History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

WriteHive Panel: How to Self-Edit Like a Developmental Editor

| October 2, 2023

One of the WriteHive online conference panels I watched was a presentation on How to Self-Edit Like a Developmental Editor. Even though I am an editor, developmental editing is one of the places where I’d like to increase my skills, and getting some tips and tricks that can help me practice these things on my […]

Care and Feeding of the Editorial Brain and Body at Flights of Foundry

| July 24, 2023

One of the panels I moderated at Flights of Foundry was called “Care and Feeding of the Editorial Brain and Body”. And while the panelists were editors, and the tips were somewhat geared in that direction, there were also things we talked about that can apply to writers, as well, such as making sure you […]

All About Editing at Flights of Foundry

| June 26, 2023

At Flights of Foundry back in April of this year, I attended and spoke on a few panels about editing and freelancing. While I still work a full time job, I have also taken on a lot of freelance editing projects, especially in the past few months. So these panels were helpful to me in […]

Approaching Personal Feedback

| May 23, 2022

As a writer with a lot of stories and poems, I do a lot of submitting my stories to markets. Of course, the flipside of that is that I receive a lot of rejections on my stories. Many markets take fewer than 1 percent of the stories submitted to them. This means that even if […]

Revising Short Fiction: On Screen or On Paper?

| February 22, 2021

I learned how to edit my papers for high school and college by printing out drafts, reading through them, and marking them up with red ink (or whatever funky colored pens I had). But that was in the halcyon days of dot matrix printers, which, in the household I grew up, at least, had a […]

Self-Editing Tips, Part 3

| August 24, 2020

The devil, as they say, is in the details. While most of my previous editing tips (find part 1 and part 2 here) have been of a fairly generalized nature, today’s tips are getting into a handful of specific topics. 6) Learn to Spot Passive Voice! Passive voice is, quite simply, putting the object before […]

Self-Editing Tips, Part 2

| August 17, 2020

Last week, I shared three tips about editing your own writing. This week, I’m back with a couple more! 4) Listen to Feedback! If you’re writing and submitting stories, or if you have a critique group or beta readers, you may wind up with some feedback on your writing. It’s less common for story submissions […]

Self-Editing Tips, Part 1

| August 10, 2020

Last week, I talked about the different types of editing. This week, I’m going to share some of my tips for editing your own work, or self-editing. I begin with a caveat, as an editor: paying an editor to edit your work is ALWAYS a good choice, no matter how much experience you have as […]

Types of Editing: A Revision

| August 3, 2020

A while back, I talked about the types of editing as they apply to self-published work, but my post ended up leaving a few of the types of editing out. So I’m back, with another post about the different types of editing! Acquisitions editing is the process of selecting works for publication. In the novel […]

Reading Aloud to Find Errors

| July 1, 2019

One of the best ways to edit something you’ve written is to read it aloud. Your eyes may try to skip over mistakes or correct them for you if you’re reading silently, but when you add your mouth into the equation, it makes you look at a manuscript differently. I edit professionally, so my brain […]