Fantasy and Science Fiction

Creating a world presents very different challenges from making an argument in the real one — but all writing has some of the same needs.

The world must be internally consistent. For example, if your characters can teleport, and teleporting could easily solve a problem that instead takes 30 pages and a lot of danger, we need to know why they don’t just teleport. Otherwise, the story becomes less believable — and harder for the reader to become immersed in. For similar reasons, the law and politics of your world need to be consistent. So you need an editor who can keep track of the laws of your world — both the government-enforced laws and the laws of magic or science — and point out any conflicts between how they work in one scene and what happens in another.

If your project includes an explicit argument, that argument may benefit from being reviewed by an editor who’s good at critiquing arguments and helping improve them.

Like all writing, fiction needs to be in good English; errors that would distract the reader or make the writer seem incompetent must be eliminated. And while fiction — especially fantasy fiction — often follows style rules different from what the Chicago Manual recommends, any given novel should be internally consistent. For example, if you decide that names of magic spells are capitalized, any lowercase use of a spell’s name is an error. So you need an editor flexible enough to adapt to your conventions and meticulous enough to apply them to words and sentences where you haven’t.

I can help with all these matters. I have experience with fantasy fiction, substantial experience editing a wide range of content, and a lawyer’s and philosopher’s expertise with arguments. Send me a message via your favorite magical or not-yet-invented means … or just use this form.