Back from vacation

Gretchen and I are officially back this week from vacationing in Colorado. What a fabulously relaxing way to spend two weeks! Holidays are perfect for writers, too. One has time to ponder and reflect upon his or her work, away from the computer and familiar societal structures. Under new circumstances, the brain tends to widen with perspective. Novel experiences can pull and tug at old, crusty synapses. Heres and theres have the potential to become moments of epiphany. The whole process of leaving and coming back can be just the elixir a potentially stale book project needs.

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Most Likely to Survive a Zombie Raid

Because we had such a great time reading your answers to our zombie question in the survey, we felt it only fair that you get to read some of our favorites, as well as see who you want on your zombie-fighting team…gang…squad…troop? We also give you a chance to vote on your favorites, as well as chime in if you have any ideas.

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Drumroll Please

Yesterday was a special day for Cogitate; it marked the five-year anniversary of our editorial partnership. We celebrated with some take-out and the Cogitate Studios Writers’ Contest questionnaires. What a way to spend the day! Thank you to all who participated.

While we had a lot of fun reading your answers, the judging was…well, it was excruciating. We had such a hard time because there were many amazing responses. So many, in fact, that we decided that instead of just picking two grand prize winners, we decided to add two honorable mentions. So, without further ado. Here are our winners:

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Cogitate Studios Writers’ Contest

The contest is currently closed for entries!

Thank you so much to all who participated. Beginning this week, we will be posting responses, statistics, and our own responses to the questions we posed to participants.

As the rules state, on Monday, June 21, we will be posting the winners, and sending out some books. We also hope you all stay tuned, as we will be starting another contest at the end of July.

Here was the deal:

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The Alchemy of Editing

The  longer title for this post is: Why You Must Love the People You Work With. Editing is, in many ways, more creative than people realize. Proofreading, of course, is a relatively straightforward job, requiring the editor have a knowledge of grammar rules, current trends (yes, even grammar has them), and house style guides. That being said, even certain grammar rules require a subjective look, e.g., “Does this sentence need a comma, or does it make sense without it?” (I’m not lying; CMOS 6.20 is “In a series whose elements are all joined by conjunctions, no commas are needed unless the elements are long and pauses helpful.”)

But more than that, as an editor, you need to know if your editing style is going to work with the author’s style. I run into this a lot in the work I do with historical and UK fiction, and Henry and I both encounter it on ghost writing projects. Personally, I tend to consistently follow rules, such as ellipsis to indicate stuttering speech or trailing off and em dashes to show interruption (within quotation marks) or an interruption in the dialogue to explain movement (em dashes in the middle of dialogue but outside the quotation marks).

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Whist, Blood Pudding, and Pride & Prejudice

A lot has happened in the past month, causing me to neglect the dear blog. In the past four weeks, I had a nasty cold that held on for at least two of those weeks, both parents came to visit, I worked on no less than five editing projects, and a number of books that I worked on were published. In particular, I copyedited a novella collection that will come out from Sourcebooks this winter, which gave me the opportunity to not only work with two authors I’ve sincerely enjoyed working with before, but also gave me the chance to work on a novella for the first time (pretty much the same as other fiction, only, you know, shorter) and work with a debut author on her Pride & Prejudice re-imagining (which is also a kind of A Christmas Carol re-imaging—very cool). All this to say, I have worked on a number of Pride & Prejudice spin-offs, sequels, re-imaginings, etc., and they run the gamut from picking up where P&P left off,  showing what would have happened should Elizabeth and Darcy have made different decisions during the happenings of P&P, to even focusing on side characters or family members we didn’t hear about in P&P. –> Continue Reading!