Editing is a dirty job, but someone has to do it

Image Source: Excuseeditor.com

Have you ever read a magazine article or even a menu at a local restaurant and been struck by a glaring editing mistake? It happens to me all the time. From simple misspellings to just plain bad grammar, I can't help but see it. My years in journalism taught me that editing mistakes take away from the reader's experience and can be embarrassing to boot. 

As an author, I have experienced both the frustration of running into these errors everywhere I look as well as catching mistakes that I make while writing The Evenarian.

When you are churning out hundred of pages and already going through multiple rounds of edits, all those paragraphs start to look like alphabet soup. This is why I have decided to push my inner copyeditor aside and hand my novel over to a professional editor with a fresh set of eyes. Because heaven help me if there's a single subject-verb disagreement in the book!

However, the real issue with getting a professional to dive into editing an entire novel is that they tend to want to be paid for their time - and rightfully so.

In order to fund this quest for the most high-quality novel possible, I am asking friends, family and grammar sticklers alike to support my upcoming Kickstarter campaign to offset the editing cost before I shop for a publisher.

If you are a fellow fan of error-free reading, then please pledge support for my campaign and share the event with friends and family.

My red pen thanks you!

Alternative history

Have you ever read a book that made you put it down every few minutes to pause and think? A book that made you see the world around you in a different way?

In science fiction and fantasy, there are books which make you ask questions about events, and how they could've transpired differently. This is a sub-genre called "alternative history." It takes place in our world's past but frequently a key historical event happens differently and magic or other fantastical elements are present. These stories explore "what if" questions like "what if Hitler had been assassinated before starting World War II" or "what if Jesus' ministry had been different" and so on.

While The Evenarian does not take place on Earth, its world very well could have been ours, or rather, our world may have been The Evenarian's world.

One of the themes tackled in the story is just how much of truth is hidden from us, including history and destiny. Many elements of The Evenarian's world are parallel to ours.

For example, what if the messianic figure that changes the world had created a positivist religion (i.e. based on science) instead of a mystic one? What would our society be like if its religious institutions were founded on positivism and post-enlightenment thinking? How would this even go about happening?

The world before the Evenarian came was a mystical place, full of simple wonders. But our hero knows that the world left behind by the ministry of the Evenarian will be full of fanatics. Opposing groups with different scientific axioms are constantly at war because of conflicting logic instead of religious beliefs. These groups are, of course, painfully unaware of what we know as Goedel's incompleteness theorem. It's our world, except that it's totally different. After reading the complete story, you'll hopefully see many of our modern debates about the nature of truth and religion from a new angle, much like after meditating on a zen koan.

I'm very proud of this concept. It's one of those mind-bending puzzles that makes you put a book on your chest and gaze at the ceiling. If you enjoy that feeling of enchantment that a book gives you, then please support our Kickstarter (launching October) so we can get this book published.

Talking politics

One of the greatest challenges a fiction writer faces is whether or not to include references to current events in one's work. If your story is set during a recent historical event, that's one thing.  It's also par for the course to include familiar sites and cultural touchstones to guide the reader and give them a sense of place. But what if you're crafting a world out of thin air?

There are many major works of literature that contain veiled references to contemporary political issues and cultural figures. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ayn Rand's books come to mind, and they weren't always straight-up allegories either. Those works can be appreciated if you don't understand the references, but reading through their entries on Sparknotes certainly fills in the gaps.

But in a few years (let alone 50 or 100), who's going to care about a spot-on caricature of a society matron or a send-up of an obnoxious political operative? Why risk future readers conflating an interpretation of the author's time with a message for all time?

Also, some authors who tackle political analogies in their fiction don't always get a warm reception. In A Dance With Dragons, the most recent installment of ASOIAF, George Martin was accused of modeling one of the book's subplots on the U.S.'s recent involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. He denied drawing inspiration from those wars, but the perceived parallels made the already shaky subplot even more unpopular with readers.

That's he conundrum I've been wrestling with lately. So far, I've come up with one answer. Shoehorning in pop culture references is a sure road to irrelevance, but there's always interesting people in the world, no matter what era you live in. If those people have something equally interesting to say in your world, maybe you should let them in.