An Editing Cabal?

[Mark_Reed]

Hey all-

So for some bizarre reason completely unrelated to vain impulses to view my own webpages, I've started rereading Fel's old stories again. I was going through the Tower of Sorcery and noticed that aside from spellchecking, Fel had been fixing some of the continuity errors the forums had spotted as he was releasing the edited versions of Tower 1 through 8. Two errors I'd noticed he'd fixed were the Kael's house being destroyed twice (he replaced the first destruction with ransacked and temporarily deserted in the edits) and the fact that Tarrin knew different languages at different times in the story. (I think there was one early reference pre-edits where Tarrin knows 5 or 6, and he learns another 3 or 4 during the course of the story. Later, the recounts of how many languages he knows don't stay consistent.) However, as I reached chapter 8 I was noticing some small stuff (like minor references to the language thing) that slipped through the edits, and of course everything after chapter 8 has the same continuity errors it had before.

So I thought to myself, "someone should go back and fix this stuff." But frankly, Fel is too busy and I'd rather his attention stay focused on writing new stuff rather than rereading and editing old stuff. Plus, the job is a humongous one for one person, and even then stuff would escape a single person's notice. The ideal thing would be for a group of people to collect known continuity errors (and possibly rereading just to make sure) and passing everything to one or two editors who could make changes and produce "Fel approved" edited chapter versions. And then my brain said "there is no way in heck you're going to head up a project like that, but it sure sounds like an excellent thing for someone else to do!"

Before I posted this, I swung the idea by Fel. He's fine with it, so long as it's organized and everyone (including him) agrees the change needs to be made.

So how about it? I figured the editor-in-chief(s) would be in charge of doing a second (or first) spellcheck of every chapter, fixing minor continuity errors, and passing larger ones (like the Kael house getting destroyed twice) that would involve passages of the story being rewritten up to Fel himself to fix (or just approve a volunteered rewrite). They could even post a running log of what continuity stuff they've fixed so that anyone rereading can give things a second go-over. (Count me in as one of those volunteering to reread, since I'm already doing it.) That way, the loyal forum members can nitpick to our hearts content while Fel can focus on writing new chapters with a low maintenance way of keeping his hand in the editing process.

Seems a win-win solution, so long as someone is willing to take on the labor of love.

[heustess]

A wiki would be a good way for a group of editors to collaborate. You could add proposed changes to chapter pages along with continuity details. You could also have character and place pages that contain continuity details. I would be interested in joining the editing cabal. I worked as a volunteer editor for the Vance Integral Edition. At least editing Fel's work would not have to start with scanning different dead tree editions with OCR. Typos are bad enough but scanos (OCR errors) are worse. Vance created so many words that OCR had a lot of problems with his books.

[Spec8472]

One of the ideas I'd had was for something wiki-like, where you could drop into editing mode for a paragraph to correct just that section.
I know mediawiki has since added this on a section basis, but it's probably a fair bit of effort to get working right.

[samuelmichaels]

One of the ideas I'd had was for something wiki-like, where you could drop into editing mode for a paragraph to correct just that section.
I know mediawiki has since added this on a section basis, but it's probably a fair bit of effort to get working right.

You (that's a generic you) might consider a combination of tools: a dropbox folder with Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice versions of documents with revision tracking for the actual text,
plus a wiki or even a subforum here to discuss status, as well as ways of tackling more complex changes.