This week, I’m joined by Alexandra Rowland. Alex is the author of several fantasy novels, including A Conspiracy Of Truths, A Choir Of Lies, and Finding Faeries, as well as a cohost of the Hugo Award-nominated podcast Be the Serpent. They share their thoughts on the importance of trigger warnings, what it’s like to work with rockstar editors, how, why, and when to reach out to a sensitivity reader, their full editing process for a new book, and much more!
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
Find Alex at Twitter and Instagram: @_alexrowland; Patreon: www.patreon.com/_alexrowland; website: www.alexandrarowland.net
A Conspiracy Of Truths, A Choir Of Lies, and Finding Faeries
Be the Serpent podcast
Tropes: Only One Bed, Huddling for Warmth, Enemies to Lovers
Navah Wolfe
Tiller Press, nonfiction imprint of Simon & Schuster
Saga press, scifi/fantasy imprint
Subterranean Press
The Untamed, Chinese drama
Britt Seiss, literary agent: https://brittsiesscreative.com/
A Taste of Gold and Iron, 2022
Rouxi Chen, editor at Tor.com
Jennifer Mace, cohost on Be the Serpent, http://www.englishmace.com/
Freya Marske, cohost on Be the Serpent, https://freyamarske.com/
Veronica “Roni” Alvarado, editor for Finding Faeries at Tiller Press
Scarlett Gale, His Secret Illuminations, http://www.scarlettgaleauthor.com/
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun, https://shelleyparkerchan.com/
Silk & Steel, anthology of sapphic fantasy/scifi stories, https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/silk-steel-1
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. This week, I’m talking with Alexandra Rowland. Alex is the author of several fantasy novels, including a Conspiracy of Truths, A Choir of Lies, and Finding Faeries, as well as a co-host of the Hugo Award-nominated podcast Be the Serpent. They hold a degree in world literature, mythology, and folklore from Truman State University. Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Alex.
Alex: Thank you for having me, Ariel. It's exciting to be doing this. I'm really looking forward to it.
Ariel: I was excited when I heard about Finding Faeries, because I could not wait to read this book, which is an urban fantasy field guide to supernatural creatures in the modern world, with a focus on the effects of climate change, urban sprawl, and other human factors. When I started reading it, I really loved your academic tone, too I wasn't expecting that. And then I found your trigger warnings. And a huge thank you for caring about your readers enough to provide them.
Alex: So I have trigger warnings for all my books up on my website, because I come from such a strong background in fanfic. Fanfic and fandom circles, you know, you get tags on everything so you basically have an idea of what the book is kind of about in a more detailed and in-depth way then the summary might give you, and it makes it a little bit easier to decide what you want to read. I would love for the publishing industry to adopt this more as a thing. Tor.com is doing a great job with this on most of their book announcements. They have, like, quote unquote fanfic tags.
For one thing, it's a great selling tool, right, it's just like a quick and dirty kind of here are the tropes, and people know what tropes they love, like only one bed or huddling for warmth, or... If you say enemies to lovers, people are like, “Oh, I know that I have a better idea of what the shape of the story is going to be,” and it makes it easier for them to consent to the story that they're about to hear. Same thing for trigger warnings right, because like I have been in the situation where I have run into something that was uncomfortable for me, upsetting content that I would have at least liked to have a warning about. And so I think that that is something that is really important. I think that it is a really easy simple courtesy that we as authors can do for our audience.
The way that I think of it is as hospitality. If a reader is coming to my house for dinner, I'm not going to cook, just anything I'm going to ask them like “Oh, do you have any allergies? Is there anything that you don't like?” And then I'll make something they will enjoy. It's a way of like signaling to the reader that this is a hospitable space for them and that I respect their preferences. And if that in some cases means that they have to pass up a book, that's okay, because I would much rather as a person have someone feel safe, rather than as a writer get the sale of my book, you know? So that's kind of my, my feelings about trigger warnings.
Ariel: Yeah, I wish that that was more the norm in the industry, because I look really hard for content warnings because I need them. I'm really delighted when I find them.
