This week, I’m talking with speculative fiction author and copy editor Valerie Valdes. We cover how she finds the people she trusts to critique her work, favorite treats for rewards and motivation, how editing shaped her galactic cast, multilingual considerations, and how gross licorice is!
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
https://twitter.com/valerievaldes
Uncanny Magazine
Time Travel Short Stories
Nightmare Magazine
Chilling Effect and Prime Deceptions
Meetup.com
Critters.org for critique
Viable Paradise: https://viableparadise.com/
Valerie’s list of workshops and other resources: http://candleinsunshine.com/resources/
Odyssey: https://www.odysseyworkshop.org/
Taos Toolbox Writers Workshop http://www.taostoolbox.com/
Codex Writer Group: https://codexwriters.com/
Cat Rambo’s Academy for Wayward Writers: http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/academy/
Discord: https://discord.com/
Mary Robinette Kowal’s (https://twitter.com/MaryRobinette) ABCD format for critique: Awesome, Boring, Confusing, Disbelief
C. C. Finlay: https://www.ccfinlay.com/
JRR Tolkien
PB Works, personal and team wikis: https://www.pbworks.com/
D.J. Older https://twitter.com/djolder
“Why We Don’t Italicize Spanish”: https://youtu.be/24gCI3Ur7FM
Conscious Style Guide: https://consciousstyleguide.com/
Crystal Shelley https://twitter.com/redpenrabbit
Blades in the Dark: https://www.evilhat.com/home/blades-in-the-dark/
Brandon O’Brien, https://twitter.com/therisingtithes
Michael R. Underwood, https://twitter.com/MikeRUnderwood
Annihilation Aria: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44331436-annihilation-aria
Patrick Weekes, https://twitter.com/patrickweekes
Feeder: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35274456-feeder
Karen Osborne, https://twitter.com/karenthology
Megan O’Keefe, https://twitter.com/MeganEOKeefe
K.B. Wagers, https://twitter.com/kbwagers
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 Ariel Anderson, and this week, I'm talking with Valerie Valdes. Valerie’s work has been featured in Uncanny Magazine, Time Travel Short Stories, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel Chilling Effect was named one of Library Journal’s best SF/fantasy novels of 2019, with starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. The sequel, Prime Deceptions, which was so good, was published in September 2020. Valerie currently works as a freelance writer and copy editor, and she lives in Georgia with her husband, children, and cats (who may or may not be psychic). Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Valerie!
Valerie: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Ariel: Let's get started with some broad questions, and then we'll get into some specifics about your works. So, first, in addition to traditional publishing edits, like notes from your agent, acquisitions editors and copy editors, you work with critique partners and beta readers to hone your stories. How did you find those people that you trust to critique and edit your work, and how do you know that their feedback is good?
Valerie: Finding trustworthy people to critique and edit your work is super, super tough. Some options include things like looking for groups at your local libraries, or you can go on sites like Meetup.com or Facebook or Twitter to find local groups or online ones. You can take classes with a workshop or critique component. You can join different amateur professional organizations that facilitate critique swapping between their members. You can even network with other writers at conventions or conferences or sign up for websites, who have that have forums whose sole purpose is posting and critiquing work. I think critters.org is one of those, and there are a couple of other options out there.
So there are a variety of places that you can try to find people. The question of whether they're trustworthy or not of course is a whole other kettle of fish. I personally found people through a sort of combinations of those various options. I went to Viable Paradise in 2016.
Ariel: What is Viable Paradise?
Valerie: Viable Paradise is a science fiction and fantasy writers workshop. And it is basically a week-long, very intensive critique and lecture component workshop. It is a great, great workshop, and there are also a lot of other ones. I actually have a whole list of workshops somewhere, I think I posted on my website, because it's kind of like, you want people to have tools. There's Odyssey, which also has an online one. There's Taos Toolbox, there’s... Cat Rambo has her Academy for Wayward Writers that has classes but also a Discord where you can meet up with other people. There are a lot of ways that you can basically kind of connect with other people who are at your skill level or close to your skill level, and who’re writing within the same genre that you're working in.
