Category: Editing Rant

Editing Rant: Everything at its Time

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Emil Widlund on Unsplash

One of the constant “micro” edits I need to do while copyediting or developmental editing is making sure the story is always moving forward, even on the paragraph and sentence level. No stutter steps back and forth. The story should push forward like a train running down the tracks in genre fiction.

What do you mean by that, Erin? you ask. Isn’t there backstory and flashbacks and information sharing happening all the time. The time order of a story is a web going back, forth, and all around, more a ball of yarn after kittens play with it than a linear if-then series without any side quests.

Absolutely past lore and character history are shared once the story starts, but the backstory is released when the information is needed in the next scene. Flashbacks happen when a pause in the rollercoaster emotion is needed to climb to the next drop, the flashbacks adding to the hill, pulling the train up the tracks.

Writing, drafting, and editing creates the track to keep the story pushing forward.

Particular to the micro-edits and the order of things, ensure when describing action to always have the activity in the order it happened. Don’t make your reader stop and reedit the scene’s action in their head.

Three examples (pulled from recent edits, adjusted to make generic):

  1. “Do you mind if I light a fire?” He asked once the shutters were latched.
  2. He started to get out of bed, and the woman did as well, offering her hand to him to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter. The previous battle had left him bruised.
  3. MC woke from a nightmare of fear and forked lightning. Flashes and flying fiends sent them diving and dodging, ducking behind spindly spider statues. The dreamscape consumed them as they ran to friends and family always out of reach.

Each of these cases has a problem with the action sequence being out of order.

In the first case, the character is asking a question of the people in the room, but after the dialog, the reader needs to back up to the character closing the windows. This particular example is the classic stutter-step within a sentence, one forward then one back.

It would be better worded:

Once the shutters were latched, he asked, “Do you mind if I light a fire?”

The second example is confusing, leaving a question of who got out of bed first, the man or the woman? Because, how is she offering her hand to help him stand if he got out of bed first? He was mentioned first, so the reader would assume he was first out of bed. At the end, backstory is doled out explaining why she is helping him stand. If everything was in Time Order the paragraph, it would read like:

The previous battle had left the man badly bruised. The woman in bed with him got out of bed first and offered her hand to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter.

As you can see, some rewording was needed to make it work. But editing is not about making everything Time Order linear, but also polishing the storytelling so that Everything is at its Time. Why the man is having problem getting out of bed should be supplied AFTER we see the issue of getting out of bed.

The woman got out of bed, and when he started as well, she offered her hand to him to help him stand, even though she was much shorter and lighter. The previous battle had left him bruised.

In this case, the NOW action needed to flow in time order, and the backstory information dropped to fill in the hole to make the sequence more immersive. The reader sees the action, and then the details of the white-room and new-characters get painted in.

The final of the three examples starts with the character waking from a dream, then describing the dream as though the character was still in the process of dreaming it. Either the character is awake or the character is dreaming in most stories, even in most genre fiction stories. In this manuscript for storytelling purposes, having the MC remembering the dream instead of having it happen in story-NOW-time would be better. The verb tense needs to change to past perfect.

Adjusted the paragraph reads as follows:

MC woke from a nightmare of fear and forked lightning, the emotions and images lingering in the morning twilight. Flashes and flying fiends had sent them diving and dodging, ducking behind slimy spindly spider statues. The dreamscape had consumed them as they ran to friends and family always out of reach.

Most genre fiction is written in “simple past” which expresses past actions, usually in sequential order. “Past perfect” is “past of the past”, describing an action or event that took place before the action being described by the (simple) past tense. By changing the verb tense, the reader is clued in through grammar on the time order of the sequence of the events.

As you can see, each Time Order issue needed a different solution, from a simple reorder of the sentence to tapping into grammar structure so an English reader understands what has happened.

The three original examples would leave a reader confused, reordering things in their head. The edited changes keep the information in order, the NOW time-sequence moving forward, and gives storytelling a chance to expand the reader’s imagery as needed.

Everything at its Time, with the train rushing forward on the roller coaster of genre fiction telling.

