He said that “The real torture with Eragon came in the editing. I discovered that editing is really another word for someone ruthlessly tearing apart your work with a big smile, all the while telling you that it will make the book so much better. And it did, though it felt like splinters of hot bamboo being driven into my tender eyeballs.”

Gotta love the way he put it.

For Vaquero though, never, ever, ever, ever. Until it is forcibly sent to screaming, weeping, gnashing editor.

Love, C.

Answering the question … I’d have to say, generally speaking, it’s never ready when you think it is. Particularly if you’re still on the journey towards publication. It’s absolutely fatal to send out the work while you’re in the white-hot throes of triumph on completing your first draft, or because you’ve just received glowing accolades from your Mum.

But people do it. I did it myself and, being a slow learner, more than once.

The short, smartarse answer is: when it’s good enough to be published. The trick is, knowing when you’ve reached that point.

I strongly believe that no writer can produce a contract-worthy piece of work without having first developed very very keen self-editing skills. And you don’t get those without putting in a lot of hours critting other people’s mss, or before you’ve reached the point where you can assess your own work objectively. Until you’ve found a way to depersonalise the ms, to look at it as a piece of work and not as a measure of your own self-worth, you’ll never be able to knock it into a publishable state. And every piece of critical feedback you receive will feel like a stab in the heart, not a useful tool to help you improve the work.

I think developing writers should involve themselves in a reputable online critting group like OWW or Critmonsters. There you can really hone your editorial skills on work in which you have no emotional investment. But the payoff comes because as you improve your editorial eye for other people’s work, inevitably its spills over into your own work, and you’re able to see your own flaws more clearly.

While everything that’s already been said is true and vital, I think that a writer who isn’t consistently able to assess their own work to a high level of competence is never going to produce a ms worthy of submitting to an editor or agent.

When you hand a ms over to someone for beta-reading, they shouldn’t have to be teaching you the nuts and bolts of how to write. You should have done that work already. And part of that work is developing your critical/analytical faculty in assessing your ms. You’re going to run out of beta-readers if you’re giving them substandard work with an expectation that they’ll ‘fix it’ for you.

Basically, you know a ms is ready to send out when your beta readers come back with a handful of comments that are concerned with fairly cosmetic issues.

Unfortunately no - haven’t managed to sell “The Mirage Makers” to USA yet, but they are coming out in UK (Orbit) starting with “Heart of the Mirage” in July. And the first two are already out in Australia (Voyager).

After all, there is no such thing as a perfect manuscript.

If you’re not, if you’re a first-timer, then I second or is that third Glenda’s and Carol’s advice. Carol makes an excellent point. A writer can keep going over and over a ms. in order to avoid the potential embarassment and despair of trying to sell it.

Or so they say.

If I waited until nothing, absolutely nothing, niggled at me, I would never turn something in. If my first readers seem comfortable with it; if nothing they say makes my hair turn gray; if I can’t look at the thing without a sense of helplessness, then I figure it’s time for professional help: I turn it in to an editor and see what he/she says.