EDITS - YES. EDITS - NO. WHICH IS IT FOR YOU?

'Edits' is a bit of 'Marmite' word, I always think - you either love it or hate it. Authors tend to say ....heavy sigh.....'Going to be out of the loop for a while, I've got edits'. A bit, then, like a dose of influenza or a nasty rash. But is there a middle way? Could edits become an acquired taste? Back in the day when I was doing journalism for Devon Life, my copy had to be pretty spot on. And anyway, the maximum word count was 1000 words so not too difficult to get right. I've had a fair few magazine editors for my short stories over the years as well. In the days when I wrote a lot for My Weekly I had the subeditor (that doesn't look right - should it be sub editor? Or maybe sub-editor?) from heaven - a lovely lady called Jean. She would often ask me to add a paragraph, or another plot thread, or change names, and - once - even a setting. So I thought, when the time came for me to do an edit on a full length novel, that I pretty much knew where I was going with it. Oh dear. How wrong could I have been! How very, very wrong. To say my edit on TO TURN FULL CIRCLE was a steep learning curve is the understatement of the century. There were lots of computer probs with this one, alas, which didn't help. I began to wonder whose book it was as it went through yet another tweak or six. For EMMA (the sequel to TTFC, and the second in my trilogy) I have a different editor. Goodness, what a difference this is making to how I perceive edits to be. I have discovered ... that I seem to have a bit of a fondness for ... elipses. Oh yes I do! And I flirt with the dash/hyphen rather more than is decent - well, haven't we all been there? Lots of both have been taken out and replaced with commas. Or the sentence has been split into two. How that simple thing has tightened up my writing - thank you, Jane! So now we come to the thorny question about self-publishing versus the mainstream route. Someone (she has never worked with an editor) moaned to me only this week that she had been taken to task by someone she'd asked to read her manuscript, for some grammar and punctuation issues. 'But I've never turned in anything less than a perfect manuscript!' she wailed. I gulped. Back home, on my desk, was my editor's 'Style Sheet'. There are 70 things on it - 70! Here are a few:- cabinetmaker, not cabinet-maker. commis chef, not in italics. drawing room, no hyphen. rag doll,not rag-doll. mincemeat, but mince pies. Oh dear. And to think I have a copy of NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY FOR WRITERS AND EDITORS on my bookshelf! But we all think we know how it should be written sometimes, don't we? I'm definitely going to refer to it more in the future. How much time we would save ourselves - and our editors - if only we got these basics perfect on submission. So, I'm going to be out of the loop for a while. I've got edits. My historical is done and now a contemporary novella awaits - a whole new ballgame, or should that be ball-game/ ball game? Hmmm ....