In my brief experience, I've only suffered under-editing. They're supposed to protect us from the hads and commas, bastards.
My story is set in the US and Italy, hence the ER rather than A&E. The character (nurse) in question is a secondary character who pops up from time to time as the on/off lover of my MC's business partner. The book spans a period of about four years so at the beginning, she's just completed her residency in the ER and has become a Doctor. The first major thing she deals with, knocks her off her trolley - I don't go into the medical side that much simply because she's not a main character, but I needed her to 1) have her own story and 2) have reasons for her and her boyfriend to have ups and downs. What happens causes her and the BF to split - the BF (an ex womaniser) goes back to his old ways which then indirectly affects the life of his business partner. So firstly, I needed her to work in the ER. Secondly, I needed her to be the person, or part of the team, that informs people their relatives/loved ones have died. After the incident that splits them up, she has a decision to make. Tough it out and become damn good at her job, or sidestep into department management and penpushing. As it is, she toughs it out and comes through the other side with flying colors because she ends up being part of the team that is there to help the MC when they need it. My editor was born in the UK. Her and her family emigrated to Canada when she was a small child - her parents still live there, her sister (and family) still live there, her brother still lives there, her married niece lives and works there, and her nephew is a Canadian actor. (small one) She moved back here and married someone I went to school with (that's how we met, when me and the school friend re-connected a few years back). So she came on board mainly to help me with the Americanisms in the first book. She was great about it, pointed me in the right direction on a lot of things and on more than one occasion, we would have conversations about what characters were doing and why, she was as open to my explanations as I was to her queries. So when the question of the second book came up, she was on board from the start. I write out of order, so I knew there would be parts of repetition that I needed to iron out (200K+ word novel, there's bound to be) and after reading it ten times, of course I will miss stuff but the stuff she questions, and blatantly points out as "ugh, change it ..." is wrong on so many levels. I have a section near the end where a character flatlines. Turns out, the character is suffering from a heart condition known as Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, which is a congenital heart defect. Once they bring the character back and stabilize them, the doctors go through the illness and explain what they are going to do regarding surgery (catheter ablation, three months recovery, meds involved ... so on and so on ...) The whole chapter contains information regarding certain machines, readouts, staff, took me months to research. There's nothing wrong with it, it's technically spot on ... but she had to say, right at the beginning when a blood pressure measurement is taken, "have you checked this is the correct BP reading?" There are blue edit marks on every page. It gets tiresome when most of them are really not needed. Thank you so much for offering to help - I'll keep that in mind xx
The first time as a nurse practitioner I had to tell a patient they had HIV, my first thought was, oh crap, as a nurse I never had to do that. It was back before we had more than AZT to treat patients, it was the diagnosis of a terminal disease at that point. So yes, usually the MD has the job of informing the loved ones. That borders on bizarre, but now I'm curious.
'Yes doctor, I have checked and yes, actually this is a different patient's blood pressure reading.' 'Okay, I say we take a new blood-pressure reading, here and now, and with witnesses. Clear the space, pass me a rubbery thingy for wrapping around forearms, ya.'
LOL! I meant the editor commented on the MS, "have you checked this BP reading for this situation?" because she had no comment to make about the rest of the medical stuff in that section of the story ... LOL Incidentally, the BP reading is 119 over 78, which is within the acceptable perimeters for the position I put the character in ...
