Sal Robinson, an editor at Melville House, in a post headed “On Editing and Being Edited,” muses on two articles on editing by John Simon and Tim Parks, and comes up with the following: “There is, indeed, a conservative tendency to editing at times — a worry that the book won’t sell or will be misunderstood, a leariness about putting between covers and into the public record something bizarre or unfamiliar.
Dude, I think it’s “leeriness.”
Afterwords
I myself am in the process of being edited, for some fan fiction I put online, a Nero Wolfe-ish threesome entitled Three Bullets, and am struggling to come to terms with all the incredibly stupid inadvertent errors I made. So it’s nice to be able to make fun of someone else.
