My First Editing Experience: Turns Out I Can Write

I opened that document fully prepared to be humbled.

When you hand your manuscript to an editor for the first time, you brace yourself. You imagine red ink everywhere. You imagine someone politely dismantling everything you thought was good about your writing and handing it back to you in pieces.

That is not what happened.

Very few body changes. Mostly formatting — italics, title styling, a few ands added or removed. The kind of things that have nothing to do with whether you can actually tell a story. Which, apparently, I can. I found that ego-boosting. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What also surprised me was how well the process itself was organized. Everything came back line by line, each line numbered. You go to the line you want to change, write your note, send it back. That's it. I was expecting chaos and got a system. It was actually quite inspiring — the kind of organized process that makes a big intimidating thing feel manageable.

I went into my first editing experience expecting to feel like a student getting a paper back. I came out of it feeling like a writer who just got confirmation that the story holds up.

By the time I got to this book, I had already done the hard work. The editor's job was just to help me make it shine. 🐉