Editing Services

 

New Copyediting & Line Editing Services

About: I am a writer and English teacher, and I’d love to edit and proofread your material!

My services are as follows. Prices are flat rates. What I’ve listed here are rates for editing and proofreading fiction. I’m also willing and able to proofread and edit articles, essays, materials for websites, blog posts, etc. Prices for these will vary. Contact me here, email me, or find me on Twitter (@mnsebourn) if you're interested. 

 

Proofreading/Copyediting: I will review your manuscript and mark/correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors, as well as note obvious readability and clarity issues relating to diction, sentence structure, verb tenses, voice, etc.

Flash Fiction/Short Shorts (up to 1,000 words): $30

Short Stories (1k-10k words): $50

Novelettes/Novellas (10k-50k words): $100

Novels (50k words +): $150-300

 

Line/Developmental/In-depth Edits: I will review your manuscript and offer in-depth commentary on issues relating to style and story/character development. Along the way, I will also proofread and copyedit.

Flash Fiction/Short Shorts (up to 1,000 words): $50

Short Stories (1k-10k words): $75

Novelettes/Novellas (10k-50k words): $150

Novels (50k words +): $200-400

 

Notes: My best way to receive payment is through PayPal. Special rates may apply to manuscripts that fall on the extreme ends of the spectrum (extremely short or extremely long). Turnaround time is dependent upon each individual project.

New Release: DUST & TIME

I am posting this to reveal the final cover art for Dust & Time (see below) and to say four things about my newest book:

1) Dust & Time is about an undead serial killer who is determined to seal his legacy. 

2) Dust & Time checks in with Constable Riley Saunders, the main character from Folklore. Ever since finishing that book, I've wondered what happened to her. How do you move on from ridding your community of a raging werewolf lawyer? You don't need to have read Folklore to understand Dust & Time. With the exception of Riley's presence, the two stories are not at all connected.

3) There is a plague in this book. It's not our present situation, and for the most part, it lingers in the background and has little to do with the main story. But it's there.

4) For the first time, I skipped out on designing my own cover. I usually enjoy this. But I had a specific idea for Dust & Time that was (apparently) beyond me. So I scrapped that idea and contacted a talented gentleman named Neil Fraser. He produced the most eye-catching cover that any of my novels have yet seen (again, see below), and I'm very grateful.

I hope you'll read and enjoy Dust & Time. 

(Anybody interested in review copies, please let me know. I’d like to send out a few.)

Book Review: THE CONSULTANT

I'm no Bentley Little completist, but I've been a fan of his books for a long time.

I read The Store when I was a teenager, and I recall understanding at least some of the novel's satire and social commentary, while also appreciating it as a very, very different sort of horror novel.

Since then, I've read several more of his books, including The Revelation and The Summoning; Dominion remains one of the few full-length novels I've read in a span of less than forty-eight hours. And recently, I've enjoyed The Policy and The Influence.

So I am very familiar with what Bentley Little does, and I'd say his books usually fall on a spectrum of "Just Okay" (The Academy) to "Excellent" (The Store). I don't think've read a bad one.

And I still haven't, though at times in the middle of this book I was starting to wonder.

The Consultant is built on a typical Bentley Little framework: a consultant is brought in to save a struggling corporation--CompWare--and instead puts its CEO and all its employees through a dozen layers of torment. It's sometimes memorable. Occasionally funny. And it's plenty weird in that trademark Bentley Little way.

But this is nowhere near Little's best work.

To start, the book feels formulaic. This is to be expected of a Bentley Little book--to an extent; Little does what he does, does it well, and that's about all he does. But his strongest works make you forget about the formula because you're so immersed in them: you care about the characters and wonder what obscene, totally random nightmare they're going to encounter next; you're perhaps thinking about some of Little's social commentary; and when you put the book down, it lingers with you for all the reasons a memorable book should.

