"Writing's hard" she whined

I have several friends who are authors so I am often privy to the difficulties of the publishing world.  Amazon and the Kindle have made self publishing relatively easy for  people and there are often any number of free books to be had; being an economical individual I am prone to download these if the story line sounds interesting.  They are usually absolutely atrocious. Sometime late 2010 I had just finished a book whose plot seemed to include nothing more then scene changes to get the hero and heroine to notice the hero's throbbing dick.  If I had to read one more sentence with "his throbbing dick" in it I was going to throw something out the window and it was likely to be my Kindle.  Just a side note, I've never seen one of those particular items actually throb, other things yes, throb no, but then I'm no Proctologist. 

Anyway, as I was skimming over the fixations of the hero and heroine and trying to find if there was any other reason for this book to exist an author friend posted a call for stories for an anthology she was co-editing.  Parameters were: short story about wicked bad tumbleweeds.  No swearing and no throbbing personal items allowed.  On a lark, I wrote a short story and submitted it.  Amazingly there was no immediate rejection letter.  Instead I got an email with very clear suggestions of where the story needed work. 

Oh dear!  Re-writes!  I got a "C" in College level English 1A by agreeing to go to the English lab and learn the difference between an adjective and verb.  This was not looking good.  So I spent time re-writing the story which was harder then writing the original story and required I look up the difference between active and passive sentence structure and then figure out what to do with that information. I submitted the revision.  Again, no immediate rejection letter.

After several months came a tentative list of the accepted authors for the anthology.  My name wasn't on the list, but the editors were still sitting on the fence in regard to a couple of stories and hadn't made a final decision.  Hey, I was already flattered beyond belief to have gotten this far.  I still expected a thanks, but no thanks email sooner than later.

And then it happened, an email with a contract.  YEA ME!!  Ah......and a note requesting more re-writes.  The editors were brandishing red ink with a vengeance.   I am currently wading through the word doc with tracking functions on.  I'm reading the editorial comments and accepting the changes or making changes, rewriting or whatever based on editor feedback.  I have to say that the editor in question is spot on in her feedback.  Her suggestions are accurate, improving the flow of the story significantly.

I read that Jane Austin had a good editor, having read of one of her "unedited" works, I would definitely agree.  Jane Austin would not be the brilliant writer she is given credit for without her editor.  I beginning to think that editors should be given bylines on books rather than a plain old acknowledgement. They definately deserve the credit.