong or misspelled variable) for a flat fee of $80 per 100,000 words (in this case, the code is included in the wordcount, since I'll be checking it).
Outline Help
If you want me to look over an outline or plan and provide developmental feedback before you begin writing, this can be done for an hourly fee by negotiation.
Thank you again for reading! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.
Do you have any suggestions for letting go and improving WITH your weird shit? I'm in university for Creative Writing and I haven't been taught SHIT other than how to engage with a text and how to continue to write at my highschool base-line level. No teaching, no instruction, only critiques of mine and my peers work that doesn't inform us of much in the long run.
I'm desperate for help, if you have Anything it's much appreciated. I'm asking because I felt seen in this post
1. READ. Read widely, read deeply, read slowly when a text demands time. Seek out work that seems strange or challenging. If/when you need to pick up something that's deep in your comfort zone, read consciously. If a passage hits you as dense and difficult, ask yourself why: word choice? complex nesting of concepts? are you distracted, or did you misinterpret something a few lines back? If a passage feels easy and fun, ask yourself why: satisfying rhythm? clear set-up and follow-through? Look for experimental texts, read more poetry even if you don't want to write poetry. The more experienced you are with the vast flexibility of the written word, the more confident and natural your own experimentation will get.
2. Try things out. You don't have to show them to anyone. Sometimes a stylistic idea will get stuck in my head and I just have to write freeform for a couple of thousand words to see how it feels on the page. One time in college I was possessed by the urge to write the vilest, foulest, most unsympathetic and filthy first-person narrative just to figure out how it would actually read, so I scribbled out a couple of pages until it was out of my system. I never did anything with those passages, but they're in my repertoire now, I know how that material hits. I'm always comparing writing to chefing - not everything you cook is a restaurant meal. You can experiment with flavours in your own kitchen, where you are free to make something completely unpalatable and then toss it right out with a better understanding of the process.
3. Be less scared. This isn't just directed at you, it's directed at everyone, and at me. Someone I know once brought a personal piece of writing to a writer's group, about the way her mother's death affected her. Someone in the group was absolutely scathing about it, because they felt that the way she reacted to and wrote about the bereavement was inappropriate. What a horrible experience! What an awful, unhelpful critique. But it didn't shake her, because she knew what she had felt and was steadfast in her right to express it. Sometimes (often, even) criticism will come from angles that are literally just not relevant to what we've set out to do. Like I said in the original post, a lot of readers are kind of ambivalent or hostile to weirdness at the moment. But if weirdness is your goal, those people are simply not your audience. It's a lot easier said than done, but have faith in your own intentions and your own taste. Listen to criticism, but always ask yourself 'will this help me accomplish what I want this piece to accomplish?' It is not the end of the world to be temporarily misunderstood.
I'd like to add something on here; as an editor and a published author, while I agree that the commodification of art has definitely affected the spread of this attitude, I also think that the Western schooling system has had a more outsized effect on how people view writing than a lot of people realise.
When I first signed a contract with my publishers back in 2017 (or thereabouts), tumblr was having a HUGE boom in writing advice blogs. People in the writing community on here would often reblog writing advice posts from a dozen different advice blogs per day, and while they did have some decent advice, they also heavily erred on the side of minimalist writing and decrying any use of descriptions and such. I would often agonise over my writing, thinking that nobody would ever like my work, because it didn't meet all of the criteria that these blogs insisted were necessary.
And then I found out (through an incident too embarrassing for the person running the writing advice blog to describe here) that one of the blogs I was following that had caused me the most grief was run by a 15-year-old child, whose authoritative declamatory statements about what every writer must do in order to be published were regurgitated pieces of advice from their highschool english teacher about creative writing assignments. And highschool english teachers, despite often being wonderful people and very important for children's creative development, do not want to have to read a minimum of 35 pieces of writing that fit the mold of the 00s horse RPers that OP describes.
And when you think about it, making super prescriptive statements about the exact way you must write does seem like something that's more indicative of an assignment specification than advice you might get from someone about publishing original works. Most published authors will give writing advice that almost always includes some disclaimer that everyone is different and not all of their suggestions will work for everyone.
I think a lot more people are subconsciously writing for an imaginary cosmic english teacher and anxiously fretting about whether or not they'll get an A than realise it, even to this day.
But it's okay. There's no criteria marking sheet that you have to write to, and some people disliking your writing doesn't mean that you fail. This isn't highschool, even if you're still in highschool while writing. You can just write whatever and however you want.
semicolons are not only for formal essays and anyone who tells you otherwise wants to deprive you of the second most satisfying punctuation mark; do NOT believe them. i promise they get no bitches
Also applies to editing. I was recently talking to another writer whose editor (at a publisher) almost destroyed her desire to keep writing. Writers, know the signs of a shitty editor versus one who actually wants to help you achieve your vision, and don’t be afraid to ask for a different one. (Or fire a bad one if you’re indy.)