I never felt immersed in The Consultant. The only piece of this novel that's going to stick around in my head for the long term is the antagonist himself, and even he feels like a lost opportunity. The settings in this book were generic and barely described. (Little seems to be at his best when he's writing about small desert communities, not high rises and suburbia.) Promising sub-plots (like the consultant stalking the protagonist's family) go absolutely nowhere. The characters here were not developed at all. Craig, the protagonist, is a thirty-something guy who goes to work, goes home, gripes about work, and promises to spend more time with his wife and kid. That's about all we ever get from him, and he's the best-developed character here aside from the memorably pathetic and evil title character. Everybody else is just a name on the page.

The action and horror in this book were definitely from the mind of Bentley Little--no chance of any ghost writers here. But with very few exceptions, the stuff in The Consultant was tame and, in this reviewer's opinion, flat-out uninspired compared to the "how in the heck did he think of that?" material I've read in almost everything else he's written.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this book--because I don't need out of this world imagery or literary-quality characters to at least enjoy a story and give it a good review--is that this is a fairly long novel (almost 500 pages), and in its current state, it doesn't need to be. Throughout the heart of the book, the middle 300 pages or so, Little bangs on the same chord over and over and over again: consultant thinks of a ludicrous new policy, calls a meeting, and Craig complains about it to his spouse and coworkers.

As I stated earlier, The Consultant's sub-plots go nowhere. I don't know of an issue in this book that matters beyond the chapter it arises in.

If the book were 500 pages because Craig and his family were being properly developed as sympathetic characters... or the horrors and motivations of the strange, bowtie-wearing antagonist were being explored... or maybe a sub-plot was followed that actually gets off the launch pad and goes somewhere... If any of this were the case, then 500 pages would be fine.

As it is, this shoulda-coulda been at least 200 pages shorter than it is.

And despite all this, I never doubted that I was going to finish The Consultant.

Little has been writing this stuff a long time, and even when he's phoning something in that was likely frustrating him, his stuff is very entertaining and readable.

So, points for the memorable bad guy. Points for the author being so talented that he can write 300+ pages of more or less the same darn thing without it being boring. And points for writing horror novels like nobody else.

3/5 stars.

FLYING SAUCER, the story behind a restless novel...

Flying Saucer is available here

What do you do when humanity decides to pump the brakes on the turning of the world?

Take care of some old business, I guess.

Ten years ago, I wrote a novel called Flying Saucer. It was about a struggling musician in Las Vegas who finds herself teaming up with a friend and a couple of strangers in a battle against dark forces from a certain military base near Groom Lake. I put the book through several drafts, sent it to a company who’d published two of my other early novels, and figured I was done with it.

A few years passed, and I kept thinking that Audrey Cole’s story was not done. Unlike any other story or novel I’ve ever written, this thing persisted in the back of my mind, insisting that I'd made a mistake in sending it off and assuming I was done with it. Rework me, rewrite me, write a sequel or a prequel—but you gotta do something, the book said, cause this ain’t over.

In 2017, I took the first step toward appeasing this restless story: I contacted Flying Saucer’s publisher and got the rights back. Feeling motivated, I started on the story again, approaching it from several different directions. None of them led anywhere, and I turned my attention to other projects. It’ll happen when it happens, I told myself. It always does.

It did.

At the end of 2019, a key plot point that had been totally missing from the original incarnation occurred to me (What if Audrey heard her song—“Flying Saucer”—on the radio, performed by her, but she’d never actually recorded it? Wouldn’t that be weird! And it could be explained by…!) With this in mind, I dove back into the story, taking it from the top. Start with the same headlines about missing persons that begin the first version. Move into that same first scene with Audrey as she's struggling with her singing and playing. Start there; see where it takes you. 

This time, the writing went smoothly. 

Flying Saucer is now a much different book. Portions of the first incarnation remain intact, especially in the first third or so of the story. Most of the key characters made the trek to their new home without difficulty…. But most of the book was rewritten entirely. Several plot threads were changed or removed. Most importantly, the theme of the book is totally different. 

