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Writer's pictureSandra Barret

I beg you…please stop repeating yourself!!!

As I mentioned in another post, I’m rereading MZB’s Darkover series.  I love her storylines, use of psi talents, and culture clash between the feudal Darkover peeps and the scientific Terran peeps.  But I’ve learned a few things in this back-to-back reread of her earlier works:

  1. Copy edit mistakes were far FAR worse ‘back then’ (1970s publishing date on some of these I think). Lot’s of little misspellings, name changes, etc.

  2. Bless her heart, MZB repeated herself… A LOT

It’s the second one that gets under my skin after awhile. It’s almost always to do with the angst/introspection part. Her characters talk to themselves quite a bit, and they repeat the same thing..again…and again…and again.  And it’s not repeating themselves on page 33, and 233.  It’s repeating themselves on page 33,  and 34, and 44… As in very close together and why didn’t the editor snip that text out?

I’m guessing it has something to do with how much more difficult it was to fix draft issues back when everything was typed up (pre-computer time). But it does make me think we’re spoiled today with our easy (HAH!) Word document edits and review cycles and electronic galleys etc.  Soo much easier to move text, delete, add, and in general, edit ourselves into a stupor.

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