Get a Fucking Edigor er Editor

Onya Mate. I'm reding this in 2024 and love your stuff. With your volume you're bound to have the occasional miss. I used to write stories for my American Lady in Grand Rapids, MI, unfortunately ALS took her, So I gave it away. Your nearby Mate, Mike in Tassie. ( Ex-Pom.

Well said Egmont but Anonymous from MN USA has a point. Originality in diction is good but spelling also helps. I am working through all your submissions, enjoying them immensely. I also really like your sense of humour and your story lines are great but I also get confused when you double up on words out of place. I bet you had an Egidor when you were a journo. I really enjoy stories with a storyline involving over 60s. Why are we conditioned to believe that we are dead from the neck down after 50... I’m in my early 70s and live in SW West Oz (that’s Australia to those of you living over the ditch)

I do read with a jaundiced eye to those who could do with an outside critic source for their writing. Note: only if they mention their "newness" to writing, are interesting, original or enjoyable. My reading is for personal enjoyment, amusement and distraction and author it with an agenda, against the generalized shortcomings of a white male, I ignore it.

Writing a business letter with clarity, brief and pointed exhausts me. The writer who offer their stories to Lit, put effort in that I appreciate and must also exhaust(s) them too. In short the author that I would like to offer editing skills to is one who "wants' It, I enjoy or appreciate their stories and want them to continue writing for my reading time.

Edgemont, You Sir, Do Not need an editor.

Please continue writing for your own enjoyment and (my) our pleasure.

Best wishes

xtremedd

PS Spellchecked & for 9th grade reading level or above.

Thanks for this article. I haven't spoken to an author who isn't narked at the 'Anonymous' wisdom generator, the critic who criticises and doesn't leave their name.

You are by no means alone.. someone told me the following, and I thought it appropriate to share. Just because some can leave feedback, doesn't mean they should, and it certainly doesn't make them credible either.

Then again... where there's muck, there's brass!

JJ

I have read a considerable number of your stories, they are long so require some degree of commitment to get to the end. Your stories are enjoyable, maintain attention and we care about your characters. On the whole your stories are pretty well edited, I suspect you read your material and correct it before inflicting it upon us, so I don't often find errors.

I'm a little surprised you are bitching about regional differences, they just exist and be thankful that Noah Webster wasn't from the deep south: US spelling horrors would be much, much worse. I do get bent out of shape by homonym errors, particularly persistent ones, because they do spoil a story: I read the words not the sounds so I build up a very different mental picture between, for example, sight and site. A site has bulldozers; cranes; dump trucks: you get the picture: "Oh! You are a beautiful site" builds a picture of some teenage beauty with Tonka Toys running all over her - not what you probably intended. Some, not yours, stories are rife with these homonyms and they do spoil the pleasure of reading. I generally give up after a few paragraphs. I am a writer, and I learned the hard way what lazy writing does when I started reading excerpts. Each time you make a booboo, you lose your audience for as much as half a minute; that's about a sentence and a half. What happens is these haitii accumulate and you notice quite markedly that the audience miss essential facts after each booboo; and then lose the thread entirely.

Our language is one of the few things of beauty shared by a huge number of cultures from the USA to New Zealand and our words do carry a lot of fascinating baggage: American literature suffers because of Noah Webster’s spelling purge: you cannot express the richness of ideas using American spellings - there is a huge difference in weight between color and colour. So if an author wishes to assert the right to write illiterate prose I reserve the right to castigate him or her for it.

If you write to be read then you have a responsibility to your readers to make it enjoyable: If you write to feel good about yourself, then there is no point in my reading it.

As to your material, I do ignore the odd booboo, but I do remember remarking to myself recently that couple of your stories were not up to your usual standard: I suspect you know this as this little gripe follows shortly after your proof reading fiascos.

Finally, and this is a key point, some of the stories on literotica are dire, you see the authors write one, or maybe two stories and then vanish. They are often very short and I seldom get much further than the first paragraph. Your stories are not dire; we do read to the end; so if we bitch slap you afterwards it’s because we care; and somewhere in our consciousness believe that you care too. True, the world is also full of arseholes and some of them criticize your work for the sake of it but most of us do it out of love: literary criticism is very hard; gosh! Writing itself is none too easy! So our comments may come across as odd and with strange emphases, but if you sit back and read the tenor, not the letter of the criticisms, you will find there is something to take away. And if Retired Teacher From Memphis wants to grade your paper, maybe he or she has a point. They care about the language they speak: maybe you should too. Slowly but surely we are losing the richness of the language we speak, like global warming, we will try to fix it when it is far too late.