Alex: It's just a matter of time, of like getting the infrastructure set up to make that possible, because I can do that on my website quite easily, but we don't really have a centralized location like a website. A lot of people are like, oh, but then like that’s spoilers. Well, no, it's not spoilers because you should have the option of looking for the tags and trigger warnings. You shouldn't have them forced on you.
Ariel: Yeah, I would rather have this story spoiled for me than have my entire month spoiled.
Alex: But some people are very allergic to spoilers, and that's okay too. Some people do like to go into stories completely blind and be surprised, and that's a valid experience. It's more about offering a greater amount of opportunities for people to actively consent to the story and to actively make choices.
Ariel: And your trigger warning clued me in on something that I avoid, so I only very carefully peeked at the previews of the book that are available online rather than reading the whole thing. But imagine my delight when I found your acknowledgments page! And it is such a beautiful surprise. So in particular, I want to talk about two things in there. First you mentioned Navah Wolfe. Navah is quickly becoming a legend, as a two-time Hugo Award-winning editor. What has your work with her been like? And how did you get so lucky? And what makes her stand out so much?
Alex: Oh my gosh. So Navah is amazing. Navah wasn’t actually the editor for this book. Navah was the editor for my first two books, A Conspiracy of Truths and A Choir of Lies, but she was responsible for putting my name forward to the team who was planning this book. The way that it worked was that Tiller Press, which is the nonfiction imprint of Simon and Schuster, had done their market research and they were like, we think that people would really really love a book about fairies. And so we need to find somebody who can write such a book. So they went down to the science fiction and fantasy imprint, which is Saga Press, where Navah worked at the time, no longer does. And they asked her, Do you know anyone who would be good at this? And Navah immediately said, “Go ask Alex Rowland,” which is something that I am still like so grateful for her for doing.
She is an incredible editor. As you said she has won the Hugo Award for best long-form editor two years running. She just has such a passion for stories and such an amazing talent for like looking at the heart of a story and what the author intends it to be and really helping guide them into making it the best that it can possibly be. For my first book in the acknowledgments page of A Conspiracy of Truths, I think I wrote, “Navah took this pretty object and made it into a beautiful weapon.”
Ariel: If Nava were a weapon, would she be a sword or a pole arm, or...
Alex: Actually I think that she would be a whip, mostly because I have seen her playing with a whip that someone brought for a demonstration at a convention that we were at. Someone was like here, you need to know how whips work for fantasy novels, and so a bunch of people got to play with this like huge long bull whip. It was amazing.
Ariel: So maybe this is a stupid question, but. Is she an acquisitions editor or a developmental editor, or both?
Alex: When she was at Saga, she was... both? I think now she is doing more developmental edits for Subterranean Press. She's also doing some freelance editing as well, so if any of your listeners are looking potentially for a freelance editor, you should go check her out.
Ariel: Oh my gosh, edited by a star!
Alex: Yeah, exactly.
Ariel: So how did you get to work with her on your first project together?
Alex: So she acquired a two-book contract for a conspiracy of truths and another book to be decided, as is so often the case these days. Because at that time I didn't really have an idea for the sequel, which became A Choir of Lies. She was just such an amazing editor. She was...
like—Not every editor is going to be the right editor for every project, but Navah was absolutely the right editor for those books, and I'm really really glad, and frankly honored that I got the opportunity to work with her.
Ariel: And then the nitty gritty: did she make comments directly in your manuscript, or did she send you just sort of notes in an email?
Alex: She did both. I think we did two rounds of edits for A Conspiracy of Truth. I don't remember... I think A Choir of Lies was also two, and both times she would send me kind of an edit letter with the rough kinds of, like, summary of like the big-picture issues that she wanted me to tackle, and then there would also be line edits in the manuscript itself for some more like nitty gritty kinds of details.
Ariel: The other thing that I loved about your acknowledgments page for Finding Faeries was the sentence, “When it came right down to it, I really, really didn't want racists to be able to like this book.” Now, you’ve indicated that you worked with sensitivity readers for other projects, not necessarily for Finding Faeries. Can you talk about how that process worked and why it was important to you?