And it can also be good to work with people who have similar goals or critique desires, because there are a lot of mixed groups, especially if you go local that you'll have some people that are coming to just kind of share what they've written and some people who are interested in publishing and potentially want a different level of critique than what someone who is just there to share would want. And all those things are valid, but it is important to have that kind of established as you're working.
Ariel: So we've heard a lot about stick with your genre for critique partners, look outside your genre for critique partners, look for people who are better than you. So there are those two different schools of thought on finding your crew. What do you go with?
Valerie: I personally think it's better to have people who are within your genre and within your kind of skill level roughly, and at the same time I think it's okay if you have a mix. It's just a question of when you're receiving the critique, you're able to properly filter it based on that, because I think that there are a lot of people that yeah, they may be just starting out, but they may have kind of really good taste and really good intuition for things, that they may be able to point out problems. And even then, critique can be something where it is like just a reader experience. And that can be extremely useful to have, even if the person giving it to you isn’t even a writer at all, and all that they're giving you in terms of feedback is what their sort of emotional experience was the book because that can help you fine tune what you are intending and figure out whether it is working. And so having a first reader, a beta reader, who is maybe not embroiled in genre or is not even a writer themselves can be very useful just so you get that reader experience of whatever's going on.
But it can also be frustrating because if they don't have that same exposure to tropes, something that is very normal for, say, science fiction can snag on the reader. They can have a lot of questions about it, a lot of curiosity, a lot of feedback on something that for a scifi reader would just be normal, and so it's up to you whether you want to interface with that kind of frustration. You may find it annoying to get that kind of feedback and be like, Ugh, that's just how this is! It's up to you what your standard is, and what your comfort level is for that.
Ariel: Yeah. And then you were going to talk about hiring professional editors.
Valerie: Yeah, so that is not a thing I've ever had to do personally obviously I have been a professional editor, which is a different thing. And so there are different kinds of professional organizations and groups that you can look for, but I will say that anytime that anyone has asked about hiring a professional editor, the first thing I do is look for other people who have hired professional editors, so that I can recommend them. So I have friends who are editors. I reach out to other people who maybe are self-published and have used editors, and I feel like word of mouth is the best way to go for that.
Ariel: Yeah, and you can always ask for sample edits.
Valerie: Absolutely. That's actually a pretty standard thing. And usually, it'll be a certain number of pages, and it is just kind of part and parcel of figuring out not just whether you'll work well together, but also what level of critique it is that you need or want. Somebody can come in and say that they want a copy edit but then in the sample critique you're like, “Actually I think you still need a developmental edit. You really need to do more work on this before you go to any kind of line edits.” So, you know, that sample edit I can help you figure out what it is that you need.
Continuing on to just figuring out feedback—if it's good, if you can use it. I will say that it happens that you'll join a critique group and find out that it actually is worse than any positive feedback that they can give you, any useful feedback they can give you. Some... some groups are extremely toxic. Some are comprised of people who are not great at giving critique, and some are just really spiteful and mean. It’s terrible.
I was personally at an online critique forum, many many many years ago, that immediately when you signed up, it talked about how it was very just harsh and honest, and it would make you better, because you know you get the unvarnished truth about your work, but what it ended up being was just this horrifying meat grinder of people having their feelings stepped on over and over again. Instead of useful advice, a lot of what they would do is just kind of repeat the same dogmatic stuff over and over again. They took pleasure in being as creatively brutal and sarcastic as they could. And that sucked.
Ariel: If you see that happening in your critique group, just close the door on that one.
Valerie: You have to just kind of nope out, and it can be hard especially when you're first starting out because you think, “Oh no, what's wrong with me? What have I done wrong? Okay well, I need to stick around and toughen up,” and, no no! There's a certain amount of toughening up you have to do, absolutely, but that isn't to say that you should subject yourself to this kind of elaborate torture.
