Editing into the Future

On my second editing pass through Whose Hearts are Mountains, I realize the story reads better than I thought.

My first edit is for word use, and I mostly eliminate as many of the passive verbs -- have, had, has, was, were -- with some fixing of awkward sentences as I see them. This gives me at best a choppy feel for the story.

My second edit is a reading edit, where I read to hear the sentences in my head and make sense of them. The book sounds good in my head.

Whose Hearts are Mountains isn't even the next book I'm sending to developmental edit. I'll send Apocalypse, which is the merciless edited version of three novels, first.  But I have good feelings about Whose Hearts are Mountains that I didn't expect I would have.

I still have to start writing a new novel soon. The only novel I have left to edit is Reclaiming the Balance, and that one has some necessary stylistic divergence (use of gender neutral pronouns for an intersex character) that I'm afraid will get in the way of its success.

I'm still wondering what I will write next. I have a few leads but do not feel passionate about any of them, mostly because they're sequels to things already written but not yet accepted. Perhaps I'm looking for a new idea.

 

Pronouns

I dusted off a manuscript that I had written a couple years ago which is in line for developmental edit. The name of the novel is Reclaiming the Balance, and one of the main characters is Amarel, who is balanced on the point between young and old, wise and foolish, human and Archetype -- and male and female.

In other words, Amarel was born genderqueer, complete with ambiguous genitalia.

When looking through the story, I realized that I had used the word "him" to refer to Amarel, which was first and foremost offensive, because the pronoun boxed him into a binary Amarel didn't belong to. I misgendered Amarel.

So I introduced gender-neutral pronouns for Amarel -- ze for he/she, hir for him/her and his/hers, hirself for himself/herself. I wrote a lot of substitutions, given that Amarel is one of the main characters.

The revised novel is a bit harder to read, because I am not used to gender-neutral pronouns. This might be a good thing or a bad thing for the reader -- good in that the reader feels the discomfort of the people around Amarel; bad in that this might make it more difficult to read.

The gender-neutral pronouns also tend to add a feeling of isolation to Amarel' s situation, which is accurate. Amarel is the only person referred to as hir and ze. We still treat the gender queer as "other", as people who purposefully isolate themselves from society through their rejection of the binary gender construction of society.

If the story had been written in first person, Amarel may have seen everyone as ze/hir/hirself, which would make a pretty inescapable point to the reader. Alas, Reclaiming the Balance is a third-person novel, so it will only convey so much of the point.