Remember how last year I complained about voting for "Best Editor" for the Hugos because I genuinely can't tell good editing from good writing, and only ever notice bad editing?
Well, this year I've been working extra-hard to pay attention to editing, and, uh, I still have the same problem: I can't see good editing, only the absence of it. I have no idea if a good book is well-edited because the editor found and fixed many mistakes, or if it's poorly-edited but there weren't many mistakes there in the first place. All I can notice is *bad* editing, where there are mistakes made repeatedly and not fixed.
Which brings me to Jim C Hines and Libriomancer and Codex Born, which are *poorly* edited. Which is really very sad, because they're good books with a neat concept but I *keep seeing* the editing mistakes, most of which are inconsistencies and contractions in the rules of magic.
In these books, Modern Humans(tm) living on Earth(tm) are sometimes Libriomancers: people who can reach into a book and pull out the contents, whether that's a phaser from a Star Trek novel, a chlorine gas attack from a WWI history book, an infection of Sparkly Vampirism from Twilight, etc, and use them in the real world. In an effort to prevent people from pulling out, say, Fred Saberhagen's Farslayer and wreaking havoc with their newfound ability to instantly kill literally anything on the planet from literally anywhere, books can be "locked" to prevent their magic from getting out. A locked book is useless to a Libriomancer, trying to pull something out of it will fail.
And *good* editing would probably have caught all the various cases where a book is locked in one scene and unlocked in another, or where a certain kind of book is a perfectly normal thing to pull stuff out of versus a weird thing that shouldn't work, etc.
For example: All the Harry Potter books are locked for various reasons, but the largest is the Time-Turner: Pulling that out is super-dangerous, so books using it are locked and there's an aside about how Ms Rowling was given a stern talking to about including it in later books. Regardless of having the time-turner or not, all Harry Potter books are completely locked. But in a different scene, our main character complains that pulling something out of a book doesn't teach you how to use it - he nearly gave himself carpal tunnel using Harry Potter's wand and still barely managed to flick the feather! In another scene, two characters mention hoping the newest D&D sourcebook isn't locked yet so they can use the spells and magic items before they get turned off, since all D&D books get locked but the locking sometimes takes a few days - and like a chapter later, Our Protagonist is thinking he shouldn't be able to pull things out of a D&D sourcebook *at all* but he's going to try anyway because it's generally considered impossible so *of course* those books are never, ever locked.
Those are two of the more obvious errors. They're not the only ones. That kind of misstep is *all through* the first two books in this series. (I haven't reached book 3 yet - I plan to read it, because the mistakes aren't killing the books for me, but auuugh)
It's really unfortunate, because these mistakes are so blatant and would have been so easy to fix. And all this rambling gets back to my main point: I can spot BAD editing, where an author made a mistake and an editor didn't catch or correct it, but I still have no idea how to identify good editing.
Well, this year I've been working extra-hard to pay attention to editing, and, uh, I still have the same problem: I can't see good editing, only the absence of it. I have no idea if a good book is well-edited because the editor found and fixed many mistakes, or if it's poorly-edited but there weren't many mistakes there in the first place. All I can notice is *bad* editing, where there are mistakes made repeatedly and not fixed.
Which brings me to Jim C Hines and Libriomancer and Codex Born, which are *poorly* edited. Which is really very sad, because they're good books with a neat concept but I *keep seeing* the editing mistakes, most of which are inconsistencies and contractions in the rules of magic.
In these books, Modern Humans(tm) living on Earth(tm) are sometimes Libriomancers: people who can reach into a book and pull out the contents, whether that's a phaser from a Star Trek novel, a chlorine gas attack from a WWI history book, an infection of Sparkly Vampirism from Twilight, etc, and use them in the real world. In an effort to prevent people from pulling out, say, Fred Saberhagen's Farslayer and wreaking havoc with their newfound ability to instantly kill literally anything on the planet from literally anywhere, books can be "locked" to prevent their magic from getting out. A locked book is useless to a Libriomancer, trying to pull something out of it will fail.
And *good* editing would probably have caught all the various cases where a book is locked in one scene and unlocked in another, or where a certain kind of book is a perfectly normal thing to pull stuff out of versus a weird thing that shouldn't work, etc.
For example: All the Harry Potter books are locked for various reasons, but the largest is the Time-Turner: Pulling that out is super-dangerous, so books using it are locked and there's an aside about how Ms Rowling was given a stern talking to about including it in later books. Regardless of having the time-turner or not, all Harry Potter books are completely locked. But in a different scene, our main character complains that pulling something out of a book doesn't teach you how to use it - he nearly gave himself carpal tunnel using Harry Potter's wand and still barely managed to flick the feather! In another scene, two characters mention hoping the newest D&D sourcebook isn't locked yet so they can use the spells and magic items before they get turned off, since all D&D books get locked but the locking sometimes takes a few days - and like a chapter later, Our Protagonist is thinking he shouldn't be able to pull things out of a D&D sourcebook *at all* but he's going to try anyway because it's generally considered impossible so *of course* those books are never, ever locked.
Those are two of the more obvious errors. They're not the only ones. That kind of misstep is *all through* the first two books in this series. (I haven't reached book 3 yet - I plan to read it, because the mistakes aren't killing the books for me, but auuugh)
It's really unfortunate, because these mistakes are so blatant and would have been so easy to fix. And all this rambling gets back to my main point: I can spot BAD editing, where an author made a mistake and an editor didn't catch or correct it, but I still have no idea how to identify good editing.
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