After that group, I mean, I stopped writing for a while, not so much because I was getting torn apart, but because I was seeing that animosity on display, and it really just sucked the joy out of writing for me for a long time. There's a certain amount of overcoming fear that you do have to do in a certain amount of forgiveness and patience that you have to allow for yourself. And if you're in a toxic group, it can really damage you emotionally, it can affect your writing output, and it can affect the quality of your writing in ways that change your voice. It's just not good.
Bottom line is basically that you should feel comfortable in the group, not that you're constantly swaddled in a warm blanket of praise, but just that you feel safe putting your work out there.
Ariel: Yeah, you kind of want that feedback that feels like. Maybe, I don't like this, but it's valid, and also that feedback that's like, Yes, I want to do more of this.
Valerie: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is Mary Robinette Kowal who has a formula format that she recommends which is the ABCD format in which you talk about what's awesome, what's boring, what's confusing, and what triggered disbelief. And so it is kind of just a really useful metric not only for writers to receive feedback in that format but for people who are reading to be able to just quickly tag stuff like that, to be able to say, “Oh, this is super cool, I like it,” or “oh this section like kind of, you know, my eyes crossed and I wasn't paying as much attention,” or “I didn't really understand this,” or “you lost me here, I totally got kicked out of this.” When you're writing requesting critique, it can be useful to give the critique partner some sort of format, something is a structure for them to use so that you're talking the same language.
Another course that I had taken, which C.C. Finlay taught. The first thing that he required people to do was summarize what they'd read. It helps you see if you're on the same page. If the summary of what they read bears no resemblance to what you thought you wrote, then you know there's a problem immediately and you can say,” Okay, well, if these are kinds of the main points that they're receiving, then how can I work through what I'm doing to make it be what I wanted it to be in the first place?” How can I make it align better with what my intentions were in the beginning?
Or examine your own intentions, and figure out okay well, actually, is that reading better than what I intended? Do I like it more? And if so, is there stuff I can do to highlight that better so that I can make changes to align it more with that reader’s experience because it actually works awesomely.
Ariel: How do you know when your story is ready for beta reading or to send off to your agent? What makes you stop tweaking and reshaping it and hit send?
Valerie: Embarrassingly, there definitely been times when I was just so so ready to share a story or poem with someone that I just finished it and sent it over, or I didn't finish it, and I sent it over, or I just did a really quick spit shine and send it over. And one time I did that with most of the novel, that was a National Novel Writing with novel which is real bad.
Ariel: Oh no!
Valerie: Yeah, no. And I ended up trunking that novel for good reason. But it's so embarrassing to think now that I took that novel and literally sent it to a human being to read. I was younger and wow. Anyway. But going through that experience did really cement for me that I was so eager to get feedback and encouragement that I just like yeeted it at someone. It was like throwing a bag of trash at their head. It was terrible. But that's what I was doing is that I was I was wasting their time, and I was wasting my time, because it wasn't ready.
So, in terms of when is it ready when do you stop tweaking, I think it's best to wait until you have edited it as much as you can, by yourself. What that means is that you've done a developmental edit—you've done kind of the big-picture stuff of combining characters, taking characters out, realigning the orders of events, taking out sections that don't need to be there, and adding sections that are missing that do need to be there. You’ve done all that kind of big-picture stuff yourself and then you've also done your own line edits, you've tried to proofread it as much as possible, you worked on your diction, your syntax, the tiny things. You've worked on your dialogue to make sure that characters have consistent voices and all of that kind of thing. So you've done all that stuff yourself.
Ariel: But Valerie, that’s so much!
Valerie: It is so much, it is so hard, but here’s the thing: If it were easy, then anybody could do it. Umm, no. But truly, no, it is a lot of work. I mean, I'm not here to pretend like it's not, because it absolutely is. And there are some people that can do a lot of that stuff subconsciously, such that their editing goes faster. I'm not one of those people. I definitely edit a lot. I edit thoroughly. But yeah, you can go through as many drafts as you want. There's not like a minimum or maximum number of drafts. It basically is, once you've gotten to the point where literally all you're doing is just changing a couple words here and there, adding and subtracting periods, looking at commas and going, “Do I need this comma, do I not?” Okay, that... then you're done. Now you're just nitpicking. Now you can start reaching out to beta readers to get feedback. But if you don't wait till you get to that point, then you may end up getting feedback on things that you either consciously or subconsciously knew needed fixing, things that you might have changed if you take in extra time and care.
