If you know me well, you know that I love to crochet. I've tried learning to knit, too, but perhaps it was a bad idea to have my first lesson on a day when I was still coming off of anesthesia from foot surgery? Regardless, I'm an only-slightly-abashed yarn lover. I also have an unfortunate predilection for falling in love with yarns and/or colorways that get discontinued.
Luckily, since moving to Denver, I've discovered that the chain Tuesday Morning carries lots of discontinued yarn colorways. Each location has a unique stock, so my best bet is to go investigate in person. What a drag, right? ;)
Yesterday, I was on an expedition to a Tuesday Morning near me. While browsing the shelves, I discovered a big blob of tangled yarn. The more I tried to move it out of the way, the more of a mess I realized there was. I should've taken a picture--I don't think even I, in all my accident-prone glory, have ever gotten my yarn into as big a snarl as that one.
Well, I was procrastinating going home to do something I wasn't looking forward to, and I figured the employees didn't have time to untangle this thing themselves. So I found an end and set to work winding it up.
A few minutes into the job, an elderly lady came down the aisle and saw what I was doing. She said something along the lines of, "Oh my goodness. Would you like some help?"
I said, "That would be lovely!"
So we spent the next I-don't-know-how-long, probably half an hour or more, working together to untangle what turned out to be four different skeins of yarn from each other. We chatted as we worked, and I learned that her name is Ricki. She hadn't even come to the store to find yarn; she'd been looking for something else on the same aisle. But she was exactly who I needed to help me. And we had a surprisingly enjoyable time outsmarting the Great Yarn Disaster of 2020.
Could I have gotten that mess undone on my own? Definitely. I've had to do similar things with my own yarn more than once. Would I have done it as well or as quickly without Ricki's help? Definitely not. And I wouldn't have had nearly as much fun doing it.
That's the essence of having an editor. Yes, anybody can edit their own work. (Note: If you're new here, I'm all for giving up the awkward "he or she" and "his or her" dance and just using they and their as singular third-person pronouns. We did something similar with the word you several hundred years ago, and nobody died. 😉) In some respects, nobody can edit a piece of writing the way its own author can. And anybody can use Grammarly or have Google Translate read their work back to them.
But, as we saw in the story from a few days ago about my poor sister's "please spare me" versus "please spear me" mistake, even the best automated checker won't catch every goof. (I tried this one in both Word and Grammarly, and neither of them found anything wrong with "please spear me." Eek.) Plus, sometimes we're just too close to our own work to see certain problems. And every writer gets to the point where they'd rather step on a Lego than look at a particular manuscript one more time.
That's why I'm here. Because I want to help you make your manuscript all that it can be, the kind of writing that attracts adoring readers and great reviews.
I know you have that book inside you. Let me help you show the world what you've got.
Click here to get started!
Write on,
Candice
(Thanks to Emma Louise Comerford for sharing their work on Unsplash.)
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