#editor life

[bullet-prooflove]

Me About To Be Interviewed For A Podcast On Creativity

[filmcourage]

Don't Hire An Editor Until You Know This - Lucas Harger

Watch the video interview on YouTube here.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

[rozmorris]

May the best book win - a few thoughts on judging a writing competition

As you might have seen from previous posts and newsletters, I’m one of the judges in the 2025 International Voices in Creative Non-Fiction competition. I’ve just finished my reading and I’ve learned a few things. How to compare chalk and cheese? Creative non-fiction is a term that covers just about every literary form. Some entries are in verse. Some are short stories. Some are experimental…

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[fdmlovesfashion]

48 hour Hamptons Getaway

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

I decided to redraw one of my earliest Tintin fancomics! I've been drawing Tintin fanart for a bit before I started posting online.

I can imagine Tintin having a tumultuous relationship with his editor, hardly ever being in the office and having a very low rate of writing articles. Tintin's increasingly liberal politics also clash with the newspaper's conservative values. Tintin and his editor frequently argue over this but Tintin almost always wins out, as he is aware that it is his articles that sell the paper. His editor is reluctant to let go of his golden goose.

More headcanon under the Read More! It's background stuff and things about his editor.

Tintin started his journalism career at just 14, and seeing the dangerous situations he is sent into in his early stories suggests to me that whoever hired him didn't have his best interests at heart. I can imagine his editor taking advantage of Tintin's ambition and naivety, while styling himself as a sort of father figure to the newspaper he runs. I based him off of the editor we see at the very start of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets!

His editor hires him after Tintin demonstrates remarkable skills in investigative journalism, uncovering local corruption for his school paper. He takes advantage of Tintin's naivety, sending him off to various countries to write conservative propaganda pieces for the paper. He hopes Tintin will be easy to groom into a conservative pundit, but after witnessing atrocities and coming into contact with people from different walks of life, Tintin finds himself unlearning a lot of harmful beliefs he was raised with. After he earns global recognition in Tintin in America, Tintin leverages his star power to ensure less editorial interference with his work. His journey away from conservatism is kickstarted upon befriending Chang, who directly challenges a lot of his preconceptions.

Tintin stays with the paper under the misguided belief that he can steer the publication in a better direction with his influence. Deep down he also feels he owes his editor, as it was him who gave Tintin a platform and an oppurtunity to escape his situation, being raised in an orphanage and being deeply unhappy in school. His editor also frequently points out that other papers will not be as lenient with his low turnover rate of articles, and that he's lucky he's still with them.

After Tintin gets Chang a job there as his photographer, Chang ends up befriending a lot of the staff. He's one of the few non white staff members there, which causes quite the stir. While Chang is grateful for the job, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with working for them the more he learns about the paper. He tells Tintin that by staying there, he's only legitimising the publication.

Tensions at the paper start rising as political tension rises in Europe. Tintin, Chang, and a lot of staff notice their editor acting erratically and making strange demands...

[niinnyu]

Reverie

[narliee]

I'm not that girl you thought I was. You're not. You, Summer, are better. See, back then you were just this fantasy. You were this little girl, who, when I would see, you would either ignore me, or make an obscene gesture and keep on walking. Yeah, I kind of remember that, sorry. But now look at you. You fight for sea otters, you've befriended Taylor Townsend. You're an incredible mom to that bunny. I guess I have changed. You've evolved. And over the last 950 days we've been dating, yes, I've counted and yes, I counted the Zach era, because, really, who were we kidding? I've watched you grow into this incredible woman. And that is who I love. SETH & SUMMER in THE OC (2003-2007)

[deoidesign]

when your main characters start dating after years of writing so they finally get to be like this

[thebibliosphere]

Just read your post about Fourth Wing. I haven't read it, but as a bookseller who's been watching it sell since day one and has multiple coworkers who've enjoyed it, the fact that I'm only just now hearing that the main character has EDS is pretty telling about how it's presented in the book...which is sad because having good disability rep in a book as popular as Fourth Wing would've been amazing

It truly would and that’s partly why I’m so disappointed.

Everyone and I mean everyone was telling me about this book when it took off and it was being heavily pushed in disabled spaces as ‘positive disabled rep’ and then it just… the number of people who messaged me since yesterday going, “Wait, Violet’s disabled???”

And like, I can’t even blame it on people missing cues or poor reading comprehension, the books just Like That.

If the disability just vanishes the instant it gets in the way of the character being a badass/sexy love interest, that’s not disability rep, that’s disability fantasy/erasure.

And again, Yarros can write whatever escapist fantasy she wants about the disability we share. But at the very least it needed to be portrayed consistently, which is where Yarros really struggles. Consistency is not her strong point. Whether it’s characterization, representation of even sentence and dialect styles, it fluctuates too much.

She’s being failed by her editors on multiple levels. But that's nothing new for that House recently, unfortunately.

[astrowarr]

i cant wait for people to make edits of wild life session 3 to the "war is over" song. it would be so funny. put the immortal snails back with Their Song

[filmcourage]

5 AI Tools Every Editor Can't Live Without (Recommended By Pro Editor) - Lucas Harger

Watch the video interview on Youtube here.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

I never don't have to look up slash spacing when it comes up at work, because on a purely aesthetic level, I hate how having spaces on either side of a slash looks. That said, per CMOS, it's not strictly wrong if one or more of the terms being separated are open compounds. It just looks ugly as all hell. To illustrate my point, here's an example:

World War I/First World War

World War II / Second World War

You cannot convince me that the second one doesn't look wrong and archaic, like some leftover from when we put two spaces after periods when we used manual typewriters.

[soothifying-sounds-asmr]

I was accepted to a paid video editing internship and a lot of the work is very reminiscent of what I used to do here. It makes me so happy to know that my silly little Tumblr blog gave me good practice :3 I hope everyone is doing well <3 Tell me what you're going to be for Halloween!

[hayden-christensen]

STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH NOVELISATION by Matthew Stover

@pscentral event 18: adaptations