"Another Round" is a 20k word, interactive fiction, urban fantasy game made with Twine for the Single Choice Game Jam.
PLAY THE GAME | KOFI
Written and coded for the Single Choice Game Jam!
STORY
You play as Maddie, a woman in love with a woman named Agnes. Actually, she hates her. Actually, it's complicated. You definitely broke things off with her. And you don't regret it. At least once.
Yes. At least once per day, you don't regret ending it with Agnes. Except tonight. You definitely regret it tonight.
Those are the facts you can't change. How any of those things came to be is up to your imagination. It's not part of the story, anyway. The story is about tonight. The night you save Agnes...or not. You don't get a lot of say in what happens.
Well, you get a say. Once.
So maybe you save her. Maybe you save yourself. Maybe the "fuck it" train you're on derails and takes the whole nightclub with you.
The story is a bit unhinged. But, then again, so are you.
FEATURES
gender-locked; name-locked; appearance-locked, sexuality-locked (congrats! you're a lesbian) protagonist. No customization available--free yourself from the burden of choice!
bad life choices come pre-made! Never fear. I'm sure you'll be able to make some more of them. Or, hmm, I guess just one more bad life choice, technically
adult language the author has already used in this description without warning...dang
hundreds of endings, but only one place the story stops. Lots of things can end, you know. The breath you just took ended
set in a world with demons and half-demons because why not?
unhealthy coping strategies! Co-dependent former relationships!
a demon who calls himself Seven because he liked that movie and tends to shout "WHAT'S IN THE BOX?" at inappropriate moments
a single choice in the entire game. Make it a good one
"Another Round" is intended for an adult audience. Content warnings are available in the game menu before the story begins.
How would payment work? I was thinking cashapp but it’s only available here in the us
I've always previously used paypal invoices, which hasn't resulted in any problems yet - I'm able to send the invoice to an email address with the amount set in AUD and people can automatically pay in my currency, so that they don't have to worry about figuring out conversions. I know paypal isn't flawless, but when it comes to sending money internationally you sometimes have to take the most convenient option lmao
Hi💗 When you're editing projects does that include rewriting (hard to read, rudimentary...) sentences or will you just say "this needs changing"?
I give suggestions for rewrites! Sometimes, multiple suggestions, if there seem to be multiple ways that something could be done better. I think the only real way I could ever see myself not offering any kind of solution and just saying like. This Has To Go or something is if the section in question was really racist or homophobic or something lmao
I guess I could potentially either not give suggestions at all or make more concrete/less fluid suggestions depending on what a client wants... that's not a terrible imposition. If you'd rather I just point out things that need changing or provide my own rewrites as a matter of course, we can discuss that before I begin working!
Editing Bugbear #1: it's "rein it in," not reign. No, really.
Somewhere, at some point in time, somebody was ground zero for everyone suddenly and absolutely incorrectly thinking that the phrase was "reign it in." And one day, with the help of time travel, I will find that person. And they will experience Ragrets. I've started seeing "reign it in" in professionally published projects now and I've never cringed so hard in my entire life.
The phrase has always been "to rein in something;" this isn't an etymological case where it's a misspelling from olden times when people didn't place a lot of importance on literature and education, because why would people from that time period add a silent g. No, this is a recent affectation, and it's completely wrong and silly. If I had to blame Something, it would be our growing modern lack of understanding of horses, most likely.
When you're reining something in, whether it's your temper or a boisterous friend, you're evoking the allegory of reining in a horse - which is to say, pulling back on the reins to tell the horse very firmly that you don't want it to go forward, even though it wants to. Reins, as attached to a bridle. Because it's a horse. Reining it in. With the reins.
"Reign" is a word that refers solely to concepts that are regnant - that is, either actively holding power and ruling in some political system, or metaphorically dominant or holding sway over people. "The reigning queen," or "a reign of terror." Other words related to royalty - regency, regent, regicide, etc. - also contain that same g that is silent in reign, which is how you can tell that they're related (it all comes from a latin base word, regnare, which means to rule).
I'm sure some people are thinking "oh, but, if you're reining in your temper you're still like. Ruling over it so it's basically the same" but 1) it's objectively incorrect whether or not it can sort of be considered to still make sense and 2) that's not how grammar works! The entire verb is actually "rein in," a phrasal verb with its own meaning, and there's no such phrasal verb as "reign in."
Like... it's just Wrong, okay? It just is. Objectively. And it bugs me when things are wrong... which is probably why I'm an editor lmfao
Totally forgot that tumblr sets blogs to block asks by default and then went to bed after finalising my masterpost this morning... asks are turned on now though at least lmfao
