Let me tell you all a story of improper editing, and how I left a path of scorched earth behind me that no army could hope to replicate.
The worst part is: It's all my fault. Try as I might, I can't blame anyone else, an idea that sets people (especially politicians and mid-level management) quaking in fear.
But you can learn from my fate, if you're a writer. Or even if you're not.
While a literary agent isn't an absolute requirement to be traditionally published, they can open doors and otherwise be a great help to an author's career. What agents want in their submission packages varies, as I've mentioned before. Generally they ask for a query letter, an author bio, the opening pages of your book (anywhere from five pages to several chapters), and a synopsis.
Writers hate the synopsis. You have to boil your (in this case) 82,000 word novel down into just a couple of pages, which should reveal all your major characters, plot, setting, and ending. That's all. How hard could it be?
For most writers, it's pretty hard.
I suppose Beowulf wonders why I keep taking photos of him while I'm writing. It's because he DISTRACTS ME.
Okay, so I had an outline for We Love Trouble, but it was too long to serve as a typical synopsis. After months of writing, revising, editing, and polishing the manuscript, I had to carve that outline down even more. I was exhausted. But the job wasn't over, so I by-gosh carved out that synopsis, finishing when it was so late even the dog was asleep.
The next day, confident I had everything ready, I started submitting.
Now, most literary agents accept simultaneous submissions. That is to say, they don't mind if you submit to more than one at a time. Most publishers have a problem with that: They want to be the only publisher that can see your manuscript for several months before they send you a form rejection letter. That becomes an incredibly stressful waiting game for writers.
Just the same, a good author-agent relationship is vital, so I carefully select which agents I'm going to query. The synopsis stays the same, of course. Imagine writing a new synopsis every time! Since I do the extra research, over the course of two weeks I only submitted to fourteen agents. They were ones I thought would make for a good fit.
Then I went on to other things: Writing, editing, submitting short stories, occasionally sleeping. Replies began to trickle in, all but one of them form rejections. It appeared that my careful targeting impressed no one.
A couple of months later I got time to send more submissions. I skimmed over my materials, just to make sure I didn't want to change anything. That's when I discovered I had whittled my outline down to a synopsis ...
But I didn't check that synopsis for errors.
"Oh, that? It's the dumpster fire that used to be my writing career. Move along."
I sent it on rife with typos, misplaced words, and ... well, no spelling errors, but otherwise it was a trian wrack. Just like that, my two weeks of submitting was cleared away like a tornado sucking up a trailer park. If those agents remember me at all, it will be with the kind of dislike people reserve for drivers who cut them off in traffic. No one's perfect, but this wasn't one error: This was as if FDR started off his famous Pearl Harbor speech by getting the date wrong.
"December 6th, 1942 ... a date that will ... no, wait ...."
Since corrected, of course, but that doesn't get those agents back on my possibilities list. E-mail addresses can be whitelisted to allow them through--mine has been blacklisted. I can only hope they aren't swapping stories about me at agent conventions.
Learn from my fate. Edit. Polish. But for crying out loud, if you have to revise, go back and polish again. Some people will tell you too much time can be spent on editing, but I'm living proof that the opposite is also true.
Ah, well ... I'm sure I'll laugh about this someday.
No. No, I won't.