Manuscript critique

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Who will read my manuscript?
This little gang of editors and writers was formed especially for the people who write and ask me to critique their manuscripts, and for those who ask for recommendations on how to find an editor. I have done some manuscript critiques for others (particularly friends-of-friends and locals) in the past but don't have time to do that now.  I hope this collection of people who critique and edit will help if you are looking for feedback on a book manuscript or screenplay.

Genres, experience, expense
Most of the people on the list handle fiction and nonfiction, but some deal with YA, screenwriting, and poetry as well. My recommendation is that you look closely at the links; the editors are quite varied in experience and interests, and some of them might just feel like a fit for you. I expect there may be a range in the pesky matter of expense as well; I've listed fees where easily available. If this helps you narrow down to a few editors, please google them and see what else you can find.

Investigate
When you read about someone who has worked in the publishing industry, see what they have edited. In the case of editors who are also published writers--as many here are--don't forget that you can often go to Amazon and read a portion of a book. Excerpts and reviews may be on other sites as well. Google is your friend. This is especially helpful with those who do not have a website. Most of the names here are based on a facebook query; if you want to look at the responses (some of which have personal recommendations and more information), they are here.

Recommendations, prose and poetry
I have included the novelist or poet who recommended each person, except when e-friends contacted me directly. Though I've focused on prose, there are a good many no-fee sites where you can share and discuss poems--perhaps the most rarefied being Eratosphere, which concentrates primarily on formal poetry.

Grow the list
Please feel free to add further names and information in the comments. I will be adding any others that come in via email and facebook. And if you use one of the editors, come back and leave a comment.

Thanks to Diane
Oh, and Diane Ducey deserves credit for writing a lovely letter that prompted me to make this list. Good luck to her!

MIKE LEVINE
About Mike Levine Editorial: here
Write Mike Levine on the MLE contact page: here
Recommended by poet and translator Alicia Stallings

JACKIE COOPER
jkershawcooper [at] aol [dot] com
About Jackie Cooper: here
Note: He will not review any book he critiques. (He reviews for Huffington Post.)
Fee for a novel critique: $400.

CAREY WALLACE
About Carey Wallace: here
theblindcontessa [at] gmail [dot] com
Fees worked out on a case by case basis.

LAURA AGIRI
silver [dot] graph [at] juno [dot] com
Laura has published novels and collections of stories
   and has worked as researcher, editor, and writer.

JEN VIOLI
About Jen Violi: here
Write Jen on her contact page: here
Recommended by writer Alice Marks

PETERNELLE VAN ARSDALE
About Peternelle Van Arsdale: here
peternelle [at] peternellevanarsdale [dot] com
YA, novel, fantasy
Recommend by novelist Jeff Giles

CINDY KANE / CINDY TRUMBORE
About Cindy Kane: here
Cindy [at] cindykane.net
Children's books and YA
Recommended by poet Julie Kane

JANET NAYLOR VANDENABEELE
Ink Stains Media: here
janetvan [at] gmail [dot] com

JULIE SCHEINA
About Julie Scheina: here
julie [at] juliescheina [dot] com
Recommended by novelist April Lindner

NEIL AITKEN
About Neil Aitken's work with poets and writers: here
Contact page here
Recommended by poet Robbi Nester

S. J. HODGES
Memoirs, self-help, fiction
About S. J. Hodges: here
Around $500 for a read with notes session, depending on length
She sends science and business mss. to LEIGH ANNE HIRSCHMAN
    at Hirschman Literary

MARGARET DIEHL
About Margaret Diehl: here, here
margaret [dot] diehl [at] gmail [dot] com

KAREN PALMER
About Karen Palmer: here
karenpalm [at] gmail [dot] com
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

MELANIE BISHOP
About Melanie Bishop: here
leximelanie [at] gmail [dot] com
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

JOAN ROGERS
to be added
Recommended by Margaret Diehl

Thanks to novelist Emily Barton for more recommendations,
   though they turned out to be overbooked. How busy
   an editor is just might be something to consider as well.

IMAGE
The Manuscript Critique: "$695 for up to six months of mentoring."
Writer and professor Jessica Hooten Wilson suggested
   both IMAGE's book service and IOWA BOOK DOCTORS.
   I haven't found enough information on the latter, but feel free to investigate further!

