This week, I’m talking with award-winning indie author Whitney Hill. Whitney shares her experiences with finding beta readers and editors she trusted, Twitter contests, how looking at self-publishing as a business has influenced her process. We also discuss accidental werewolves and the perfect way to roast a marshmallow!
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
write_wherever on Instagram and Twitter, whitneyhillwrites.com for website
Shadows of Otherside series: Elemental, Eldritch Spark, Ethereal Secrets
BetaBooks: https://betabooks.co/
Fiverr, a platform for all sorts of freelance services: https://www.fiverr.com/
#RevPit: https://reviseresub.com/annual-contest
Jeni Chappelle, editor: https://www.jenichappelleeditorial.com/links
Tweet: What it looks like around Arden’s house: https://twitter.com/write_wherever/status/1341140392482402305?s=20
Pitch Wars: https://pitchwars.org/
DV Pit: https://www.dvpit.com/
Tessera Editorial BIPOC mentorship program: https://www.tesseraeditorial.com/mentorship-program
Dani Moran: https://twitter.com/dani_l_moran
Dahlia Adler’s Cool for the Summer: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50748473
Jason June’s Jay’s Gay Agenda: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55200702-jay-s-gay-agenda
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180467.Self_Editing_for_Fiction_Writers
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month): https://nanowrimo.org/
S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy https://www.goodreads.com/series/211584-the-daevabad-trilogy
Kim Harrison, Laurell K Hamilton, Patricia Briggs
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker: http://www.helenewecker.com/the-golem-and-the-jinni-by-helene-wecker/synopsis-of-the-novel-the-golem-and-the-jinni/
WriteHive: https://writehive.org/
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences. I'm your host Ariel Anderson, and this week I'm talking with Whitney Hill. Whitney writes award-winning adult fantasy with sizzle and soul from Durham, North Carolina. Her worlds feature the diversity she has lived as a biracial woman of color and former migrant to Europe. She uses these life experiences to write characters drawing on inner strength to carve out a place for themselves. Elemental is her award-winning urban fantasy debut and book one in the Shadows of Otherside series. Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Whitney!
Whitney: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Ariel: So you are independently published, which is fabulous. How did you choose the people you worked with for beta reading and developmental editing? We'll start with sort of that overarching big-picture question, and how did your experiences differ in those two steps of the process?
Whitney: With beta reading, at first I used a service called Beta Books. And that was really helpful to find a range of people who were interested in beta reading books. I think they've expanded their service since I use them. And then I also looked on Fiverr actually, because you know you get so much advice when you work with beta readers that it's kind of hard to tell like is this an individual opinion? Is this something that really works? And on Fiverr I was able to find some people who had MFAs, so they could look at it a bit more critically. So kind of a mix there, I was looking overall for people who were urban fantasy fans who knew the genre and knew what I was trying to do.
And then for Developmental editing, I got really lucky. I ran into Jeni Chapelle as part of the RevPit Twitter contest, and I almost didn't join the contest because I...you know, I was certain that my book wasn't ready and I just had no idea what I was doing, and she really encouraged me to jump in and do it, and I had such a good experience that after the whole contest was over, I went back to her for the developmental edit just because I really felt like she understood, not only what I was trying to do with the story, but also you know she's local to North Carolina. So she would really be able to look at the story and identify where it spoke to the setting and where it needed help. So there's a lot of, I guess, critical decision-making there in deciding, you know, who was I going to listen to for feedback.
Ariel: Yeah, you did a great job with the setting. You posted a picture on Twitter recently where you were like, this is what it looks like Arden’s house, and I was like that is exactly what I pictured.
Whitney: Yeah, no, and that's one of the great things about writing locally. I'm actually a transplant North Carolina. I didn’t grow up here, I didn’t live here until about four years ago, and getting out and getting to know the area has just been so key to the story, and I love hearing that people can, you know, see the setting exactly as it is, and that did take a lot of researcher as a newcomer.
Ariel: I meant to look it up. What is RevPit? What are the rules for that one?
Whitney: RevPit, it's revise and resubmit, so it's a collaborative effort between a bunch of editors. A lot of them at the developmental editing stage. And it's kind of one of those pitch contests, like pitch wars or, you know, DV Pit. But this one is to win a chance to work with an editor on your story. They'll tell you what you need to revise and then you resubmit. So it's a good stepping stone, I think particularly for people who are interested in following a traditional publishing route, which was actually the way I was trying to go. I got a lot out of it, even as somebody who eventually went indie, so yeah definitely something for authors to check out.
Yeah. It's not every day that I see a copy editor mentioned in a book. When I saw it on your copyright page, I looked up Tessera Editorial, and I looked up Dani Moran, because you cite them, and I was just really delighted to see all of the wonderful books that they have going through Tessera recently, like Dahlia Adler's Cool for the Summer and Jason June’s Jay’s Gay Agenda. They have a mentorship program for BIPOC who are interested in becoming editors, so big shout out for that good work. And I wondered, Dani did such a beautiful job
on your book. Did you find Dani through Tessera, or was that just a happy coincidence?