Alex: Yes, so with Finding Faeries specifically, like the comment that I made in the acknowledgments about really not wanting racists to be able to like that book is because mythology has been used as a tool of white supremacy for frankly centuries, and it has been used as an excuse to justify atrocities, and that's something that I as someone who majored in folklore and mythology in college am deeply aware of, and it's something that I wanted to not only avoid with that book but also explicitly make impossible. And so that made it very very important for me to include a broader range of perspectives.
For Finding Faeries like you said I didn't use sensitivity readers because I was more oriented towards doing the research from step one, rather than writing the book and then having someone check it afterwards. I was talking to people from marginalized communities before I even started writing the entries of the book that would deal with those subjects, and talking to them about well, what are some things that you never see represented? What are some like supernatural creatures that you would love to see in a book like this? So that's, that's kind of what the strategy that I took for that book.
Ariel: And then with your earlier works where you did consultants activity readers, how did you know that you needed to reach out to a sensitivity reader in particular, and then how did you find that person?
Alex: So the issue of sensitivity readers is something that we're still kind of exploring as a community of authors, and we're still kind of figuring out like what is the right way to do this, what is the way that is going to create the best amount of progress. Naturally, it's very... it's a very complicated subject for a number of reasons. We are seeing, way, way, way too often, books, get announced that have some really stereotypical and hurtful cliches baked into their very foundations, which is why doing the research beforehand, rather than having someone check it after the fact, is what I think that I would prefer to do overall, because a sensitivity reader can't fix your book, if the book has cliches baked into the very fabric of it. Like if the whole plot is based on cliches of some kind, then a sensitivity reader can do anything to make that better.
It's important to do the research first, to be paying attention to people from marginalized communities, to have social circles that include many people from many different backgrounds and perspectives, because especially now that we're on social media people are always talking about their experiences all of the time, and having the basic empathy to just listen and be aware of those conversations is already going to do a whole lot to get you in a position where you are thinking more critically about your own work, where you're thinking more critically about your own ideas before you even a single word goes on the page.
The other issue with sensitivity readers that I see frequent—I don't see it as much anymore—but several years ago when we first started seeing sensitivity readers as a thing, there were several instances where I would see mostly white people say things like, “Oh, well, my book isn't racist because I had a sensitivity reader.”
Ariel: You had one single perspective.
Alex: Right!
Ariel: And that’s justification for anything that I wanted to put it this book.
Alex: Yes, exactly. And so, for one thing, you can't use the existence of the fact that you've used a sensitivity reader as an excuse. It's not like a stamp of validation for like, this is certified not racist anymore. That's not how it works, and also a sensitivity reader is still a human person. They're still an individual. They still might have different opinions on things, than other people from their demographic would be, because one single demographic is never a monolith, right, everybody has different experiences and opinions and something that bothers one person might not bother another person. That's just how the lived human experience works.
And then the other other issue with sensitivity readers, is that they are drastically underpaid.
Ariel: Oh yeah.
Alex: We are asking them to do a huge amount of emotional labor, and to put themselves in situations where they don't know whether or not they are going to be comfortable and safe. They don't know going into a project how much of a toll that's going to take on them. Frankly for the amount of emotional labor, that they are doing. If they were to charge what they are worth I don't know that anyone would be able to afford it. Which sucks because they also have to like pay their bills. I have all of these complicated kind of interlaced thoughts about like, well, when is it appropriate to use a sensitivity reader. Are you potentially endangering someone? Is... We have to take care of them too. Like if they all burn themselves out trying to take care of everyone else and do these good works, then we are losing a very valuable part of our community.
The most frequent time that I have asked for, quote unquote, sensitivity readers, is with my fan fiction, actually, because with my books so far I haven't really gone too far out of my comfort zone. I have been talking about things that are very close to my heart, my books are for example very, very queer and I myself am queer, but for my fanfiction. Right now I am very passionate about a Chinese drama called The Untamed. And so I'm writing a lot of fanfiction for that. And because it is a Chinese drama based on a Chinese web novel, there is a whole, whole, whole lot of cultural background that just completely goes over my head. When I'm writing fics, when I encounter certain things that I feel a little bit uncertain about, I go and ask a couple of my friends who have the necessary background to answer those questions. For example, when I need to name original characters. Names in Chinese can be quite complicated and have a lot of like nuance of language and poetry and so forth, and that's something that I, as a person who is not fluent in Chinese whatsoever, just don't have the capability to tackle by myself in any kind of meaningful and nuanced way. And so that's a great opportunity to stop and ask questions. And you asked like where, where I find people to answer questions that, and I have just been asking my community. People I know personally, people who I can approach and say, “Hey, I have some questions, do you have some time?” And so far I have been extremely fortunate that everybody has been really enthusiastic to share that part of their background and to answer those questions, and they're excited that I want to get it right. And I think that that's the big thing that proves how valuable it is, because people want to see themselves and people want to... People love to help, humans love to help, we're social creature. And giving someone the opportunity to sincerely help you to do it right the first time, rather than you mess up and then they have to fix your mess, it creates such a stronger bond and a stronger kind of more positive interaction, as well.