Editing Rant: Why AI is a No-No

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Image acquired from the Internet

A recent contact I got was a “Hi, I am an illustrator who uses AI.” To which I immediately responded my publisher (and I) have a strict no-AI policy. (points to them for admitting the AI use up front.)

Well, they wrote back and asked why? They said they got a lot of responses like that and were wondering why the publishing industry is so against this tool everyone in the business world is embracing.

I needed to present an argument that wasn’t “well, AI is evil and makes Sarah Connor cry.” Because this person is trying to make a living with art, which means creating art fast in a variety of forms. AI can be a tool like the collage-type art of early photoshop. And for some people everything is shareable – I remember early pirate sites for music and books created by those that thought all data should be free. So what argument to use?

I gave the person the “the courts have declared AI-created materials are not copyrightable.” The fact is who do you attached the “creative” part: the people whose materials and skills the database is built-on (whether the material was bought legally or collected for AI training (like most medical interpretation softwares), mass-trained through people licensing the equipment and uploading suggestions (like many editing softwares), or mass-scrapped/stolen (like most artwork and writing softwares)); the assemblers creating the database; the programmer/team/company that created the search engine/AI platform; or the person using the AI to create the image per their specifications.

When publishing companies (and other companies) cannot attribute copyright ownership, they can not go the AI route. Contracts require clear lines of ownership to distribute rights. (Side-thought: Companies using AI-generated marketing materials, really should rethink their choices, because I bet if you can’t get copyright, you can’t get trademark either.)

Anyway, the person thanked me, saying no one explained it that way to them before.

AI isn’t inherently evil, but there are other considerations and maybe we writers and artists should start pointing out the “bottom line” for companies using AI isn’t protected rather than argue the ethical and moral stances. Many people only are able to listen to money. No copyright, no contract, no clink-clink.

That being said, many aspects of how humans are implementing AI are counter-productive to society as a whole and individuals in general, which ethically and morally could be interpreted as evil.

Ethically, the database builders doing the mass-scrapes, stealing materials under copyright is wrong. Especially when the follow-up programming to access that database includes suggesting prompts where copyright is worked around: create a drawing in the Style of Disney or write a horror book in the style of Stephen King. Both are clear violations of society’s agreement to protect people’s intellectual property so their efforts are paid and they have the opportunity to continue to create what people think is worthy of purchase. The owners of the creative materials did not agree to this use. Ethical sourcing of the materials for the databases needs to be required.

Morally, the electric and water required for datacenters, when the infrastructure is already stressed and normal people are constantly being asked to save irreplaceable energy resources like uranium, coal, and oil, is abhorrent.  While on some levels, the mass-use of the AI-products expands the capability and considerations of LLM (large language models) and AIs (artificial intelligences), making developing of productive uses of AI easier. For example, using AI to figure out how to water crops and target pesticides increases food for all. Also using LLMs to look over medical tests and crunch numbers beyond what humans are capable of save lives. Both of these uses are beneficial, and having everyone exploring LLM products is bringing down the price while also encouraging programmers and companies to discover more uses.

But programs like ChatGPT are being used indiscriminately because people aren’t seeing the cost. Right now the companies are underwriting it in the hopes to make even more money later, but “a single 100-word email in Open AI’s ChatGPT is the equivalent of consuming just over one bottle of water.” (Garrison) Making five quick pictures of you as various Disney Princes is equal to a day’s worth of water for one person. And that isn’t even counting the energy use. (The water is used to cool the heat generated by datacenter computers.)

People are using ChatGPT to write grocery lists. Is a grocery list really worth a bottle of water plus energy? The destruction of trees and habitat for the large area needed for these centers?

I know one email doesn’t matter, but just imagine several cities worth middle schoolers figuring out which version of Pokémon is the best version of their pet, with all the twenty-somethings using it for groceries lists, and all the tech bro saying “send out an email on a meeting about using paper straws to save the environment,” and you can see where the waste of limited resources becomes objectionable.

With the present issues with climate change, is the energy and water use of the datacenters for entertainment purposes appropriate ethically and morally? Is it appropriate to build datacenters on an already stressed electric grid with rolling blackouts just so people can have help writing simple 100-word emails? And is AI/LLM programs and apps the best way to write those emails?