FREE FACEBOOK WRITERS GROUP
"Anyone may submit passages of written work for group critiques."
Find other writers who want to swap manuscripts for comments at any stage...
Recommended by Kim Beall, who says she found a few trolls but also
   some helpful friends. (Kim just sold her first book.)

FREE CRITTERS is a free service for writers of sf/f/h, though you have to critique
   other pieces before you take a turn with your own. So you "pay" with your
   time and thoughts. I talked to someone who used the service, and he was
   enthusiastic about one critiquer out of five.

Suzannah Smith Miles, "August Light"

Here’s a lovely guest post by South Carolina writer and historian, Suzannah Smith Miles, from Charleston, South Carolina and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Suzannah is known for both her books and magazine work on North and South Carolina history, and she writes regularly for Charleston Magazine and WNC (Western North Carolina) Magazine out of Asheville. Known for presenting history in a light conversational style, Suzannah has been called “the best armchair historian in the state of S.C.” This piece was originally published as one of her weekly columns (a ten-year run) for The Moultrie News in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. Her current book project is A Sea Island Gazetteer (projected publication date Spring 2012), comprising an A-to-Z listing of people, places, and events in the history-rich coastal area between Charleston and Hilton Head."

AUGUST LIGHT

     Guest blogger:  Suzannah Smith Miles



The low country photographs are the work
of Robert M. Smith, Jr.,
a photographer based in Columbia, S. C..
Also known as Robin, or Suzannah's brother!

 “Maybe I have already done it,” ponders a character in William Faulkner’s book, Light in August. “Maybe it is no longer waiting to be done.”

August is here, my friends -- that curious, pivotal and delicious time of the year when summer still reigns but we begin to feel the unmistakable touch of autumn. It shows in the sassafras leaves which are beginning to change from green to russet and orange and fall in my backyard. It shows in the pecan trees which are filled with large green, leathery nut pods. It shows in the fields and roadsides, where a month ago wildflowers were in full bloom but now are “thighdeep in dusty weeds.” As we turn our thoughts from vacation trips and days on the beach to book bags and school clothes, we think, “Where has the time gone? Is it August already? But, it was just the Fourth of July!”

Yes, August is beginning to show. The seasons are beginning to turn. There is that unmistakable something in the air. And, more than anything, there is the August light.

There is a distinct, airy and almost delicate quality about the light in August. The sun is beginning to nestle into its wintertime position, casting angular rays which diffuse and brighten the depth of the landscape of late summer green. The marshes, at the height of their maturity, shimmer and gleam, and the spartina moves in the wind like an undulating cape of emerald velvet.

There is a mellowness that comes with August light. Faulkner described the August sun as “a prone and somnolent yellow cat” watching the “slow flowing of time” beneath him. Time does seem to flow more slowly in August, especially during those periods when it is unbearably hot. August appears to drag on interminably and its thirty-one days feel more like thirty-seven.

Augustus Caesar stole a day from February to give his namesake month of August thirty-one days. This decision was not based on any astronomical purpose but from simple petty jealousy. Augustus thought of this month as his “lucky” month, for it was in August that he scored his greatest military achievements and first became a consul of Rome. He didn’t want July, which was named for his uncle, Julius Caesar, to be longer than the month that carried his own name.

August is a month of yellow days, days when the ocean border is commanded by tall, white cumulus clouds which march across the tropical horizon like sentries at their post. When the early morning sky is washed with saffron and the light bleaches out darkness with the color of sand. When the late afternoon setting sun deepens the earth into shades of copper and orange, and the sky is fringed with sweeping cirrus clouds tinted with turquoise, ruby and sapphire.

The old ones called these clouds “mares’ tails” and saw them as a sign of the approaching season of tropical storms. “Watch-em. Mares’ tail fill de’ sky,” warned my friend, an Edisto Island Gullah fisherman who has long since gone to his heavenly home. “Mares’ tail mean big storm a-comin,’ he would sagely predict as he pointed to the cirrus clouds above. And sure enough, if it isn’t a “hurricane bin come,” whenever sweeping curls of mares’ tails dominate the sky, some sort of tropical system usually passes through within the week.