Whitney: Yeah, I found her through Tessera. And that was just a really good experience working with them. I was able to find you know a copy editor who read my genre, and I think I definitely got far more than I expected to be honest.
Ariel: What was it like working with Danny?
It was fantastic. I mean, really quick, really professional. I learned quite a lot about what it... you know, what it means to have a copy edit compared to other types of edits, and I think maybe as somebody who was at the very beginning of my process with Elemental, I knew that there were different, like, you know, a developmental edit and a copy edit and a line edit and like all these different kinds of edits, but I hadn't had the practical experience of what that meant. And it was just fantastic, like all of the things that she caught, and she wrote this whole like style guide about, okay we're using you know Chicago Manual Style, but here's what's different about this particular book. You know, she caught errors about local things that like I should have known as a local writer. So it was just a fantastic experience really.
Ariel: Were there any surprises or anything that delighted you?
Whitney: I think I was surprised, at least in the case of this particular agency, there was a little bit of a sensitivity read that was rolled into it. In my case there was a very you know, like a very small thing and—I say very small; I don't mean to minimize it. But the thing that I, it wouldn't have jumped out to most people as, you know, potentially problematic, and Dani really tactfully said, “Here's why you might want to change your language. Here's why.”
You know, obviously it's mortifying because you don't want to be you know that person who's being insensitive, and I think sometimes as a person of color, you kind of forget that like, yes, you too can also mess up on these things, you know. Nobody has a total high ground on using language. We've all picked up things, we've all learned things. So that was just a really good lesson for me. A surprising lesson, but a really good one, and one that I'm grateful for.
Ariel: To get really specific. So you sent Dani your manuscript or did you send it through Tessera?
Whitney: I sent it through Tessera, yeah. They arranged everything.
Ariel: Okay, and then did she also do the cleanup round? Like she tracked all of her changes and sent it to you, and then you reviewed the changes, and did you accept and reject, or did you just say, you know, stet this, stet this, and send it back to her for cleanup?
Whitney: Nope, I did the cleanup myself.
Ariel: Ah, okay. How did that feel was that overwhelming, or...?
Whitney: I think I have like kind of an analytical mind so for me it wasn't overwhelming just because, you know, I expected to get edits back, and edits were exactly what I got. You know, it's just a matter of methodically like, Okay, I've got this one, I’ve got this one, I’ve got this one. If there was one I didn't agree with, was there precedent for why I wanted to leave things the way that it was? And then, cuz I was already working on Book Two at that point, was it consistent with what I was saying in the next book? You know, it's just paying attention to the details.
Ariel: Yeah, so there was nobody who looked over it after that, like you were the final authority on your work.
Whitney: Yep, that's what I do for all of my books.
Ariel: Ooh! That's so much power.
Whitney: It really is, yeah.
Ariel: Before you even go through editing—rewinding a little bit—how did you prepare your manuscript so that you know you got the most out of those critiques and out of your editors’ time?
Whitney: That's a really good question. One thing that's really helped is Jeni Chapelle has a reverse outline method that she taught as part of a workshop. And that helps me a lot with the developmental aspect of, you know, editing my own work before I send it off. And then I've also got like a whole stack of grammar books and, like, editing, self-editing books.
Ariel: Ooh, anything good?
Whitney: Let’s see, there's one that I really love, which is... Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.
Ariel: Yes! Beth Jusino mentioned that one in Episode Two.
Whitney: Yeah, no, that was a really good one, especially as somebody who, like, I feel like I was a pretty good writer already, but there's a lot of technical craft to it, and you know, obviously that's why we hire professional editors, but just doing what you can as a writer to educate yourself, to work on craft, to work on process, and get it as good as you could possibly get it. Before I send anything off to an editor, I have to tell myself, “I would be happy to publish this today.” It's not for other people to fix my messes. It's for them to help me improve my work.
Ariel: I just got chills, that is so good. Let's talk about the specifics of your Otherside series—hopefully without too many spoilers. I just finished Elemental, and it was thrilling. And I'm still really excited about it. The second book in the series, Eldritch Sparks, is also out, and you're gearing up to release it Ethereal Secrets, still in February 2021?
Whitney: Yes, that's the current plan. I'm waiting for the cover design to come back, but the editing is all done. I just gotta like get these last pieces together.
Ariel: Yeah! Did you use the same editorial team for all three books, or have you switched it up over time?
Whitney: I did switch it up for the next two books. When I did the first book, like I said, I had been planning to traditionally publish. So my developmental edit with Jeni was way far behind the copy edit. There were a lot of changes in between. There's a lot of time, and then I just needed to get the book going a bit faster, so I was like okay, Jeni's booked out. She's very often booked out.
