Edit All the Things

I’ve officially been back in school for a month now. And in that month, I’m practically reading or editing something every day.

In my advanced fiction writing class, I get 4-5 days to read six of my classmates’ short stories. You might think oh, that doesn’t sound so bad. But for me, I take my critiquing very seriously and it takes me an hour to read each story. And once I’m done, I have to write my editorial feedback letter to each one.

In addition to that, I also have an internship this semester. I intern for a small, independent book publishing house (I don’t feel comfortable saying the name on a public platform like this blog). For the past three weeks, I’ve been read the beginnings of manuscripts. My task is to explain what’s working and what’s not working within each piece, ultimately voting on whether the story moves onto the next round. So basically, my job is to weed out the poorly written stories.

Yesterday, this internship also started assigning me a novel to read/copyedit on my kindle. With these books, they were published years ago, but the publishing house is trying to convert them digitally. Unfortunately, by doing this, occasional typos pop up, so I have to report them.

Even with all that reading and editing, it’s not including my other class I have this semester. I’m part of the team that is working on my university’s literary magazine (we only accept undergraduate work; no submissions from our university). We’re working on our second issue, so it’s still a new endeavor, but we definitely have our work cut out for us. It’s exciting to see all the submissions piling up in our inbox, but most of it hasn’t been read it.

Basically, I’ll be very busy this semester. (Hopefully it’ll look nice on my resume because I’m graduating in December.) I’m not complaining (especially since I barely did anything in the summer and I felt like I lost some kind of purpose), because I actually enjoy doing all the editing; it’s just very time consuming.

And I feel a twinge of guilt as my pile of leisure books are piling up on my dresser again. There are only three novels right now, but my birthday is in three weeks, so it’s guaranteed to double in size soon.

…But who needs sleep, right?



P.S. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I had some kind of writing error within my post about editing?