I’ve heard the story that Stephen Crane went up to an attic workspace and cranked out The Red Badge of Courage like a NANOWRIMO project. If it’s true, God bless him. Me, I work off boatloads of Purgatory, or maybe I earn boatloads, we’ll see I guess, anyway, work off boatloads as I go from first draft to published and postpartum depression.
In the first go round, I like to get a content edit to find historical inaccuracies, story threads that seemed interesting to me but don’t lead anywhere important as far as the story is concerned, transitions, time-appropriate phraseology, and a gazillion other things a content editor will pick out. Some editors will do both content and a detailed grammar and punctuation edit in one fell swoop. I like them to be done separately. When I address the content editor’s input, I always find things to fix that he/she didn’t. By the time I ask for a detailed edit, I want the story to be solid, and the writing good. What you give an editor has to be a certain amount good, or an editor can’t edit, only ghost-write.
I have encountered a couple of male editors who do a good job with the content edit phase. In the detailed edit, I have found only female editors. I, some years ago, edited technical reports that US Navy pilots wrote. To them flying was everything, and writing was worse than nothing because it interfered with flying. After being boxed around the ears a number of times by my executive officer for crappy editing, I found I had to make myself read a report three times. I went through a piece from front to back, doing in effect a content edit. Then I went through it a second time reading from back to front. If I tried to do a detailed editing pass going front to back, I couldn’t keep my mind from wanting to speed-read. It’s a genetic gender related attention span thing, I guess. But however female editors do it, they do marvelous work.
And of course a side bennie from using two separate editors is that you get two readers perspectives on your work instead of one. Which is worth the extra time.
Then after all that labor, you publish and the postpartum depression gloms onto you. So you are in great shape to receive the reviews.