Ariel: Yeah!
Whitney: You know, like let me see if I can find another good copy editor, and I was fortunate to. With the next books, I was able to, you know, arrange something. It was kind of a two in one. And you know just take, I guess, more responsibility for my own developmental edit. It's always an evolving process. I've cut way down on the number of beta readers that I use, because I've got one or two that that I really trust their opinion, I trust that they know what I'm trying to do. I trusted they are readers of the genre, you know, that they are critical readers, rather than just pitching it out and saying, “Can somebody read this?” At this point, it is a business that I'm that I'm running, so it's like there are deadlines, so I've got to turn it around. I'm just kind of found mechanisms for turning it around, high quality but quickly.
Ariel; Your protagonist, Arden. She has such complex relationships, and her motivations and emotions behind them get woven into the story with really great pacing. Did you get any help on that from betas or Jeni?
Whitney: The funny story about Arden’s relationships is that in the first round of the book, she didn't have very much agency, and that's probably the best piece of advice that Jeni, who did the developmental edit, gave me, basically that Arden needed to kick a lot more ass. You know, she really needed to be somebody who took charge of situations and did more for herself rather than reacting to those around them. And I think that kind of reflected where I was at the time that I was writing. Those relationships grew more complex as Arden as the main character had to—I say she had to find them—as I was writing them in, I had to revisit why was she doing some things, what were her motivations, and how does that impact the relationships. So there was definitely a lot of help, from particularly Jeni, on the relationships and on Arden and how they interact.
Ariel: I loved the ass and cash romantic relationship with the outcast werewolf. That really heated up for me, as someone who, you know, grew up in the heyday of Twilight. That was just really like a good payoff for me.
Whitney: Oh, nice. No, it's always funny. Everybody, they really love Roman, and the funny thing about Roman was he was never originally in my head for the book.
Ariel: (gasp) No!
Whitney: Yeah, he was a happy accident.
Ariel: Oh no!
Whitney: I was writing a book for NaNoWriMo, and I had to hit my word count for the day. I hit a wall, and I was like, where's this gonna go? like I don't have a werewolf, I don't have any sizzle in this book yet. All right, we're going to put a wearable boyfriend or friend with benefits. So yeah, that’s how that happened.
Ariel: And then there's the whole magical fantasy side of the series, so we know that Arden can manipulate air as a sylph. You know, Roman is a werewolf, and there's all of these other creatures and types of magic. Arden mostly doesn't use her powers, for the first book at least, because there's this death threat on her head if she's discovered. Did your editing team point out places where she should or shouldn't use her powers, or did they have any the thing to say about which creatures get included and how they should be included or how they were portrayed?
Whitney: I do think I was asked a few times, like, why hasn't she used her powers here. Jeni had made a really good point about what else could she be doing with these powers, which is where I got this... the passive and active. I don't know if it comes out that much, I can’t remember if it comes out that much in book one. It develops more in the next few books around what air abilities come out without her trying, they're just part of who and what she is as a sylph. But then what does she actually have to activate and make a conscious effort to do, like make a whirlwind. So that was a really fun process that definitely did come out of the editing process.
And then the creatures. It was nice to get feedback from a few editors and readers, about, oh this is, you know, a different way to do vampires—again that's another thing that’s developed a little more further into the series—or, oh, you know I haven't really read many books with djinn, so it's just really good to get that feedback because editors are doing a heck of a lot more reading across all, you know, a lot more, I think of the literary spectrum. So, they’re a lot more cued into what is everybody else doing. So it's just great to have that editorial feedback of, “okay, yes, this is different,” or “here's where I would spin this out a little more.”
Ariel: Yeah. What were some of the books that inspired you for those creatures? Did you read books with djinn?
Whitney: No, the only book I read with djinn was S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy, which is fairly recently published. We'll probably start to see more of them. But yeah, I very much grew up with like classic urban fantasy so you know Kim Harrison, Laurell K Hamilton, Patricia Briggs. The big names, so that's, I think, where I was looking in terms of what had and had not been done before.
Ariel: I read The Golem and the Jinni last year or the year before, and it was fantastic. How did you keep track of consistency in these different forms of magic, like how elven magic smells like burnt marshmallows? Was there a section for that on the style sheet?
Whitney: Yeah. I have two notebooks full of planning. Like before I even sat down to write the series, I delineated all of the main factions, so you know the vampires, werewolves, elves, all that.
Ariel: And then their territories.
Whitney: Their powers. Their kind of cultural ghosts. So, you know, why are they acting as a group, the way they're acting. You know what's their background? You know, for the vampires, it's like, what would actually kill them, because they can walk around in the sun, so what does damage them? So just pulling together all those different pieces. I don't know why I made them smell like marshmallows. I really can't remember that part of the process. But yeah, all those little details, it was all noted in a little notebook, and that was transferred to a style guide.