Ariel: And I think you nailed it with the word community. You know, you're not just finding random people on the street who you think might fit the stereotype that you're looking to avoid and asking for their opinion. You're building relationships with people who happen to have these identities and asking them about their experiences.
Alex: It's an ongoing conversation of getting to learn about their lives and experiences and getting to share in an experience their expertise, which is something that is such a positive and wonderful thing, in my experience. I just like people, I just really like people, okay!?
Ariel: Let's switch it up a little bit. If I were a fly on the wall in your writing room, or like a weird human standing in the corner...just sort of observing you...
Alex: Cool. I’m picturing you, like, hanging in the corner of the ceiling like a little Gremlin.
Ariel: Ooh, or like maybe there's a little hammock up there. And I'm just hanging out.
Alex: Or sure, a hammock. You can be comfy. Yeah, why not?
Ariel: If I was observing your entire editing process from start to finish, right, you're going through self-edits, critique partners, beta readers, notes from your agent, from dev editors, and then on through copy editing and proofreading, right? That's sort of your order?
Alex: Yeah, roughly.
Ariel: And do you skip any of those steps depending on the project?
Alex: I mean, it depends on the project. It depends on the deadlines. For example, if I was on a very very tight deadline and I had to deliver the draft by next Tuesday, I might not have time to go back and do self-edits. That might be a time when I would just have to like send it off to whoever I was supposed to send it off to, either my agent or my editor, and let it be a little bit messy. And usually, in that case, they know that it's going to be a little bit messy and they're okay with it. On the other hand, sometimes it's okay to say like, hey, is it okay if I take like one more week? I just want to like read over everything and like smooth things out, and so forth.
I tend to be quite open with my work with my sort of group chat writing group partners. And also I thrive on validation and feedback. I am like starved for validation at all times. And so, I will often start giving some of my favorite critique partners and friends who are readers like a Google Doc with part of the novel. I think, usually I start doing it around the 20,000-word mark. And I'll just say like can you just read this and like tell me how beautiful I am. And then they read it and they tell me how beautiful I am, and they get excited about the characters. They're, they're hungry for more, and that's something that really helps motivate me through the process is feeling like there is an audience, feeling like I'm not just speaking into the void.
Ariel: Yeah.
Alex: Usually then, like, when I finish the manuscript, I will send it off to the group of beta readers, and I'll say okay now read it from start to finish, and like leave any more notes that you, you have. I have found that doing it in Google Docs has been very useful for me because then I can send one document to the whole group, and then they can leave margin comments that are all collated in one place. So I can find all of them easily rather than having to dig through like five or six email chains with five or six different people to find them. And it also means that they can talk to each other, which has been a really, really wonderful experience, because it means that maybe someone points out like, “Oh, I don't really agree with this right here. I... it's not really working for me.” And another person might come along later and see that comment and go, “Actually, it's really working for me. Here's why I like it, here's why you might want to change it.” And then I have both of those comments right there. The person who liked it might not have pointed out that they would like it. Without that interaction between the beta readers, I might have just changed it based on one person's opinion, rather than having like a couple different intersecting perspectives to compare and contrast and sort of decide what I think is going to be the right choice for me to make.
