Review: Advice to the author.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 07 15, 2014
Unreadable.F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great writer and story plotter,but a lousy speller. That's why he relied on Maxwell Perkins, a man who was incapable of writing lyrical novels but who knew how to shape writing with numerous technical flaws into literary spun gold, to edit his work and make sense of spelling and grammar. It takes a self-aware and humble writer to use editing services when one of his or her chief tools for good writing and communication is horribly broken or missing, just as it takes a brilliant and talented editor to chop, file and burnish otherwise lackluster prose into something readable and even enjoyable.I wish I could write to the author personally, but there's no way to do that. So I'm doing it here. Dear Author, you might or might not be Mrs. Incredible, but even she knows she needs Edna Mode to design her costumes for her. Without someone like Edna (i.e., an editor), you are just a vaguely heroic India Rubber Girl. A grown person with English as a first language  but with extremely poor spelling and grammar skills has no business editing her own book, especially if after doing so it still remains completely unreadable. Take a writing class at the local junior college. Start listening to "Grammar Girl" podcasts and invest in a physical dictionary and thesaurus, and then teach yourself ten random words a week. Start reading classic romance novels to learn plotting, spelling, sentence structure and verb tenses. Heck, buy an ESL book and re-teach yourself English (apparently, you slept through all your grade and middle school classes, and ignored high school altogether).Or, instead of sewing your metaphorical costumes out of shabby fabric in a darkened room while not using a pattern or even a dressmaker's dummy, hire an editor. Why? Because you can't spell, you can't construct a a basic paragraph, and at this point your writing isn't worth giving away, let alone $2.99. Editing is not part of your skill set. Being brave enough to write and self-publish is, and bravery like that deserves to be rewarded.