Make all the changes that you think are appropriate changes. If you're unsure, then you can look for a beta reader’s reinforcement and opinion, because that uncertainty is a place that we can live in a lot as writers where you have done a thing but you're like, “I think this works. I don't know if it doesn't work.”
It can sometimes be useful to pause when you reach a point like that and give yourself time. Or just talking it through with a critique partner can be really useful because they can help you work through it mentally. There's the rubber duck approach which is basically just talking at something, explaining the problem to as you're explaining the problem a lot of times you figure it out.
Ariel: Yes. I used my dog. I took him on a walk and I told him the part of the story that I was stuck on, and he was like, “Sniff sniff sniff?”
Valerie: Pee pee pee, run run run. Woof woof.
Ariel: Perfect!
Valerie: And you're like, thanks dog, you've solved all my problems. Yes. I mean, it works. Just talking out a problem with someone or at someone can help you work through it.
Ariel: Once you've received all of that feedback—from reviewers, from your editor, from your copy edits—and you're looking at this marked-up page that you have seen so many times. There's so much of it! What does your process look like for looking at that marked-up page. How do you stay organized in addressing all of those points? And how do you decide what to keep?
Valerie: And what to yeet. It is a process, and some people don't realize how much editing goes into a traditionally published novel from start to finish. And you do have to kind of like be kind to yourself and take breaks. When you first start getting that feedback in, you don't take it or get rid of it right away. You want to take time to process your thoughts, your feelings, you know, go through those notes, think them through. I personally have kind of a rejection sensitive dysphoria problem, which means that I usually struggle, really, really, really, a lot with receiving critique, among other aspects of that. I'll just have an emotional collapse as soon as I'm told that I've done something wrong. So even small critiques I will often turn into just giant unfixable problems.
Ariel: Big walls.
Valerie: Yeah, it’s like I'm never been able to climb this mountain.
Ariel: You need a special harness.
Valerie: Yeah right? Just, I need one of those like thunder vests that dogs get for lightning and thunder. Maybe a weighted blanket.
So, because I know this about myself and I know that I will always freak out as soon as I get any kind of feedback, I have friends and family who I can lean on a little bit, I have therapy, and I just am aware that it will take me time to recover before I can really view that feedback objectively, and figure out how to incorporate it instead of just setting everything on fire, which is not useful, does not get you to a finished product. So giving yourself that time is really important and that mental, emotional strength that you need to process what you've been given.
Once that part of it is done and I'm able to be like, Okay, I'm not the worst ever, I can definitely just edit and it will be okay. Then I usually will take the edit letter or the notes that I've been given, and I will make a plan. Typically I will note what things I think I can add, what I need to take out, what needs to be changed. If I feel like it's necessary I might do a reverse outline, but usually I will have an up-to-date outline at that point so I don't have to go that far, but a reverse outline is where you outline what you have already written. And so you have a very thorough summary of everything that's on the page, and it helps you be able to kind of go back and forth and figure out what happens when, kind of what beats you're hitting, what characters are involved, things like that.
And then I, personally, I just start from the beginning, and I go start to finish. And I do as many passes as I need to, and then I send it back to agent or editor for final approval, and always, every time that I finish something like this, I give myself some sort of celebratory treat
Ariel: Top five?
Valerie: Top five. Okay, baked goods.
Ariel: Yes.
Valerie: I will cop to alcohol being a treat for me, but that's not for everyone.
Ariel: Not for everyone.
Valerie: Not here to advocate for that. Hot chocolate, super love hot chocolate. Really delicious tea. Video games.
Ariel: I love that video games gets to be in with all of the other yummies!
