On Jobs That Are Harder Than They Look

Omigod, my respect for editors has gone through the roof. I had some sense that their weeknights and weekends were consumed by reading manuscripts on submission as well as editing upcoming books, but I had no idea how hard it would be just to balance editing one book on a series of deadlines with other work and with one’s home life. I have just the one book and it took up a dozen weekends of work: reading, rereading and then getting on the phone with Neil, going page by page, fine-tuning some dialogue here, making a character’s motivations crystal clear in a key scene, that sort of thing. That level of detail was fun for me, but I was lucky; how does a real editor balance dozens of current projects at one time AND acquire AND do their marketing advocacy in-house? Not enough hours in the day.