August is the month of four o’clock thunderheads, forming in predictable mountains over the western horizon almost every afternoon. Charged with electricity and heavy with rain, they change the temperature from broiling to steamy and wreak havoc on the motorist during the rush-hour drive home.

August is the month of sweet, fleshy mountain tomatoes; of okra which has grown too large to be good for anything but stew. The month when blue crabs are at their fattest and saltwater fishing is at its best. When shrimp are plump and full, and the shrimp boats come into the harbor trailing a smog of seagulls hungrily diving, bobbing and working the wake as they feast on the leavings tossed aside.

August is a month of excesses. A time with days too hot and storms too fierce. When fogs of mosquitoes clog our twilight yards. When people with sanity decide to remain in their mountain cabins for “just one more week.” When the rest of us wipe the sweat from our brows and yearn for September, hurricane season be damned.

August is the month when we watch the impatiens wilting in their beds and try to decide whether we should water the flowers now or wait for the late afternoon thunderstorm. When we see that the grass is ankle-deep and sigh, “but I just mowed four days ago!”

And, like Faulkner observed, August is the month when we ponder whether we did the things we set out to do, or whether they needed to be done in the first place. We go from “should I” to “did I” with a simple rotation of the earth’s axis.

This is the month of August. It is bathed in exquisite, glimmering light with days awash in the colors of lemon and cream. It is a time when we see the summer crops come to their peak -- and then pass on. It is a month of Sundays, when we can almost feel and touch time as it makes its steady and unwavering advance towards autumn. August. Yes, this is August.

The House of Words (no. 17): Metanoia: Philip Lee Williams

Another kind of metanoia: Philip Lee Williams. 

Today we'll start an interview with Philip Lee William that, among other things, looks at why he has altered his mode of communicating with his readership and moved from relying on New York publishers to the university press.

Phil and I have been correspondents for more than a decade, although we only met in person a few years ago. Oddly, we are both winners of The Michael Shaara Award, but Phil has wheelbarrow loads of awards and books and is a Georgia institution all on his own... If you don't know his work, you may pop over to www.philipleewilliams.com and take a look at his novels, nonfiction, and poetry (as well as some of his musical compositions.) A blog for his sixteenth (or is it seventeeth?) book, The Divine Comics, is also there. 

In addition to being an award-winning writer, Phil holds solid title to being one of the kindest men on the planet. That quality is not always rewarded in this world, but for me it has been a great pleasure to be his friend. And so I want to say that Phil is the most positive sort of proof that it is possible to be both a good man and a good writer.

Marly: Phil, you have published many books, won awards, been honored--how and why have you changed the way you relate to your public and to the publishing industry?

Phil: It has been nearly 27 years now since my first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, was published by W.W. Norton. (It's still in print, btw, in a trade softcover edition from the University of Georgia Press!) From the spring of that year until the summer of 2010, I did many, many dozens of appearances, autographings, speeches to benefit causes and so forth, from New York City to Los Angeles and points in between. I loved meeting with readers and fans of my work, and for many years, I traveled extensively. I published books with major NY publishers such as Random House, St. Martin's, Grove Press, Norton and so forth, as well as university and smaller regional presses.

By last summer, however, I realized several things. First off, I felt a sea-change was necessary in my public life. Where in the past I had spoken everywhere to help push my books and meet my readers, I began to believe that the old model of just showing up in person and signing a few books was no longer the best way to meet the public. Instead, social media, blogs, websites, and so forth are much more effective. I have even done hour-long phone hookups with book clubs that are fun. I also realized that I had simply run out of my need to travel and sell. As a result, I made a decision to severely limit my public life. I announced that I would no longer tour or do routine speeches, lectures, or autographings. Frankly, I wanted my private life back.

Continued

Paean to The Long Grass Books, no. 4: In the Morning

Update, 13 June: Now this must be what contitutes the thing known as "perfect timing." An interview with Philip Lee Williams, done several years ago, has just come on line at The Istanbul Literary Review. It's an enlightening encounter between Phil and William Walsh. Phil talks frankly about worldly success, his books, the assaults on his heart, introspection, publishers, and much more.