Ariel: And when you're sitting around a campfire toasting a marshmallow. Do you roast it slowly to a golden brown or do you burn the crap out of it?
Whiteny: I burn it, I'm not patient enough to toast it.
Ariel: Yes! I double burn it!
Whitney: Yes, I go back and burn it again, and then I take it off and burn it again.
Ariel: Someone who knows me! I feel so seen!
Whitney: Yeah, I don't have time to sit there waiting, like we're just gonna go.
Ariel: Let's move on to the questions that I ask every author I talk to. What do you really hate about the editing process?
Whitney: Honestly just the amount of time it takes to do it right. It's not something that you can rush through. I think maybe a lot of people are frustrated with having to do it or you know having to go back and fix things. I actually love that about the editing process because when you work with an editor, they're giving you a map to get to where you need to go. I just get frustrated that I have to sit down and do it instead of just writing the next book.
Ariel: They’re giving you a map. I love it. Well it's like you came up with this story and you are investing your time in it because you like it that you care about it. So it's definitely worth spending more time with it in editing to make sure that it's completely polished and that readers will like it as much as you do.
Whitney: Especially with indie publishing or self-publishing. Yes, you have your team of editors, but you don't have the resources of a major publishing house, so there's kind of a big chance that the quality might suffer if you're not taking that time. There's that stigma around being an indie publisher or around having self-published books that they're not very good. And I don't think that's fair. Because there are some very good books, it's just a matter of, are you taking the time to do that? But then also to be quite honest be, are you privileged enough to have the disposable income to hire editors and cover designers and everything else that goes into creating a book that looks traditionally published. So there's multiple factors there.
Ariel: Yeah. What is the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing?
Whitney: I'm laughing because I just got edits back a couple of weeks ago, and it was the same problem as before. Ellipses! I apparently am obsessed with ellipses. I put them everywhere.
Ariel: They're a matter of rhythm. They're a matter of you don't know exactly the perfect word to finish on there so you just leave it to the reader's imagination. They can stand in place of M dashes and all kinds of other punctuation. Who doesn’t love a good ellipses?
Whitney: I thoroughly abuse them, I’ll be quite honest. I'll write my first draft and then I have to go back through and take, you know, a bunch of them out, and then I'll get the edits back and she's like, “You do love your ellipses.” And I’m like, Oh no, I did it again. Semi colons were my other Achilles heel, before I got those under control.
Ariel: Semicolons are vastly underloved for all the good they can do in the world.
Whitney: Yeah, I guess punctuation is just my issue there.
Ariel: Do you have any last words of advice?
Whitney: I'd say definitely figure out where you're trying to go with your book. You know, if not before you start writing, then in the process. Do you want to be traditionally published, or do you want to self-publish, or do you want to self-publish after trying to traditionally publish? That decision has had probably the biggest impact on my editing process. Because, you know, when you're when you're going for traditional publishing. I think there's an expectation that your book will be significantly changed. I mean, I don't know how many times I've seen on Twitter that the book that you sent in was not the book that was published.
Certainly for me, when I was, you know, starting the querying path, I went into it with a bit less editing expecting that I was just going to get back something completely different or that they would do something completely different. When I changed to self-publishing, it was definitely much more of, o kay, what am I trying to do and can I do it right earlier in the process rather than assuming that somebody is going to fix everything or changing everything, because, you know, like you said, I'm the final voice in what goes out. So yeah, definitely my word of advice would be, figure out how you plan to get your book out into the world. And then, plan your editing style in needs accordingly.
Ariel: So the last portion of this program is a Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner. Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Whitney: Yeah, so there's a really good group of creatives and writers working together on an organization called WriteHive, and it's one that I'm recently becoming more closely affiliated with. They are a nonprofit who provide free and inclusive events programs and resources for writers from all different backgrounds. It's by writers, it's for writers. They've got some really great programming, and it's an incredibly supportive community, so... I think they just launched a new website. They've got a lot of resources available, they've got a lot of events coming up. And I think they're also always looking for sponsors or partners, you know, people on Patreon. So I would definitely give them a look.
Ariel: Beautiful. Well, if you want to keep up with Whitney follow her on Twitter and Instagram as @write_wherever, or visit her website, WhitneyHillWrites.com. Catch up on the first two books of her Otherside series, Elemental and Eldritch Sparks, in time for the third installment, Ethereal Secrets to come out next month. Thank you again for talking with me, Whitney!
Whitney: Thanks. Ariel, it's been great to be here.
Ariel: If you loved this episode of Edit Your Darlings, why not share it with a friend? Remember to rate and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast fix. For show notes go to edityourdarlings. com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @editpodcast, or I'm @arielcopyedits. Until next week, cheers!