So after I do the round of edits to sort of reconcile all the beta comments, then I would send it off to my agent. And at this point I'm assuming that we're talking about like a brand new-manuscript that isn't on contracts, and I don't owe to anyone on deadline or anything like that. So then I would... I would send it off to my agent and she would probably take a month or so to read it and look over it. My agent is fantastic: Britt Seiss with Britt Seiss Creative Management. Her comments are always incredible, and she and I have very similar ideas on what is fun. And that is very validating because she can point out things and say like, “I think that you could be a little bit more self-indulgent here. I think that you could really dig in and make this an entire chocolate cake.” And I always have this this reaction like, oh I, I can make the whole chocolate cake. I can just like do the things that I want and that I love if I want to. That's cool!
So then, after we sold the book, theoretically, then I would get an edit letter back from my editor. With the book that we just sold, A Taste of Gold and Iron, which comes out in 2022, Ruoxi Chen, my editor at Tor.com, gave me some just sort of like overview comments initially, like not full line edits, and she was like, “Here's some like big-picture changes that I'd like you to make before I dig into like the first round of revisions,” and one of those was like the beginning needed to be tightened because I didn't introduce the love interest until like chapter four, and that was, that was way too long to go without him. I was just like, okay, I'll just like chop off the first eighty pages of the book. And that actually made it a whole lot better. Shocking! Editors! They keep being right about things all the time. It's very unfair of them.
And so right now I am waiting on an edit letter or line edits from Ruoxi so that we can move on to the next step of that process. And then theoretically it would be like copy editors, proofreaders after we did that. Again, every project is different. Ruoxi might want a couple rounds of edits for that. She might want just one. I don't know yet, it's gonna depend on how it turns out.
When I am doing really, really in-depth kinds of big plot changes to a book, I have a method that I stole from my friend Mace, who is one of my co-hosts on Be the Serpent, called murder board. You make an outline of your book after the fact with the manuscript. You go through the manuscript and you kind of take inventory of all of the raw material that you have. And I like to lay it out on a physical form, so I do all my writing on the computer and then I do the murder board like with a cork board and, like, some index cards or like a big blank piece of wall, so that I can physically move cards around.
Ariel: And you use string?
Alex: String. Yeah, exactly. A murder board, you get it! Or color-coded highlighters, all sorts of things. And then I put post-it notes on to say like, okay, add this here and change this gear and make sure that this character beat lines up later with this character beat, and so forth and so on. Then I would take everything that's on the wall and transcribe it into a spreadsheet, and I like spreadsheets because it just keeps every block organized, and it means that like when a row is done, when I'm done like the plot fixings for that section, I can just, italicize it to let myself know that that's done and move on to the next thing. It makes it much more like a to-do list. And since I have ADHD, it breaks the big, big project down into smaller, more manageable chunks. So that's everything about my editing process.
Ariel: I love it. So, when you talk about correlating all of your comments in Google Docs, that reminds me of when I was in creative writing workshops in college, and I would get all of the different pages back from the people in the workshop with their comments and then I would have to add them all into one document so that I could actually see what all had been said where. And that reminded me that you wanted to talk about peer critique and academic critique.
Alex: Yes. Gosh. So, if you want to get really, really good critique, you can't just ask anybody, right? Like you can't just go out onto the street and grab someone and expect them to have useful things to say that will genuinely make your work better. They might—it’s a possibility—but it's much better to approach it with a sense of intention and purpose. Since I have a group chat of a bunch of other friends of mine who are also writers, I know what their strengths and weaknesses are and which things they are going to be really really good at paying attention to and what questions they're going to be really good at answering. For example, Freya, my other co-host can Be the Serpent, is really really good at relationship arcs and tension. She has written fanfic and romance novels for ages. She's incredible. And sex scenes, she's fabulous at sex scenes.
Ariel: Now that’s a talent!
Alex: Oh yeah, she has this whole like school, we joke to her about it, we call it Freya’s school of writing sex scenes real good. And so there's, there's a sexy scene in A Choir of Lies that she basically just wrote for me, like she just did my homework, she just wrote the scene for me and said, “Okay now change the words so it sounds like you.” Because the one that I had in was just so bad. And so she pitied me. Bless her heart. I love her. I have graduated now from Freya’s school of writing sex scenes real good, and now I am writing my own sex scenes, I'm very proud of myself. Anyway, but for example if I wanted something like that checked if I wanted like the emotional arcs checked, she would be a great person to ask because that's the things that she's really really good at and that she pays attention to a lot when she's reading. You can kind of tailor what you ask to the person that you're asking it from.