Here's a clip: "To me, the great part of being a writer is the writing. All the rest of it is business stuff. When something great happens with the business stuff, you have two hours of happiness. When something really hideous happens, you say 'crap,' and you have two hours of being disgusted. It really isn't much more than that after you have been around for a long time. You don't sit around and get ecstatic except when you write. And of course I treasure it when someone says they love my work."

* * *

In a world where poetry professors gift their own students with major prizes and one little monkey scratches another's back, I'm reluctant to review this nature book, because the author is a penpal of mine. I've never met him, but we've exchanged many emails since 2001, when we were supposed to be on a panel together. Thanks to a bad back, we didn't meet at the Southern Festival of the Book, but now when I read In the Morning: Reflections from First Light, I know a lot about the author and the people and places he mentions.

So this will not be a review.

It will be, however, an attempt to shed light.

Feel free to leave a comment, as always, but if you have any questions for the author, ask away, and I'll pester Phil for an answer.

In the Morning is a classic Long Grass Book. I imagine that many people won't recognize the publisher: Mercer University Press. The copy I ordered is a trim, well-made hardcover, and the fact that Mercer chose to publish Philip Lee Williams is a credit to the press.

In the Morning is Phil's twelfth book, a kind of love song to his home state, its flora and fauna and people; in the past few years, the state of Georgia has been regularly laureling him with awards for his body of work (novels, poetry, and nonfiction), so the feeling must be mutual. Phil's a creative man, and he's a notably kind and tender-hearted man, so all the attention he has gotten lately seems especially pleasing.

To show the spirit of the book, I'm going to offer a variety of passages from it. And I'll append a few comments from other people who have admired its qualities.


***

Now, though, the mud has been washed away, and once more the creek is shining, sparkling. Murphy and I have come down to look for stones and artifacts, and already I have found an enormous amethyst crystal, pale purple and perfect, and a rim-sherd from a clay pot made on this land more than a thousand years ago. p. 28

At first, they appear almost black, like charcoal outlines in a book of nature identification, but soon their raw sienna paints itself on their flanks. The ivory spots that speckle the fawns come out like constellations. And their eyes are brown, what I see in the mirror each day, but much more alert, purposeful, and unknowing. The doe's right ear flops toward something I cannot hear. p. 34

Crickets that produce these sounds also have "ears"--on their front legs. (Stridulating grasshoppers have "ears" on their first abdominal segment.) Some species can make sounds at a mind-boggling 100 kilohertz, though humans wouldn't know it, since the higher range of our hearing ability is about 20kHz.

Which means that what we hear of this morning cricket chorus is a fraction of what's actually out there. (Lest we feel superior, one species, the snowy tree cricket, actually recites the temperature. Add forty to the number of chirps it makes in fifteen seconds, and you'll have the temperature in Fahrenheit. Science is full of fascinating and moderately useless bits of such information.) p. 64

It's early on a foggy spring morning, and we have already uncovered the clear outlines of the fort, bastions and all. We have found the skeleton of a man who we believe is Lt. Coytmore. We know his body was buried inside the fort, and it's the only such burial here. Looking on his skeleton, laid out neatly, I feel a shudder of sorrow for the man and his stupidities. p. 101

The mangrove-lined shore was probably half a mile away. Our houseboat bobbed several yards behind me in the Gulf of Mexico. I remembered well enough what you do not do around a shark: thrash and make a lot of noise. So here I was, in the middle of a spreading pool of blood, wearing sneakers. The shark came up then, and I could see his blood-drenched mouth and the 3-inch-long teeth and his wild, dead eyes. p. 120


***

Georgia writer Philip Lee Williams communicates both the wisdom we gain from the wilds and the wisdom we gain from science in language we want to read aloud for its sheer beauty.
--Betty Jean Craige, author of Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist


Wise, engaging, and unfailingly profound, In the Morning awakens our weary senses to a whole cascade of mornings...
--Amy Blackmarr, author of Above the Fall Line and Going to Ground


Like morning itself, this book is quiet, gentle, and enlightening.
--Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Wild Card Quilt, and Pinhook


...Williams has found nature where millions of us live--just as Thoreau once found it on the edge of bustling, antebellum Concord.
--Edward Larson, Pulitzer Prize winner for Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial
*