Karin Cather

Of course, authors want their books to have correct spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation. But books can have more serious problems that can alienate the reader even if the spelling and mechanics are pristine.

If I see a factual issue in your novel, I will flag it for you. If your rationale is “it’s just a story” and so you write without regard for the facts, your readers may interpret that as lack of respect for them. But a novel is not a documentary, and an author might have to take some liberties. How does an author know which facts to bend? That’s how I can help you.

For instance, in reality, a murder case might take a year or more to go to trial. An author might not want a year to go by in a story. On the other hand, given the reality, the author would not want the defendant to go to trial the following week.

Meanwhile, there are also factual issues that are nonnegotiable. Maybe you want your defendant to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Not only could getting this wrong alienate your readers, but the factual errors could affirmatively offend them. I can use my background as an editor of forensic reports to assist you in making sure that these elements of your story are accurate, because there really isn’t a lot of room for error here.

Other common issues include having a deputy sheriff investigate a murder in a state where they only staff the jail, having an elected mayor in a jurisdiction where the mayor is appointed, or calling the prosecutor a district attorney in a jurisdiction where the prosecutor is actually called a commonwealth’s attorney. It could also be that you have a gas giant in a solar system with an earthlike planet around a K-type star.

Another class of problem is the discontinuity. It might take months or years to write a novel, so it is natural that an author might make mistakes. Character names might unintentionally change. Or an author might decide to change a character name in the middle and maybe forget to change the name all the way through. Or a character’s eye color might change. In chapter 1, the golden retriever’s name is Sandy, and he is a puppy. In Chapter 3, a month has gone by, but Sandy is now a black lab who is dying of old age.

And there could be dialogue issues. These could involve dialogue tags (“he said angrily”) or dialogue that doesn’t match the speaker.

There could also be plot holes. The explorer dropped her weapon on page 97, but she fights the alien with the same weapon on page 112. The protagonist escapes the gulag on the alien planet by playing dead until nightfall, crawling out from a pile of dead fellow prisoners, climbing over the fence, getting cut on concertina wire, and scaling down to the ground. But we already know that as each prisoner is executed, they are thrown into a giant meat grinder. So there is no pile of bodies to even hide under. Besides, the fence is always electrified. She could not possibly have escaped, let alone commandeered that starship in time to assassinate the bad guy to stop him from blowing up her home planet.

While I do a structural, line, or copyedit for your book, I will help you identify these problems and work with you to find solutions.