Valerie: Yes, yes no, because video games are yummy! I find them delightful, and usually by the time that I've finished doing that I have not played video games for like a month. And so I'm ready. I’m jonesing. And I'm like, okay, you know what, video games are good for my mental health so I'm going to give myself two nights a week to make a date and treat myself with that.
Ariel: I love it. Now I want to talk a bit about your work in particular and get into some more specific examples. I read Prime Deceptions. And I was delighted by the diverse cast of characters and unique settings and everything that gave the book so much flavor. First I want to talk about your characters, because that's really what drives the book for me. And you paint this diverse cast with nongendered pronouns and representations for disability and mental health and the queer community and different races and species and languages, and I have so many questions about it. But they all come down to how did your editors help you shape this cast? Did they ask for more or less of any particular things?
Valerie: So, more than anything what they helped me do was just make sure that I was doing a good job of portraying everyone as people, not being disrespectful, not causing harm, not perpetuating stereotypes with my characterizations my plot choices, things like that, whenever I start a project usually I try to think about who I can represent and how within the context of whatever story I'm telling, whatever world I'm creating. I again to quote Mary Robinette.
Kowal, she has a saying that is basically about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.
Ariel: What does that mean?
Valerie: It is basically the idea that if you are telling a story that you're attempting to be even even presenting kind of a faux realism, because of course, this is the science fiction world that I've created it's far in the future. And the questions of what constitutes realism for something in the future, I tend to align with the rule of cool in terms of doing things that I think are cool, frankly. But that said, you do want to have at least a certain amount of verisimilitude. You want to have a certain amount of realism, and for me, part of that realism means thinking about who is allowed to be in space is not, and who is allowed to go on adventures and who is not. And as far as I'm concerned, pretty much everybody should be allowed to go on adventures in space.
And part of what I'm trying to do then is have as many people as possible doing that. If you have a very homogeneous cast, if you have all of the same you know culture, race, ethnicity, or what have you in space, it can work because what if you're telling the story of, you know, a colony ship that is entirely comprised of one group of people from one particular location. Okay, you're still probably going to have a certain amount of diversity among that right? Like if even if you're, you're having people from some small country that is pretty homogeneous. That doesn't mean that you're not going to have other people on the crew, that doesn't mean you're not going to have some other representation among the passengers. And so it really is just a question of what story are you telling, and what characters would naturally inhabit that story.
If your cast is homogeneous, then you need to have a justification for it. Typically, the approach is the opposite, where people will say, you know like, oh, why is this person Hispanic, and you're like, because they were born that way? Why is this person gay—it doesn't contribute to the plot! And I’m like, “Did you know...?”
Ariel: Do you have an agenda here?
Valerie: Yeah exactly, it's like, people, gay people don't have to contribute their gayness to the plot, it's they're just allowed to be queer. That’s just who they are. And so people's backgrounds and who they are as people will absolutely shape their choices, their reactions to things...
Ariel: Their dialogue, right? You had Min who uses filler words and upspeak, and then you've got like Miles Erck who comes across as this absolute asshole with the simple phrase “well actually.”
Valerie: Yes! It's really important to me to have people with strong voices and have a mix of experiences and, and spread it out as much as possible. I really I just, I want as many people as possible to be able to see themselves, and I don't want it to have to be like people are kind of projecting their ethnicity or gender or sexuality on a character for whom it is not defined. I want it to actually be on the page if at all possible.
Ariel: Yeah. And I was curious about... you talk about humanity, but you also have lots of other species. And you’ve added all of these creative sentient beings like, I don't know how to pronounce them. Ronnie, tuareg, piski, and they were all treated as sort of generic nouns. They were lowercased, and I was surprised by that. So can you talk to me about that choice?
Valerie: Again this is, this is my perspective and I'm not advocating for this on a copy editor basis but it is, it's how I approached it and this is a conversation I did have with the editors what. I feel like if our species aren't capitalized, why should any other species be capitalized. So if you're not capitalizing human or cat or dog, then capitalizing the other species, the sentient species, it doesn't make sense in terms of consistency.
