Unnngh. I'm in the middle of editing this manuscript--which was edited once, self-pubbed, then acquired by a publisher who set it up with another editor and...
Well, it's gotten weird.
The structural edits were great, I was really excited, but the line edits are increasingly strange as I go through. The editor's pulling out whole lines and dropping in new ones that she wrote. And I mean, not just a couple words or a shift from passive to active voice, I'm talking major changes here--at one point she swapped out "it didn't seem to be helping" with her own "while the situation wasn't any less perilous, it ceased to be novel."
That's not at all the same thing, and it's not anything I would ever write!
Her ear for dialog is...let's go with 'different from mine.' Occasionally jarringly so.
And I mean, I've trade published...uh...three novels, eleven kid's books, a couple more in the pipeline, I'm used to working with in-house editors, I've hired freelance editors before and worked with them, I'm not inclined to sob about my precious prose, but this is different than any edit I've gotten and I'm kinda sweating at the amount of STETs I'm throwing down, and how frequently I just hit "Reject Change" and put it back the way it was.
I've never DONE that. I accept probably 95% of changes on most manuscripts because they're usually right!
But this is getting kind of ridiculous--just hit a completely new line added, with TWO typos in it--and I've emailed my agent, and I don't know if I've just always had editors with a really light hand and this is within the usual norm or what?
Our deadlines are so tight and I'm nearly done, so there's not much point in asking to be placed with a different editor, I guess. I'm just thinking I don't want to work with this one again.
And then I worry that it's me, not them.
So. Um. Someone reassure me I'm not turning into Anne Rice? Please?