TL/DR: Authors, artists, and other creatives have a love-hate relationship with AI, balanced between an exciting new creative tool and the exploitive, illegal tapping of the creative community by scraping intellectual property for training LLMs. Publishers and those whose business model is based on protecting intellectual property cannot put AI-generated material under contract because of legal considerations of rights and ownership. Additional ethical and moral consideration of the wide-spread use of LLM and the related datacenter industry required to support them makes causal business and entertainment uses of LLM and AI questionable.

Final Thought: I want machines to do the boring grinding repetitive tasks so I can make art and write books.

 

Bibliography

Garrison, Anna. “How Does AI Use Water and Energy? Unpacking the Negative Impact of Chatbots.” GreenMatters. 2025 Jan 10. https://www.greenmatters.com/big-impact/how-much-water-does-ai-use – last viewed 6/8/2025.

Editing Rant: F is Fact Check

Erin Penn 2 Comments

Photo by www.testen.no on Unsplash

Having friends, selectivity readers, and editors from a widely diverse background really helps writing accurate fiction. In my life, I have earned degrees in business, sociology, and computer science; my social circles looks like a Venn diagram with historic reenactors, D&D role players, and fiber art enthusiasts (especially embroidery, with a side of calligraphy and medieval illumination); I have worked as a teacher, tax preparer, and politician along with many other jobs in a lot of different industries, often more than one at a time. Plus unpaid side quests as a CPR instructor and adoring space exploration. (Oh, did I forget to mention writing, editing, book reviews, and small press publishing? I figured this website kind-of give that part away.)

This varied background means I often go “hold up, I need to do a little bit of research” when I am editing, then return with “FACT CHECK: here’s what I found.”

Having beta readers different from your personal background helps craft a more accurate picture of the world. Having specialists you can text with “Where can a person be shot with an arrow and still run for about three miles? How about if they are a werewolf and the arrowhead is silver?” or Facebook message with “So how do moon cycles ACTUALLY work? And what do you mean solar eclipses can only happen during the New Moon?”

My most recent Fact Check for an edit was CPR. Like I said, I was a CPR-First Aid instructor, something I did voluntarily for over a decade. I’ve been lucky enough never to have needed to administer CPR-Rescue Breathing in my life, but I have taught people who have used these skills in the real world.

And Fiction gets it wrong SO MUCH!!!!

Editing Rant activated.

Let’s start with the TV shows. How many times actors perform CPR on a BED!!! Look, you do compressions on a bed, the body is going to bounce up and down on the springs. Nothing is going to be compressed. Either put a body board under the body – and I say BODY because you only do CPR when there is no heartbeat. No heartbeat, no living person, … that is a dead body. – or you move the body to the floor or other flat hard surface.

Also on TV, the medical staff always “break” their elbows. The elbows are bent.

If you are doing compressions, the arms are stiff, and you have your shoulders and body above your hands and you push down with your whole body weight onto the body. You are falling on their chest basically with stiff arms. The effort on your part, after gravity does its thing with your weight compressing the ribcage, is lifting back up. Anyone who does pushups know the control fall is as exhausting as the push-up. Compressions are going to tire you out.

Now I will give the TV shows and Movies the elbow bend because you don’t want to perform CPR on a living person; no actor wants to go through that. It falls in the same category as the fact Movies and TV shows they never show the full vows during a marriage ceremony. Some things just aren’t done: perform CPR on a guest-actor or marry your co-actor on film.

Now onto books I have read or edited.

In one book, a group of three college students were electrocuted. Another person enters the room and is able to perform CPR and rescue breathing on all three people by themselves and revive all three people.

Uh, no.

Do you know how much effort it takes to do compressions, while also doing rescue breathing? Do you know how long you need to do both before it is effective? Not the typical TV, 15 seconds with three-to-five compressions and two breaths! I give TV a pass because of time limitations of the medium, but a book has all the time in the world. Three bodies needing CPR isn’t a quick fix.

If you are going to do CPR, figure you will be at it for minutes. The rule is once you start, you continued until you are relieved or you cannot physically do it anymore. Call 911 BEFORE you start. Because those “minutes” you are going to be at it is the ambulance response time for your area.