The character has had flutters for a while. He decided to get it checked out but on his way there, (he's kept all this a secret from family) his heart speeds up (tachycardia) until he blacks out and crashes his car. (he was parking up at the time so no massive crash to deal with). He's stabilized on site and taken to the ER. On arrival the can't talk to him so have to start ruling out the main reasons for the fast heartbeat (cardiomyopathy, hypertension, athersclerosis, thyroid disease ...) Then the stress of the tachycardia sends him into cardiac arrest and his heart stops. The defibrillate and bring him back, at that point, his bp is 119 over 78 with a normal sinus rhythm. The EKG shows up the WPW syndrome and they administer meds to block the accessory pathway. He's groggy, feels like he's been hit by a train, hates the feeling of the catheter, can't speak and can't focus properly but he can hear voices. He panics until he manages to make out his wife's figure and voice. Transferred up to CICU and later, the Doc comes along and explains everything. Firstly, I'm no medical person. And yes, WPW is totally different from open heart surgery but I did go through that with my husband, so from his wife's POV, I've felt everything she did. Not that that means I've gotten everything right LOL
Given that scenario, I can't imagine what your editor was on about. Seems perfectly in range for a newly recovered NSR (which would be a very broad range in the first place). Don't know what language you use in the book. Technically the heart fibrillates rather than stopping. If you are having ED* or ICU people talking to each other they would call it cardiac arrest or V-fib. Talking to a family member they might say his heart stopped. I think you are wise to draw from a personal experience and there are many reasons here not to take this editor's advice to heart. *Most hospitals call it the emergency department, not room, thus ED and not ER. But the reading public wouldn't give a rip.
Thanks. I'm about 75 pages off editing that section, would you mind if I messaged you the passage for you to take a glance at? I'm not looking for it to be edited or changed, just the nod from a medical POV.
This doesn't sound like an editor. It sounds like she's decided that she's going to be your co-author, whether you like it or not.
@GingerCoffee , my understanding, from my nurse daughter, is that US nurses are allowed less autonomy than in the UK...but that may be based on what we see on TV. Certainly, watching an episode of House with her generally takes a couple of hours, as we have to pause it every couple of minutes for her to have a rant about the medical reason why they wouldn't do that!!!
I can't stand House because it is so far from a factual program. As for your daughter's perceived lack of autonomy, I'd be interested in an example. It's kind of hard to judge without that. I had much more autonomy as an ICU nurse than I did in a small hospital just out of nursing school.
Not where book writing is concerned. and no, she's not actually charging me. I think the biggest surprise is how massively different her edits have been between book one and book two.
A "proper" editor will charge an arm and a leg to do an entire book and is out of the reach of most people unless you seriously want to invest in your book. I'm not sure what credentials this lady has to satisfy this but it sounds like you would be better off leaving her advice to one side. If you aren't going to act on her advice then there probably isn't much point wasting her time either.
As I mentioned above, I am reading every comment and change she's made, but only acting on less than ten percent. She's made about 8 comments where the beta reader had said the same thing, and she's raised a couple of good points which have made me rethink one or two things. But the rest of the stuff is just changing MY work to suit HER taste. Even down to changing the words of a nursery rhyme that I've made up. I don't mind anyone telling me where I've gone wrong but taking out whole sections for no apparent reason, swapping sentences and renaming my characters is total bollocks as far as I'm concerned., Yes, she wants me to ditch an Italian character named Nephele, (because she hates that name and finds it distracting). She wants me to change a name form Dantea to Dantéa even though the name never had an accent over the e in the first place and is actually an Americanised and feminine version of Dante so doesn't need the accent over the E ... and she then wants me to change the characters nickname to Téa which, as far as the story goes, is the crappiest thing I've ever heard and has no bearing on the story whatsoever. What it comes down to is this. She was supposed to: . pick up on any americanisms that I got wrong . pick up any spag that I'd messed up on . send me a list of questions referring to anything that caused utter confusion What I got was all the above and every page buried beneath blue edit markings until a lot of it became unreadable. I have multiple characters, they are all in third person omni except the female MC who is in first person (trust me it works). She even goes so far as to changing the tenses around in parts of each secondary character. She hates long sentences, I love them. So most of her changes reduce my sentences to nothing more than almost bullet point notations. I guess this is what I get for trusting someone who a) writes reports for a living and b) I though was a very trusted friend. Obviously I was wrong!
Oh, dear God. It's like she's actively trying to sabotage your work. That's practically Chapter One of Things To Never Do When Writing Fiction.
I've stuck my tongue out at my computer screen more times this past few weeks while reading her margin notes than I ever have in real life. (and I've also taken to answering her margin notes with my own sarcastic margin notes too. I'm a bad girl!)