And it’s all for the better.

That first version of Flying Saucer was a noble effort at an idea that I really liked but was incapable—at that point—of fully developing.

Despite its inspiration from my personal explorations of the desert north of Las Vegas, despite its title and the story's inclusion of creepy shadow figures from Area 51, Flying Saucer is not a book about aliens or alien vehicles.

It’s a book about a woman who made a poor choice in her life at a time when she should’ve never been asked about her priorities. Will she make things right, when forces she’s incapable of comprehending are working against her? Can she?

These are big questions about big ideas. They deserve proper exploration.

This time, it's all in there.

NaNoWriMo and Rattus Rattus

2018 started off promisingly, with publication of Lost Soul Found, a novella I wrote in late 2017.

I planned on writing another novel through the spring and summer and publishing in the fall.  Things went as planned... kinda... for a while.  I was over 40,000 words into a novel about a serial killing ghost when I had to accept that it was going nowhere.

Discouraging? Yes. I'd spent most of the year forcing it along, telling myself that all first drafts are crap; it's okay that this thing is rambling; it's normal it's taking forever....  I was convinced of all this, because all of it is true.  First drafts are meant to be rough, and some stories take a while.  Fine.  But you have to know when typical setbacks become warning signs.  You have to know when to call it a day.

So, time to pull the plug.  Fine.  But what was next?

Paperback and Kindle

Thanks to the advice of one of my students, I set my sights on NaNoWriMo.

Because, hey, I love a challenge. I love to climb mountains. I've developed a passion for running and completed my first half marathon in 2018.  Why not take the challenge approach to writing? Why not NaNoWriMo? It sounded fun.  Maybe the structure would suit me.

I spent the last two weeks of October tossing around ideas.  I did not outline anything.  I simply decided on a concept--a single dad and his daughter in a rat-infested house--and a working title, Plague House.

And on November 1, I dove in.

After spending months fumbling through 40,000 torturous words that went nowhere, Plague House somehow spilled out easily.  I wrote between 1,300 and 2,000 words a day and hit 50,000 words right on time and spent the first week of December rewriting the ending.  That was really the book's only hiccup, and it was a minor one.

Plague House became Rattus Rattus, and I'm proud of it.  Like Folklore, it's a lean, straight-up horror novel with characters readers will care about.  Also like Folklore, it's a modern-yet-traditional take on a classic monster.

The blood-suckers in Rattus Rattus are tragic, lonely, and monstrous.  I think they'll have you checking for rodents and fleas.

NaNoWriMo was just what I needed.  And Rattus Rattus is available now.

Vision and REvision

The most important part of writing a novel is getting that initial vision in writing to begin with.  But if you intend to unleash what you’ve written on the public, you’ve got to go well beyond the first draft.  To slightly rephrase a quote attributed to Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is crap.”

Michael Crichton said it pretty well, too: “Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten.”

Here, I am going to briefly discuss my process of revising; not because I think I have any brilliant, unique spins on the conventional wisdom, but because I think writers learn from both self reflection and one another.

First, though, a confession (that’s not really a confession): Because I don’t outline or plot my novels before diving into them, my first drafts are truly prime examples of Hemingway’s wisdom: characters and locations change halfway into the narrative; loose threads dangle everywhere; inconsistencies abound… this, plus all the typical typos and issues related to grammar, style, and overall readability.

But that’s fine.

Because any first draft should emerge from its initial revision looking like a gutted carcass.  Any writer who doesn't totally mutilate his or her book during that first round with the red pen has failed to do the job right.  And to be clear: the first round is the writer’s job.  Don’t inflict the inconsistent, overwritten, underwritten, mistake-riddled, infernal suckage of a first draft on anybody, not even a trusted loved one or friend.