Now on the other hand I do capitalize if they're part of like a cultural, ethnic, religious group like that, because in English we do capitalize those in general. So that was just me attempting to apply a what I thought was a very reasonable standard of comparison. And I think that what can happen in science fiction and fantasy is that there is a conflation between race and species. I think in some ways that can be really problematic depending on the context.
Ariel: So would you fight with JRR Tolkien about capitalizing Hobbits?
Valerie: I mean, I think it depends on whether Hobbits are species or culture. But probably. And again I don't say this as like a judgment, or that it's a rule that everybody needs to follow or something like that. I'm just saying that, that to me is what makes sense.
Ariel: Vakar, your protagonist’s partner, he's this interesting species that gives off different scents associated with his moods. Did your copy editor track the different meanings of those scents on your style sheet, or did you just trust yourself to be sure it was consistent, and do you like the smell of licorice, which to him means love?
Valerie: I had to go back and check the style sheet for this, but no. it was actually not tracked.
Ariel: [dramatic gasp]
Valerie: But I have a wiki, where I track it. Yes, I was very careful about this scents and about the users thereof. But I was tracking it as I was writing, so if I made a cool thing, I made a note in my wiki of what I had used for which particular thing.
Ariel: Wait, let's get real nerdy! You keep saying wiki, like you literally have like a Wikipedia, or a fandom wiki?
Valerie: Okay so I use PBWorks, it is a personal wiki just for me. But yes, I literally have a wiki: a page for each character. I have descriptions there, I have all of Vakar’s various scents collected as one example, I have backgrounds and details, so that I can keep track of them later for myself. And I have the planets listed.
Ariel: Oh my gosh! I've heard of series bibles, but you have taken it to an entirely galactic level.
Valerie: It's just a series Bible, but in wiki form. It's a little silly, but it helps because then I have stuff that I can refer back to later instead of having to rifle through the book trying to figure out what I've established for a particular person. And that's not to say that I haven't made mistakes as well. In Chilling Effect in particular, I kept mixing up the color of Mala’s eyes, I would put hazel or green. And so I had to go back and make that uniform throughout, as an example of what copy editors are great at catching.
Ariel: Ooh, that makes my heart go pitter patter!
Valerie: Oh yeah. And by the way, I hate the smell of licorice. I hate it, I hate licorice.
Ariel: Oh no! Then why would you choose it for love?
Valerie: Because it's supposedly an aphrodisiac. Yeah.
Ariel: What are the scents that mean love to you?
Valerie: Oh goodness, I don't know. I feel like any kind of baked goods smell feels comforting and warm to me. I will cop to my husband using a particular soap that he loves and I don't but I support his autonomy.
Ariel: We've talked a little bit about copy editing, which it's so rare for me to accidentally find another copy editor! Can I ask a selfish a question?
Valerie: Sure.
Ariel: I am copy editing a multilingual book, and I'm sure that you're already rolling your eyes because you get this question about your work all the time, but I don't speak any of the other languages, and the publishers that I work with have guidelines that tell me to italicize those phrases and exactly how to treat the surrounding punctuation, etc. But, this book is with an indie author, so the style rules are really up for grabs. Can we talk about your approach because you mix Spanish phrases in seamlessly with English, often in the same sentence using no special formatting to call out that you're switching between languages. And I loved that unapologetic take. It was so refreshing to me to find it, I was like, [gasp] YES!
Did your editor have a hand in any of these decisions? How did you and your editors imagine that readers would react to that choice, and how did your copy editor handle it on the stylesheet? Were they multilingual?
Valerie: So, when I first was acquired, and also I think with my agent even I had this discussion, I indicated my preference was that we not italicize the words that were in non-English languages, and part of it was that D.J. Older has this really great video about this. The TLDR is that for those of us who do speak in multiple languages, who code switch between English and literally any other language or even not English but other multiple languages, we don't somehow change our tone or our voice or our posture or anything. As we switch we just talk normally the whole way through. And so, italicizing the words does kind of set them apart in a way that isn't really consistent with actual multilingual speech, though as noted some publishers and people still prefer to do it for their own reasons, which again is fine, I'm not here to dictate anybody else's.