Back to the Editing Rant: Then there is the constant … and I do mean constant … “I feel a faint heartbeat, so I need to perform CPR.”

NOPE … no-no-no NO!!!

Again CPR is to restart the heart. You got a heartbeat, you are good. CPR is only done on dead people who were recently alive, to remind the body what it felt like to have a heartbeat and to be breathing.

Faint heartbeat – no CPR.

No heartbeat – then it is CPR time.

I ain’t got time to teach the world this fact one writer at a time.

So let me recommend something here. Take a CPR and First Aid course. American Red Cross, American Heart Association, OSHA training, whatever your country offers. Just take it. While the life you save likely won’t be your own, it may be a niece or nephew who fell in the pool, it may be a grandmother you are visiting, it may be a co-worker massaging the left side of their chest during a stressful meeting.

Or it could be you are able to write about CPR, rescue breathing, and basic first aid bandaging more accurately in your books.

Go! Get training.

I’m tired of editing this. It’s basic life knowledge. Or should be. Make it so.

Rant over.

E is for Editing Rant

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Today, I have an edit in, this time line editing / copy editing. It’s my third day going through it, and I have two more days with it. A-to-Z is hard when you are focused on other people’s words.

Line editing is the editing pass concentration on the paragraph and sentence level, and falls between developmental editing (the big picture story stuff – and my favorite type of edit to do for other people) and proofreading (the nitty gritty punctuation and verb tense stuff from English class). English class covered big picture stuff – picking up themes and logic and characters; and it also covered the nitty gritty with language structure and sentence diagrams. Line editing is a mystical land in-between no one really knows about.

I’ve covered topics like the power of paragraph breaks, fact checking (especially distances), varying sentences structure to keep things lively, integrating dialogue and narrative, etc. Also word choices. Making them powerful, make them match the genre.

Spell them right.

Okay that last one, spelling, is proofreading, but I try to catch as much as I can when I am line editing. Choosing the right word is harder than you think because of homonyms.

I need to rant on homonyms.

I’ve been editing for over a month now. I’m working on book seven and so.many.homonyms. The real evil thing about homonyms are they are actual words; spellcheck WON’T find them. Having a computer or friend read your story aloud WON’T find them because they sound the same as the word you should have used. The only way to catch these monsters is with trained human eyes and still some of these buggers are going to slip through. It’s why I start marking them during the line-editing even though it is a proofreading thing. Maybe between the two passes we can catch these nightmares in our net.

The standards: too/to/two and they’re/their/there and it’s/its.

The all-time winner (found in half of the books I edit)!
I reigned in my anger. (I reined in my anger.)
Reign – is to rule / Rein – Guild-line type things on horse which control movement

 Old standbys:
I waited with baited breath for the authors to learn. (I waited with bated breath for the authors to learn.)
Baited – using small pieces of food to catch bigger things / Bated – short of abated, meaning stopped or reduced

I bare the burden of too many words. (I bear the burden of too many words.)
Bare – uncovered / bear – to carry

I gave the writer a peace of my mind. (I gave the writer a piece of my mind.)
Peace – a quiet time or situation / Piece – a part

The son rose and set before the edit was done today. (The sun rose and set before the edit was done today.)
Son – male offspring / Sun – the big burning day-moon

What a fowl situation. (What a foul situation.)
Fowl – animal in the bird family / foul – offensive to the senses

 New and interesting ones:
Over the coarse of time, I learned my lesson. (Over the course of time, I learned my lesson.)
Coarse – rough surface / Course – a path

Pity the retch editing other people’s books. (Pity the wretch editing other people’s books.)
Retch – to gag / Wretch – be pathetic

Words closely related to homonym issues to watch out for:
Lighting / lightning / lightening (glows / storm / color changes)

Than / then (comparison of quality / time order)

 

I could go on all day, but let me end with one that blue (blew) my mind a few years ago. The author used each of these words twice in the manuscript. Once for each with the word spelled right, and once each with the homonym. Yes I fond them that time … but, no, I don’t always find – I can’t find – everything. Homonyms are hard to find, am I write (right)?