You may be comma queen, but I am comma (and semi-colon) king! I recently had a story edited where a lot of my longer sentences were chopped up, and I have to day I didn't feel entirely comfortable with it. I asked for a couple to be changed back, just to get some semblance of rhythm back into the prose, but didn't feel it worth fighting over to any greater extent - perhaps because it was a reprint sale (and thus the "preferred" version of the story still exists and is available). That's only the second time I've had anything significant asked for in a rewrite; one other sale went through a minor back-and-forth. Oh, actually, thinking about it, there was a third one, where I was actually asked to change the end of a story. I found a way to keep the ending I wanted in principle while providing a more dramatic climax, so I was OK with doing that. And another editor pointed out I had too much "whiet room" dialogue in the heart of a story, so I brkoe that up a bit.
In general, it's noticeable that the "bigger" markets seem less inclined to fiddle with prose details, though obviously my sample size is pretty small. If an editor is pointing out ways to make a story stronger, I generally feel happy going with the changes, but where it's a matter of changing prose for what seems to be the editor's stylistic preference, I'm less happy. But I haven't really had occasion to dig my heels in yet.
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Date: 2008-07-30 02:01 pm (UTC)In general, it's noticeable that the "bigger" markets seem less inclined to fiddle with prose details, though obviously my sample size is pretty small. If an editor is pointing out ways to make a story stronger, I generally feel happy going with the changes, but where it's a matter of changing prose for what seems to be the editor's stylistic preference, I'm less happy. But I haven't really had occasion to dig my heels in yet.