🆕 New service.
I will edit the first ~10000 words of your manuscript to help you get it ready for literary agents.
I’ve done this for a fantasy–romance author this week and it has been such a satisfying experience.
It’s really important to impress the agent with clarity and precision of expression.
Alongside the usual formatting, SPAG and consistency checks, the changes I made often related to the following:
– avoiding echoes and repeats of words in sentences close-by one another
– taking out filler words such as ‘that’ and some instances of ‘she/he said’ where they weren’t necessary
– changing some sentence openers so that fewer started with the subject of the sentence
– removing some adverbs so they were used sparingly
I also assessed the author’s POV. He had written in the third person limited, i.e. pronouns and names, yet with access to thoughts and feelings, namely one particular character’s. Yet I spotted some sentences I felt head-hopped, or drifted into either an omniscient POV, or a detached one – giving thoughts and feelings of other characters which the POV character would not know, or giving details which sounded too cinematic in scope. For this reason, I amended some sentences to give the consistent impression that we are accessing the POV’s angle on all things.
As I said, this was all really satisfying and enjoyable and I want to do it again!
If you want me to run my eagle eyes over the opening of your novel (or even the whole thing), let me know.
I’m taking bookings for February 2022 onwards.
CherryEdits 