This is someone you would want to edit because you feel s/he needs editing that doesn't get done?

No--someone who you think you'd be good at editing, whose prose you'd like to be part of fixing up, and could produce a book you'd be proud of.

Why aren't you reading Divergent? I mean, should I?

How much does it bother you when the third book in a trilogy goes off the rails?

Oh. Well, that can vary from amusement to stopping reading. Hmm.

It's just not my kind of dystopia. I'm actually not a huge fan of dystopia -- I really prefer post-apocalyptic stuff. The Hunger Games books were fantastic, but they also made a weird kind of sense to me that some of the other really contrived dystopias don't.

I forget how I ended up with them. When I was promoting Cold Kiss, I ended up getting a lot of books from my editor and other people.

No--someone who you think you'd be good at editing, whose prose you'd like to be part of fixing up, and could produce a book you'd be proud of.

That's a complicated question, I think because any author I'm already reading has already been edited, so it's hard to tell where the raw material ends and the editor's work began. If that makes sense.

I do remember what it felt like to come across new authors I wanted to acquire who blew me away,though. That's a great feeling.

I wouldn't pay for the Divergent series, it's not something I have any desire to re-read. First book was pretty good. Second, meh. Third total waste of reading time.

I feel the same way as erin I really enjoyed the first book (until the whole love story kicked in, then ugh.)

I was told by a Professor in college that he knew the man who edited "Brave New World". He claims that he was told that it was tightly written that it could not be edited, that for the most part that changing a word would ruin a transition or some other part of the flow. The only editing that was done in the end was proofreading for typos and misspellings of which there were almost none. I don't know whether this was myth or truth, and it has been so long since I read "Brave New World" that I can't judge based on internal evidence of the work either.

I will note that I have never heard this even about many writers that are acknowledged greats. Also the one other writer I heard it about was an LA Times columnist I found boring - Jack Smith. (I doubt Jack Smith is still alive; he wrote column that basically just narrated his life as it happened, along with not very profound musings. )

I remember years ago reading a biography of Lucius Beebe who wrote for ... Gourmet, I believe, among other publications. One comment that stuck in my mind was that he wrote "prose so rococco you could carve grottos out of it." There was also an instance when he turned in a column that was one long sentence; when his editor told him he had to break it up, Beebe told him to do it ... and the editor couldn't find anyplace to break it.

Free audiobook of Code Name Verity: [link]

Whoa, nice, thanks!! Guess I know what I'm listening to after Every Day. Though there's a sequel out, too. Is it a trilogy/series or are there only two books?