When the student is ready...the teacher will bitch slap her across the face.

I have raved many times about the perks of forming an unholy alliance with Scarlett, and I am now compelled to do so again. Also included in this rave are Libbie and Loki.

Now, I've had edits coming out my ears for the last three weeks. My own revisions for World Enough and Time. First, second, and final round edits for Nine Tenths of the Law. First round for The Next Move. I'll likely have more for The Next Move very shortly. Needless to say, I'm getting a bit tired of MS Word's "track changes" function.

World Enough and Time was a take-no-prisoners slash-and-burn. Wholesale darling genocide. Slicing. Dicing. The works. I literally decimated my book, hacking away a full 10% of the original manuscript. The other two books were mostly just line edits.

And it occurred to me that I did it without a hell of a lot of flinching.

Now, there was a time in my life when I would get precious and defensive if someone suggested I replace a word or delete a sentence. God forbid you tell me to axe an entire scene, you presumptuous bitch. No, these are my words, and these words are golden.

Yes, yes, I once had a mighty case of Golden Word Syndrome.

Libbie was my original beta. She guided me through the early, dark years, when I poured my heart and soul into the bottomless vat of fail that turned out to be Sins of the Father. Those were some educational years for both of us, let me tell you, as we walked together through the scary Forest of Learning To Write. We both learned to give proper critiques, the kind that are about the story not the ego stroking.

Then Loki joined the beta clan, and she also has no qualms about slapping me across the face with no regard to my ego. Between the two of them, I learned to write. While Sins of the Father remained a ghastly tome of failtabulous crap, it was my apprenticeship, an apprenticeship which would have been utterly useless without people there to say, "Dude...no. That doesn't make sense."

Ladies, I thank you.

After graduating Magna Cum Humbled from the University of LibbieLoki Brutality, this student was ready, and the next master appeared.

Along came Scarlett.

Fortunately, my ego was already calloused from the Libbie Lashings and Loki Beatings (with the occasional Vanessa Slapping), because Scarlett had neither the time nor inclination to accomodate my ego.

"The only thing golden about these words," said she, "is me pissing on them. Sort it, shithead."

Scarlett is the Simon Cowell of my writing mentors. All of them are brutal, but had I met her before the other two, I don't know if I could have handled it. I think my ego would be as shriveled and cold as Scarlett's black, black heart. (On the flip side, with such criticism comes praise that is hard-won and genuine...but it's easy to only hear the negative if you let your ego get the best of you.)

So now, I'm at a point in my career where I'm dealing with editors. Those people who get paid to say "this sucks, change it".

There was a time, way back in those dark, scary formative years, when the edits I'm receiving right now would have left me sniveling, crying, and probably under my desk in some variation of the fetal position.

After taking a few beatings from Scarlett? Pfft. This is easy. Seriously. Yeah, I get irritated with some of them, and they can certainly get frustrating, but they don't hurt. They don't hurt because, well, most editorial advice is pretty easy to swallow when you're accustomed to the skies parting, thunder crashing, and a booming voice raining down like fire and brimstone to inform you that no, you dumbshit, that will not work, change it at once.

I've thusly come to the conclusion that if you can take a crit from Scarlett, you can handle a revision from an editor.

So, many thanks to Libbie, Loki, Vanessa, and Scarlett. You ladies (and I do use that term loosely for some of you) have molded my career into the somewhat lumpy, aesthetically puzzling monstrosity it is today.