As I sit here on a Sunday morning, enjoying the sunshine and my coffee, I see a tweet from one of my fellow naturist authors, Wallace Greensage. Wallace just published his third book, and seeing that tweet made me think of this here post.
I had the good luck to have these same fellow authors willing to look over my writing. Mind you, I’m not a native English speaker (nor writer), so my English isn’t perfect.
At that moment it struck me how great that naturist
Working together like that is important. Writers, like any kind of people, can fall into traps when putting down words. Some things just don’t seem to want to go away. My ‘skill’ in writing
Having someone check the writing is important. Another set of eyes always sees things that escape a writer because of habit and blindness to her/his own mistakes. Of course, there are tricks you can use to catch most of them, but having a buddy, an editor, a proof-reader is vital to discovering the oddities and flaws. Also, someone like that can detect stupid things, like someone suddenly going from blue eyes to brown eyes and then going back to blue eyes, to give an example.
For me it is also important to have collaborators who are naturists themselves. People who understand the spirit of the writing, who write and live that themselves. If there is a concept in a book that isn’t naturist, they will catch that and tell me about it. A textile editor would totally miss that.
This post is basically a THANK YOU! note to the people who help me in making my writing palatable for consumption. So thank you, Ted, Will and everyone who has helped to make my stories better. Sheila and Jeremy thank you, as do the cast of Mirror Earth, the
Thank YOU, Paul, for your wildly imaginative and prolific work. Also thanks for this post, because, as you say, it’s much better for us to work together and provide good feedback, with the goal of producing stronger work overall. Proud to be part of the “collaborative naturist wordsmiths”!
Yes, Jake Drake, author of the Chronicles of a Bare Naked Nudist books, look over my new novel Life Models before I published it this past June.
*looked, not look. That will teach me to try to write a comment on my phone…
It’s a sad fact (at least, I think it’s sad) that many publishers no longer have the resources to provide their authors with top-grade copy editing. What’s even sadder is that it seems a great many self-publishing authors don’t even use the features built into the word processors they use (with some, I suspect they use voice-to-text systems, as spill chuckers won’t normally deliver homophone errors).
We’re all familiar with the false “corrections” produced by spell checkers (and the sometimes hilarious errors made by predictive text systems – I’ve recently acquired my first smartphone, and a few days ago had terrible trouble getting it to show “bees” – as I had typed – rather than “beds”). But, like so much technology, the spelling and grammar checkers can do a lot to pick up issues, and some of the stuff I’ve read would, were the monitoring systems enabled, have covered the writer’s screen with squiggly underlines in various colours.
Personally, I regard such sloppiness as an insult to the reader. Not that I expect published writing to be error-free, that would be ridiculous. But errors should be exceptional, not the norm.
Fortunately, Will, Paul and Robert have high standards, and their collaborations with one another, Ted, Wallace and others mean that I can read their books without continually stumbling and backtracking to work out what it was the writer meant to type.
As someone once said “you can have it quick, or you can have it right”.
Thanks for this ringing endorsement, Tim! That means a lot coming from a reviewer like you! It’s certainly a goal of ours to have high standards for copy-editing as well as for other aspects of the reading experience, in order to produce the best possible quality naturist fiction, poetry and etc. Speaking for myself, I know I learn a lot from reviewing, editing and commenting the works in progress of my fellow writers. The collaboration, as Paul has described it here, has become key.
I’ve been meaning to write to you for a few days; thank you, Will, Paul and Robert (and Wallace) for setting a high standard. There are many other writers who should aspire to your standards but are content with Tim’s ‘quick’ rather than ‘right’.
For about a year I have been using Grammarly (premium) as my first editor (my second one is my wife). Grammarly uses sophisticated algorithms to check many aspects of my writing (as I write) and suggests alternatives which I often accept but sometimes reject because it is not aware of the environment in which, or about which, I am writing. I suggest using it for those who need help, but cannot afford real editors.
I have no connection to Grammarly, other than as a happy user.
Thank you, Mark! We appreciate your message and endorsement. 🙂
Thank you, Mark for your kind comments. I have heard of many in the writing community using Grammarly. I am considering it for the future when I have less time or when I get tired of rewriting for the umpteenth time.
I should have added that good writers (you guys!) are less likely to ‘need’ Grammarly; however, it could act as a ‘first proof-reader’. Art Ifficial-Intelligence and Al Gorithm should not be allowed to over-ride creative writing by knowledgeable authors. Unfortunately, there are too many who don’t even know they have used the wrong word since it may sound like the write won.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAA!!!