Ask Editor Alison Weiss #15 (right in here!)

Thanks Alison! Would the age thing be a tipping point either way? Like...if you liked my writing but weren't head-over-heels for it, would the age thing be a dealbreaker?

Taryn: Totally! Do you Tweet? My handle is @encoreunreveur, if you do. I rant about my writing woes and high school, among other things.

Maybe for another editor it would tip them over the fence. For me, if I don't love the book, I don't care about the other stuff. (Okay, I'm curious about the other stuff, and I might like to know the other stuff, but I need to be passionate about the project, even if the other stuff didn't exist.)

So if I was fence-sitting, and then I found out you were 15, I'd still be fence-sitting. And if I'm fence-sitting, then it's PROBABLY not quite there for me.

Thanks Alison!!! And...um...*awkwardly clears throat while blushing furiously* Just out of curiosity, what genres are you interested in right now?

::Low chuckle::

I don't have a particular genre right now. I'm looking for really strong, standout writing with premises that are different and suck me in and characters I either fall in love with or loathe utterly. (I like anti-heroes. Sue me!)

That's all I'm saying for now.

Loving the questions so far!

I have a tiny question. I tend to have trouble making distinctions between drafts. Ex: Do these tiny polishes make this Draft 2? That kind of thing. What would you say is a radical enough change to warrant a "change of draft"?

Lemme know if that makes sense.

I think that's up to you. But if you're going to make every document that has a tiny tweak a new draft, you will have a gazillion drafts, my dear.

One trick I've heard a lot of writers use is that they keep a seperate file with all the bits they've diced out, so if they decide at some point they wish they hadn't gotten rid of something, it's still there!

But maybe my advice to you stems back to looking at your novel, for a moment, like you'd look at writing an essay for high school or college. At what point do you call the new version a draft? Or is it just a working document until you hit that critical moment when it became time for a seperate version? (That's how I worked on my papers. Maybe I was weird. Actually, probably. . . .)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that everyone finds their own way. None is right or wrong. It just is.

E-book, paperback, or hardback? and WHY? =D

I think each have their place and audience.

Preference for me? I think hardcover - because I don't want to wait for a book I've been lusting after to come out. I want it right away, even if by the time I get to reading it, the paperback is out.

Paperbacks are often what keep a book going and going and going. And if I'm going to write in a book, it just feels a little less sacreligious to do it in a paperback. Why? Don't know. And, truthfully, now that I'm out of college, I'm not much of one for scribbling notes in my margins anymore. (I guess I do that so much on author's manuscripts that I don't need to do it in books anymore). But I love reading other people's marginalia. I think it comes from reading my dad's old college books when I was in high school. I loved seeing what passages he thought were especially important and how he interpreted things.

Ebooks - I think Ebooks are great! I love that you click and it's yours. Right there. And you can see exactly how far through you are becasue there's that great percentage bar. (Or, on my Kindle, there is). But I guess I don't do that many Ebooks because the Kindle technically belongs to my company and, to be honest, I find it aggrivating to keep switching the credit card charged from my company card to my personal one. But I use my Kindle to read manuscripts. All my manuscripts. So we can say that's reading books in one of their earliest forms. And I love that. I love that it's all there and I can just read and click and read and click and read and click.

Conclusions: Don't care how you're coming to your books. I just want you reading 'em!