After Ooligan Press acquired Echoes of the Lost by Cindy Brown (originally titled What the River Knew), the first step was developmental editing.
Instead of doing an intensive developmental editing process like the one in this portfolio piece, we were asked to focus on specific aspects of the manuscript, and write a letter in any form as long as it was under two pages. (Full length DE letters tend to be quite a bit longer.) My assigned focus was character development.
Here is my DE letter:
In addition to the letter, we were asked to mark up the full manuscript. I obviously can’t share the full marked up manuscript as that would be some serious copyright infringement and I really want everyone to go out and read this book when it comes out on May 12, 2026. So instead I’ll share some screenshots that are part of my Ooligan portfolio for the term.
Manuscript Markup Screenshots:
These images each highlight different aspects of the DE markup.
Well, the first one actually wasn’t technically on topic of character development, but I felt it was so me I couldn’t not include it. My memory is weirdly great for dates and days of the week, and I clocked the mismatch immediately. (And while you might think that I automatically knew that Dec 13th in 2017 was a Wednesday because that’s Taylor Swift’s birthday and I’m a crazy enough Swiftie to have an encyclopedic memory for what day her birthday fell on every year, and that wouldn’t be an unreasonable assumption, but in this case the date and day registered right away as not right because my med school interview at the Mayo Clinic was Dec 15th, 2017 and it was a Friday.) Of course, I checked a calendar first before making this comment. Another reason I wanted to share this one was that we’re taught that, when possible, we should give multiple options for how an author can address feedback, and this one lays out three options to get this date/day (and all subsequent ones in the manuscript) back on track.
You can always count on me to catch timing discrepancies big and small!
I included the second one because part of my style as a DE is to make sure I’m not just pointing out what could be better but also what is already great. The third and fourth photos demonstrate the typical feedback I give in DE manuscript markup.
Here’s the cover, designed by my Ooligan Press colleague who taught me everything I know about ebooks, Madelynn Sare. Again, I did NOT design this, but wanted to include it for the visual element of the cover, as well as to plug Madelynn’s work!
Chrys Buckley 