Anyway.  My process after I finish a first draft (which I usually handwrite) goes something like this:

Wait, then type.  I put the notebook(s) away.  I don’t (typically ignore it for weeks as some say you should, but I do step away from it… for a while.  The length of this “cooling period” depends on how attached I feel to the book, how confident I am in it, or perhaps how sick I am of it.  I simply don’t want to begin revising anything if I can’t look at it objectively.

After a significant break from the thing, I type it up.  I consider this an “unofficial” first revision, because I’ll make a few changes as I type.  Major stuff?  No, because this process is all about getting the narrative out of the notebooks and into the easily-manipulated confines of Microsoft Word as quickly as possible.  But I’ll fix the obvious issues that can be fixed with a few keystrokes. Once it’s all typed, I print it out.

And within a day or two, it’s time to…

Unleash the red pen.  I don’t hold back.  I don’t elect for alternate colors or alternate mediums.  No green colored pencil, no purple crayon.  It’s red ink, preferably gel, because I want every flaw in the novel that I can find to be noted and noted clearly, so it can be changed or removed.  This is surgery, and I want to see blood.  There will be words, lines, paragraphs, and sometimes entire passages slashed or marked for revision; there will be arrows and circles galore… notes in the margins.

At this point, I’m fixing the book, not polishing.  This isn’t about smoothing out the language; this is about errors: grammar, spelling, consistency, character, plot.

This can take a while, because it’s fundamentally the most important part of the revision.

But after I’ve turned the manuscript into a pile of gore, I sit down at the computer and…

Type in the corrections/revisions.  And when this is done, the manuscript will obviously be much different than it was before—and shorter, with all those overwritten and wordy passages excised, all those frayed plot threads reattached or cut loose.  The manuscript, at this point, is at least readable, too.  If I chose to hand the book to a trusted reader at this time, I wouldn’t be totally embarrassed to do so.

But I don’t choose to hand the book to any trusted readers at this point.

After I print out this tighter, leaner, corrected manuscript, I…

Read it aloud.  For several nights, I pace around the house with a red pen handy, manuscript in hand, reading the book aloud, from the first word to the last.  I know you’ve seen reading aloud recommended before.  And I can say, without doubt, that it works.  You will find flaws—of all kinds—that you won’t find by reading it silently off your laptop screen.  I strongly urge you to print the book and read it aloud.  If your spouse thinks you’re a little bit crazy, it’s okay.  You probably are. You’re a novelist, after all.

When I’m done reading the book aloud, marking it up as I do so (and hopefully this manuscript emerges from its date with the red pen much less bloody than the previous draft), I…

Type in these corrections and changes.  And then, finally, it’s time to…

Hand the book to a trusted reader.  I’m not a fan of sending my stuff all over the internet to strangers or near strangers who volunteer themselves as “beta” readers.  Some folks do it, but I don’t.  Writing is a labor of love.  I wouldn't mail my wife or cats to a stranger, so why my young and still vulnerable book?  Certainly, you need to have somebody you can trust who will approach your work objectively and give it the praise—and criticism—it deserves before it’s thrown to the wolves—ahem, world.  Family members can be good for this, if they know their way around the language and will be (brutally) honest with you.  Former teachers or professors can be helpful, too.

You just need honest and informed eyes on the book that aren’t your own, the eyes of folks who understand it’s not their job to say, “Oh, I love it!” or “Dude, this really sucked!” but to give meaningful, constructive feedback.  Are the characters making realistic decisions?  Are certain points too predictable or too out of the blue yonder?  How’s the pace?  Did I accurately capture the mood of the setting?

Such feedback is critical, because I want to know if the book needs another round of editing, or if it’s a few little typos away from being ready for

Publication.

Writing Music

I just reached the 20,000-word mark of my work in progress, which is a straightforward horror novel, set in my home state of Arkansas. For now, that’s all I’ll reveal about it. I’m just a little superstitious, and it seems that if I ever get too excited about a work and start speaking or writing about it, said work will retaliate by dying on the proverbial vine.

I’m here to don my music critic hat and talk about some music I’ve re-discovered while working on this book.

