Hire Angel Larkin, Developmental Editor
- Current: 1 · Describe
- 2 · Pay
- 3 · Questions
- 4 · Delivery
- 5 · Rate
Step 1: Describe your job
- Revision plan for a second draftYou get: A revision plan for your second draft, in order · ⏱ 24 hrs$70
- Total, fixed$70
The length of your brief never changes the price. Only the packages above do, and each one is listed.
Total $70
- • Revision plan for a second draft: $70
- A full read, an editorial letter and a dated revision plan
- 2 revisions included
- Size limit: one manuscript or proposal, up to about 100,000 words
- Counts as a separate task: line editing, proofreading or rewriting the book
Example deliverable: Editorial letter (excerpt)
Example of work, not a client review scenario: Debut novelist, 94,000-word literary novel, second draft · what a finished job from Angel looks like · turnaround 24 hrs
Package: Editorial letter for a full manuscript · $120 · 3 days
Delivered Thursday, March 12. Your revision plan follows on the last page.
Dear Maren,
Thank you for trusting me with Nora. I want to start with what is already working, because it is a great deal, and because I don't want you to cut it by accident. Your first chapter, the drive over the Bonner Bridge with the motel's unpaid electric bill in the cup holder, does in four pages what most debuts need forty to do: it tells me who Nora is, what she owes and what she is afraid to want. Your sentences about weather and money are the best in the book. Keep every one.
THE HEART OF IT
Here is the thing your beta readers are feeling, even if "the middle drags" is how they said it. The book has two engines, the motel's debt and Nora's silence with her mother, and right now they take turns instead of pulling on each other. From chapter 8 to chapter 17 we alternate: a money chapter, then a mother chapter, then a money chapter. Each one is lovely on its own. Together they idle, because nothing Nora does about the money costs her anything with her mother, and nothing her mother says changes the money.
The ending is not the problem; the ending is unearned. When Nora sells the motel in chapter 24, she hasn't paid anything for the choice on the page. The reader needs to watch her try the other way, and fail at real cost, before the sale can land as grief instead of relief.
WHAT I'D CHANGE, IN ORDER
- Tie the engines together at the midpoint. Move the scene where Nora finds the second mortgage (now chapter 19) up to chapter 11, and make her mother the one who signed it. Now every money decision is a decision about her mother.
- Give Nora one wrong plan. Between chapters 11 and 17, let her try to save the motel her way, the summer rental scheme you mention in passing in chapter 14, and let it fail in a way that hurts Dell.
- Cut or merge three chapters. Chapters 9, 13 and 16 each repeat a beat we already have (Nora alone on the pier, thinking). Keep the best page of each; fold it into its neighbor.
- Let her mother speak once, clearly. Her stroke has taken most of her words. Give her one sentence, late, that Nora cannot argue with. I've marked a spot in chapter 22.
WHAT TO LEAVE ALONE
- The present tense. It is doing real work in the hospital scenes.
- Dell. He is the most alive person in the book; resist the urge to explain him.
- The title. It earns itself in chapter 3.
You have written a book with a true center, Maren. This revision is about letting the reader feel the weight you already know is there. I'm right here if any of this lands wrong, and I'd love to see chapter 11 first when it's ready.
Warmly,
Angel