Because, like, I too have been in college creative writing classes where you're just sort of like thrown into a group with some other random people. Those people don't necessarily have the same aesthetics as you do. They might not have the strengths and expertise that you need to actually get better. Except like because it's a creative writing group, they have to have something to critique. They have to say something. And also critique is a skill. Good critique isn't just telling someone, “Oh this is bad, you should change this” right? It's about looking at the thing that they were trying to do, and saying, “Here's how I think you could do this thing a little bit better.” I've had people say like, “Oh, I didn't really like this character,” or “Oh, I think that this character should have made this decision instead of this other one.”
It can be really really hard when you are a beginning writer to identify what critique is good and what critique is garbage and can be thrown out, because we live in this society that says you should accept all criticism gracefully. Regardless of what it is, regardless of whether or not you think it's good valid criticism, you should just be a graceful recipient of the critique, and you should incorporate all of it.
Ariel: Oh no!
Alex: Which is nonsense, right? I had for a long, long time as an adolescent beginning writer and through college, a genuinely difficult time with critique. People would offer me criticism and I would feel like physically stick in my stomach about it, and nervous. And probably some of it was rejection sensitive dysphoria from my ADHD, which was not diagnosed at the time. And so that all kind of plays into it.
But then I started noticing that when people, people like... when people I trusted gave me critique that was really good, not in the sense of praising me, but good in the sense of it made the book better, I didn't feel sick. I felt excited, I felt thrilled to go and work on the book and fix the thing! Because the whole reason I was asking them for critique and feedback was because I knew subconsciously—I knew, or rather instinctively, I kind of knew instinctively that there was something about the work that was a little bit broken or something that wasn't quite perfect yet, or something that could be improved on, and like I knew this thing. So when someone tells you like, “Oh, I see where the broken part is, it's right here you just have to fix this little part of it.” That's so exciting! Because you get to then just fix the thing and then it's better and you can be less worried about it!
When people are coming up with like just random ass critiques for no reason, that’s super frustrating because they're not paying attention to the work itself and they're not paying attention to your needs as an author. The best anecdote that I have about this is, I was writing this YA steampunk book about like a 14-year-old kid who has some adventure on a pirate ship.
Ariel: I'm listening.
Alex: Right. It's great, like everybody loves that! Great premise! And so I was in this critique group, and they were giving me information about my work that was not right, and that would have in fact made the book actively worse. For example, there was one lady who, like we had like a one-on-one kind of meetup one time, so we met up for coffee and she's like, “I think that you really need to change something about this,” and I was like, “Well, what do you mean?” and she said, “It's just, this pirate ship, there's women on the crew,” and I was like, “Yes there's there's lady pirates,” and she was like, “You can't have ladies on a pirate crew.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” She was like, “I just think, you know, bad things would happen to them, if they were there.”
That was the interaction that made me realize, bad criticism makes me feel sick, and good criticism makes me feel excited, because I went away from that feeling like I was going to throw up. And also incredibly angry, like I was infuriated with her, because lady pirates are incredibly cool—like, I want to read books about lady pirates—and also their pirates. They have the ability to stab people if bad things start happening to them. So I went away from this interaction like so so mad, thinking, like, this is not a piece of criticism that is good. This is not a piece of criticism that is going to make the work better. It's not something that I want.
That was the moment that I realized like, Oh, I don't have to accept this. And I could tell that it's not good because of how it's making me feel. Because if she had told me something useful, I would have been over the moon to, to make the book better.
Ariel: Yeah, you don't want to take critique that makes you feel like you need a shower.
Alex: Right.
Ariel: You want to look for those pieces that feel like, Aha! or like, Oh, there it is!
Alex: We hear a lot about people not wanting to accept criticism because they are proud, they think that they are the best writer ever. But we have lived in a society that is constantly criticizing us at every possible opportunity. So we are used to accepting criticism more naturally. And the question isn't then, like, “you should accept criticism,” it's “how do I filter what is going to be useful and correct?”
Ariel: Let's go ahead and move on to the questions that I asked every author I talk to, first, what do you hate about the editing process.