I can write in silence, just as I’ve been known to write in noisy waiting rooms, car lots, and classrooms. But when the setting is 100% to my liking, I prefer to have some writing music emanating from my portable Bose speaker. I have no clear definition of writing music. It varies, depending on my mood. Sometimes it’s a playlist of quiet, somber songs; sometimes it’s folk; sometimes it’s a Radiohead album or a collection of bizarre non-music (such as Tool’s most abstract, Area 51-inspired noise tracks).

Lately, though, my go-to writing music has been what I feel is three straight releases of under-appreciated material by the Swedish progressive death metal band Opeth.


Yes, I do listen to a Swedish progressive death metal band when I need to think: except it’s not death metal. Progressive, yes. Death, no. After Opeth’s 2008 album Watershed, the band abandoned the “death” part of their style entirely (and their progressive death albums are excellent as well, if you’re into that sort of thing). Since Watershed, they’ve released three albums—Heritage (2011), Pale Communion (2014), and Sorceress (2016)—that could be loosely described as simply “prog rock.”  Except this material can't be properly categorized with one label. It’s prog; it's also folk, hard rock, experimental, and yes, a little bit metal; or it's at least influenced by metal. It’s also very fine thinking music.

Heritage is the most challenging of the three efforts. The album begins with its title track, a somber two-minute piano number, then launches into one of the most aggressive tunes of the entire three-album stretch, “The Devil’s Orchard.” This aggressive track hits you head-on and charges furiously towards the short-lived but memorable guitar solo that wraps it up. From here, Heritage crawls and gallops its way through an unpredictable landscape that’s at one moment explosive and the very next quiet and atmospheric. This apparent disjointedness is not entirely a bad thing. Given its unpredictability and complexity, Heritage offers something new with every listen, and the more you listen to it, the more you start to think, “Maybe disjointed isn’t the right word. Maybe this is simply a complex album that takes time to get.”

Pale Communion is a tighter album than Heritage, with a much stronger folk influence than either Heritage or Sorceress. The album opens with a complex, prog-inspired track “Eternal Rains Will Come,” passes through the closest thing this band will come to mainstream rock territory with “Cusp of Eternity,” and then launches straight into the opposite of “mainstream rock” with the eleven-minute prog-folk-metal tune “Moon Above, Sun Below.” This track is complex and unpredictable without meandering; quiet, moody, softly-strummed passages explode into epic guitar solos, which seamlessly retreat into folk territory. "Moon Above, Sun Below" is arguably a microcosm of the entire album. Calmer waters persist through the middle of the album, until we arrive at the three-track closing set: the folk-inspired epic “The River,” the latter-Led Zeppelin-esq. “Voice of Treason,” and the beautifully flowing “Faith In Others,” which sounds exactly like its title.

Sorceress is the most modern-rock influenced of these three albums. It does not contain the heavy-quiet-heavy-quiet unpredictability of Heritage, but it does not—to me—come across as cohesive as Pale Communion; with any other artist, the latter would be a bad thing. But this album, lately, has been my favorite of the three, cohesive or not. There are three tracks here that are straightforward rock/hard rock: the down-tuned and heavy title track, the charging “Chrysalis,” and the (dare I say it?) optimistic-sounding “Era.”  Between these rockers is the complex, bizarre “The Wilde Flowers” (which has grown on me and become a favorite); the largely-instrumental and Middle Eastern-tinged “The Seventh Sojourn”; and the nine-minute Opethian concoction “Strange Brew.” But Sorceress is not without its soft side: “Sorceress 2” is a slightly-ominous, quiet number, and “Will O the Wisp” is a folk-inspired song that soars just enough to take you away.

I’ll summarize with this: if you are open-minded about music and give these three albums a chance, I almost guarantee they’ll take you away, especially if you’ll partake of them with a good set of headphones.

And if you’re a writer who wants some complex, diverse thinking music to entrance you while you work… Well, that’s what brought me here. They work for that, too.