But I think that not italicizing the words does help normalize them, and I did like that I wanted that. If I drop into Spanish with, you know, I’m talking to my mom or whatever. I talk Spanish to my cats, you know. I grew up speaking Spanish with my grandparents, I grew up going back and forth in English and Spanish with family and friends. And it was it was just very normal, and so the idea of kind of having to separate that out with italics didn’t sit super well with me.
And that can cause its own challenges for sure. For example, if you have a word that is a particular word in a non-English language but looks like an English word, it can be pronounced differently and have a completely different meaning. And in context unless you are careful about the way that you place it in the text, it may read weird to the reader because they read it as the English word instead of the Spanish one. Dale is probably one of the most common ones. I mean, it looks like Dale, and you're like, “Dale? I don't understand. What does that mean?”
That is how we approached it and certainly some readers think it’s fine, some readers find it difficult or objectionable. The copy editor had been given that style edict, so to speak, before she started editing, and so she just kind of went with it.
My first copy editor, I don't know if I would call her multilingual necessarily, but she did take four years of Spanish and so big props for that because frankly, a lot of my Spanish is spoken Spanish, it's colloquial Spanish, and it's Cuban Spanish. And so, there were a lot of times where she absolutely saved my bacon in terms of, I forgot an accent somewhere, or I spelled something weird, because I was typing it quickly and then I didn't catch it when I was proofreading. Even I, who copy edit, will still miss stuff.
Ariel: Ah, does it hurt your heart?
Valerie: It does! Every time it's like, “Oh, I’m the worst copy editor ever.” And I'm not though! I know I'm not. The fact that I couldn't do it for myself, feels like a failure. So there's always that even when I get the copy and it's back it's kind of like, oh my gosh, why is there so much red, what have I done!?
Ariel: The first time that I heard about how the trend in publishing is going to be to stop othering languages is probably from the Conscious Style Guide. Maybe Crystal Shelley. And the first time I read about it I was like, is that... it goes against everything I've learned. But watching that video that you sent me from D.J. Older, I am definitely adding it to the show notes, because it's hilarious. And it was just such an aha like, of course!
Valerie: Yep, yep, that's how I felt too. It's weird to italicize when you're writing, frankly, because again, if I'm switching back and forth between the languages when I'm writing I'm not sitting here like, Okay, it's time to switch to italics because I'm writing in Spanish now. That's not how my brain works, that's not how my typing fingers want to work, and so it's, it's weird to try to do that.
I actually don't italicize thoughts either. I have other formatting stuff too in terms of like the pings that they send each other, which are just kind of short psychic messages, or in Chilling Effect I have actual psychic communication between different creatures and Eva. And so sometimes formatting is used to set that apart as well.
Ariel: Let’s move to the questions I asked every author I talk to. First, what do you hate about the editing process?
Valerie: So definitely as previously noted, the worst part for me is that that first sinking feeling that I have done things wrong. And I am bad and I should feel bad about myself, which is not true. It's not useful. I always, I just hate having to get over that, that first hurdle that first kind of wall of misery, so that I can get to work on, on making the thing better, because that's what editing is. Editing is making the thing a better version of itself, a more polished, you know you're getting to the kind of form inside the marble that is going to be the statue, and it takes work, it takes time, and you have to be able to come to that without feeling like “I’m a terrible failure because I have to edit.” Editing is not a failure, it's just it's part of the process.
Ariel: Yeah, you talked about how you give yourself a yummy treat once you're done with editing. Do you do any self care or anything else to try to get past that initial wall before you start your editing?
Valerie: There are things that are incentives that you're like trying to work towards as a goal and there are things that are motivations that you give yourself beforehand to gird your loins and to help you feel better. And so yeah, sometimes I will give myself that initial treat. And I like sugar just because it gives you that kind of burst of mental energy. A lot of times, too, I have to kind of like sneak around myself in a weird way that it works, it's like an ambush predator approach, where it's like, okay and then I started working and before I can have feels about it.