Alex: See, like I'm having a hard time answering this, because with the professional editing process, I just have loved it, like all the time!? Because like, I have been so lucky to work with such amazing editors, for all my books. Oh, I think that I didn't mention at the top of the episode Finding Faeries was edited by Veronica Alvarado, Ronnie Alvarado at Tiller Press, and she was, she was amazing! Navah Wolfe was amazing. I'm extremely looking forward to continuing to work with Ruoxi Chen for the book that's coming out. And so like, I have had... I've been really really lucky to have all of these amazing editors fixing my work.
I think that the part that I hate is probably the stuff that's about me, rather than the stuff that's about the work. Like, not in terms of editing but like struggling with my... with myself or imposter syndrome or like feeling like I didn't do enough or feeling like the book isn't good enough or feeling like I don't know if I'm a good enough writer to write this book, that's the hardest part and the least fun part.
Ariel: What is the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing?
Alex: Alex, please explain things. Please can you explain this, Alex? I think that it's happening a little bit less lately because nowadays I am on ADHD medication, but there have definitely been times in the past where an editor has pointed out like, “Alex, you kind of like skip from point A to point D, and you kind of need to go back and tell us what points B and C are so that we can follow the logical progression.” And that's something that I am struggling to do and that I get called out on a lot. “Alex, please explain things. Please, Alex, please just give us some insight. What does this mean? Stop being so mysterious.” Yeah.
Ariel: Do you have any last words of advice?
Alex: I didn't know it was going to be this much fun. I think that I still had a lot of fear about how I had been edited in the past. Like I said, I've been wildly pleasantly surprised every time about how fun it is. probably my biggest piece of advice would be to try the Google Docs thing. And then I think that that kind of expands into a piece of advice, which is that you can make choices about so many things, and no part of the work has to be accidental. When you're first starting out, when you're a beginning writer and you haven't quite familiarized yourself with the extent of the capabilities of all your tools, you are kind of just doing a lot of things by intuition. But once you learn and grow your skills, you become like so much more aware of what the possibilities are, and you can make decisions on purpose.
Ariel: I love it. So the last portion of our program is a Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner. Are there any other writers or creators doing something that you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Alex: Oh my god, so many. Like I said, I love people, and so many of my peers and colleagues are doing just incredible, incredible, amazing works right now. Scarlet Gail is probably my favorite independent author. She just released her debut romance novel, which is called His Secret Illuminations. It's very sweet and friendly and kind and I can't recommend it strongly enough. Shelley Parker Chan has a book coming out, so soon now, right at the beginning of 2021, I believe, which is called She Who Became the Sun. It is incredible. It is so so so good. I could gush for hours about how amazing it is.
There also was just released an anthology of sapphic fantasy and sci fi stories called Silk and Steel, which is a swordswoman/princess as a ship. I haven't quite started reading it yet, but I have several friends who are either in the anthology or who were responsible for doing administration on making the anthology happen, so huge shout out there. It's the next thing on my TBR, and so I'm really looking forward to reading that.
Ariel: I love getting a little look at other people's TBRs. Mine is quite high stacked.
Alex: Mine is out of control. I have things on my TBR pile that have been there for like ages and ages, but because there's no deadline on like, Oh, I have to read this to blurb it or I have to read this because the friend is asking for feedback on it, or things like that, like they just keep getting shoved further down the pile. I don't know, everything is terrible. That's the horrible thing about like having a career as a writer, is that your TBR pile just like goes out of control. You know too many writers, you get sent too many advanced copies. It's chaos, it's a mess.
Ariel: “Oh no, I have too many friends.”
Alex: Oh no I have too many books. Oh whoa is me! Whoa is me!
Ariel: If you want to find Alex or read their work, you can follow them on Twitter and Instagram. You can visit their website, AlexanderaRowland.net. And check out their Patreon. Be on the lookout for their upcoming book a Taste of Gold and Iron, out from Tor.com in 2022, and listen to their podcast Be the Serpent, where they discuss topics of extreme literary merit with two fabulous co-hosts. Thank you again for talking with me, Alex!
Alex: Thanks so much for having me, Ariel.
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!