My first experience with a professional editor

Once and a thousand times I will have to thank Lioness Press, @LionessPress on Twitter, for the great gift she gave me.

Lioness Press is a professional editor, whose services you can find in her website: https://www.lionesspress.us/

A few days ago she was kind enough to give away a sample of her work as an editor for five manuscript pages, and the lucky winner was me.

I promptly handed her my five pages (which turned out to be more due to my lack of knowledge of industry standards for acceptable font types, a mistake she didn’t give any importance to).

The next day she sent me her Word file, with a thorough work done with change control, in which she broke down the weak points of the manuscript, proposing alternatives or directly suggesting a new approach in other points, giving indications of where it would be appropriate to focus the changes.

I will not excuse myself by saying that it was my first draft, before passing any filter, and that this meant that our friend had to work hard.

Her meticulous work has been of great help to me, since as an amateur writer it is a great fortune to be able to see, on your own manuscript, where you are making mistakes by saying instead of showing, where you are resorting to cheap clichés, when you are putting lines of dialogue without action,  producing the effect of ‘talking heads’ and many more mistakes that no matter how much you know about them and are aware of their existence, you won’t be able to spot them in your writing if you don’t possess the proper critical spirit and in view of her wonderful work, I can affirm that Lioness Press possesses it.

Therefore, I close this post by reminding you of the importance of careful editing, and how highly recommended it is to have the support of a professional for this task.