Yeah, different methods work for different people and the key is to find which one works for you.
Ariel: What's the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing?
Valerie: This is unfortunately a moving target. I usually try to take feedback that is common feedback and incorporate it into my writing process as I go forward, but then sometimes that means I overcompensate and I go too far in the other direction. So, the main example that came to mind immediately: I got feedback that I wasn't giving enough description of the different locations. So I started going really deep into descriptions of just every place that the characters went. And then I started getting the feedback of, well, do you really need that much detail? This is kind of slowing down the pacing.
Ariel: Mmm, like they land on a planet and they just kind of stand there for a while.
Valerie: Just gazing around.
Ariel: While you describe the planet.
Valerie: Yes.
Ariel: Look at the colorful lights!
Valerie: They enter a room, let me tell you every aspect of this room that they've entered. It's like, no there's definitely a balance to be struck between “This is a white room with no information about it,” and “this room is described so much that we forgot why we're here.” But definitely I would say that kind of description is probably the most frequently feedbacked thing that I get. But I'm always reevaluating, I'm always adjusting, so.
Ariel: Do you have any last words of advice?
Valerie: The main takeaway I think, is that editing is not an indictment of your skills as a writer, it's not an indication that you are not good at writing. It is just a normal part of the writing process. Everybody does it. The people who say they don't do it, are either the extreme rare instance, or they're lying, and so either way, it's not relevant to you.
Ariel: Don't listen to the liars!
Valerie: Yeah I mean, and the thing is I'm not telling you to assume they're lying, because that's not useful either, but just assume that if you need to edit, it's very normal. If your goal is publication, then just think of how many hands touched my book before it ever got printed. Are there still typos in it? Maybe. I'm not going to go look for them, and if you tell me they're there I'm going to feel real bad about it. But the fact is lots of people went through it, trying to kind of scrape all that stuff away. It wasn't as if I just typed it and went: “Tada. I'm finished and amazing.” That's not how it works.
And you don't ever have to take all the advice or feedback that's given to you. The critique and editing and revision processes, they’re kind of a dialogue between you and your readers and your beta readers and the text itself ,and the ultimate goal as long as you're not working with terrible toxic people is for you to end up with a better, stronger, more polished version of your work at the end of the process. If you go to the gym every day and you do a bunch of crunches or curls or whatever it is you do at the gym, you don't think to yourself, like, “I'm not buff so that was a waste of time.” It's like, no it's process. You go, you do the thing and you try to take what pleasure you can from the doing of it, and and keep your eye on the fact that by the end you're going to have a better thing than what you started with.
Ariel: The last portion of my program is a Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner. Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Are there any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Valerie: Yeah, I feel like there are so many people that lift me up, frankly, and I could shout for days. So, if you follow me on Twitter, you will see a lot of them. I will say that I am part of a monthly Blades in the Dark game that I play in, and so it is an actual play RPG, that is super super fun. Our DM is Brandan O'Brien who you can find on Twitter, @therisingtithes. And he is an amazing poet and tabletop RPG writer and an amazing GM. Super, super recommend checking out his work. And I also like to usually mention Michael R Underwood who is another writer with a pretty great backlist of a lot of cool stuff, but his most recent novel, Annihilation Aria, pairs really well with my books. So if you like my stuff, you will probably like his stuff too.
I also like to throw out Patrick weeks as someone who is has some sort of stylistic overlap with me. He writes fantasy, but also modern stuff. Feeder is his latest. And you can check out folks like Karen Osborne, who has great space opera, Megan O'Keefe, K.B. Wagers, there are just so many so many so many great writers. And if you follow me on Twitter, you'll probably see me boosting a lot of them. If you ever want to come to me asking for recommendations and stuff, I try to pretty good about finding you things that are recent and that will fit with your tastes interests.
Ariel: If you want to find Valerie, you can find her on Twitter as at Valerie Valdes, and read her books! Chilling Effect and Prime Deceptions are available wherever fast-paced, snarky, beautifully written books are sold. Thank you again for talking with me, Valerie!
Valerie: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
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!