#copyeditor

The Psychology of Monster Romances: Why We Crave the Beastly Heartthrob

Monster romances have clawed their way into the spotlight of popular fiction, blending the thrill of the unknown with the warmth of heartfelt connection. From timeless tales like Beauty and the Beast to modern gems such as Tiffany Roberts' Ensnared (my favorite monster romance)—where a human finds love with an alien arachnid-like being (Ketahn is so hot)—or Ruby Dixon's Ice Planet Barbarians series, featuring blue-skinned barbarians on frozen worlds, these stories captivate readers by pairing ordinary humans with sexy extraordinary creatures.

But what's the psychological draw? Let us explore the appeal through a psychological lens, grounded in real concepts like attachment theory and evolutionary psychology, while touching on cultural impacts, ethics, power dynamics, how these monstrous suitors diverge from human men, and the undeniable sex appeal.

The Allure: Escapism and Embracing the “Other”

At their core, monster romances tap into our deep-seated need for escapism. Psychologically, humans are wired for novelty—our brains release dopamine when we encounter something new and exciting, much like the rush from a rollercoaster or the honeymoon stage of a new relationship. In these stories, the monster represents the ultimate "other," a being far removed from everyday life, allowing readers to step outside societal norms without real-world consequences. Evolutionary psychology suggests this stems from an ancient drive to explore and adapt; just as our ancestors sought out diverse environments for survival, we now seek diverse fantasies for emotional fulfillment.

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I don’t lmao

No sorry

I am just guest I see tv tropes view them

I am also writer I need to analyze the characters traits motives implied facts the sitcom never address

Since I am running this blog for about 2-3 I need look out for more content and facts about Thundermans. I thought it be fun and helpful for other fans.

However on wiki it was definitely different story I was copyeditor.

I edited

Elizabeth Olsen page then was approved by others

Then Letitia wright page before it was approved by others

Then I was trained

On editing page and look out for more factual page. I was columnist I would share my opinion on Quora

Then I briefly moved to Reddit.

Then I edit look out for factual info before submit my answer.

Hope that answer your question!

Thank you so much for the question.

Even there deep within the earth, the air was frigid. The lit torch cast dancing shadows about the room that continually caressed the stone map of Hydaelyn. Pawns with symbols were strategically positioned across every single continent. A patient eye looked over the map, judging each of its options. Every day for years it had looked over this map and updated it as needed. And now?

Now, a clawed hand reached forward and tipped over the pawn that rested in Gridania. Upon the pawn was engraved the family crest of Clan Khaghh.

“Begin...here.”

Heyyyy, thanks for joining me on Ask the Editor, Neomikey! :D Happy to oblige! Quite frankly, this one took me a few reads to really find edits I could suggest. Your structure and grammar are overall solid, and it has great tone and atmosphere that draws in the reader. But let's dive in and see what we can do to give it a little extra polish!

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Even there deep within the earth, the air was frigid. A(1) lit torch cast dancing shadows about the room and(2) continually caressed the stone map of Hydaelyn. Pawns with symbols were strategically positioned across every single continent. A patient eye looked over the map, judging each of its options. Every day for years[,] it had looked over this map and updated it as needed. And now?

Now, a clawed hand reached forward and tipped over the pawn that rested in Gridania. Upon the pawn was engraved the family crest of Clan Khaghh.

“Begin...here.”(3)

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This sentence has three "the"s in it, which felt juuust a little repetitive. Unless the torch is especially important in this sense (THE torch), changing "the" to "a" should serve the same purpose.

". . . cast dancing shadows about the room that continually caressed the stone map. . .": Since the most recent noun before "that" here is "room," it reads as if the room, rather than the shadows, is continually caressing the map. An easy fix!

This is so nitpicky that I didn't even bother making the change, it's more of a handy tip for publishing: When I do a final review of a manuscript, I always convert the ellipse sign (...) to a full ellipse (. . .), per Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) guidelines. But it's not worth worrying about at this stage; in fact, I have a macro on my keyboard that automatically converts every ellipse symbol in a manuscript at once!

And aside from the one comma addition, that's all I could find! Thanks for sharing your work, let me know if you have any questions, and happy writing! =D

Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]

I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.

It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.

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Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.

But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.

A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.

In another article I pair it with, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”

It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all. [...]

Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]

There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.

I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.

I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. [...]

It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules. [...]

Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

All-in-one proofreader/copyeditor/beta reader services!

As a writer who will, without fail, notice a dozen typos, inconsistencies, and structure issues the second I post my work online or decide I'm finished with it, I know this struggle like a dear friend. Asking someone to read over my work and point out issues I haven't noticed always helps, but asking someone with a trained eye for this work is especially beneficial. I am a reporter for a statewide, well-respected newspaper, which gives me experience with quick turnaround times, effective communication, research, and, of course, writing and editing. When I'm not interviewing doctors on the latest developments in pancreatic cancer treatments or researching the history of newly designated landmarks, I spend time working on my own projects or making my way through my endless TBR pile. If you think I can help you on your own writing project(s), let's talk about it!

My rate, which includes copyediting (grammar, spelling, sentence structure), an evaluation of the overall concept and characters, as well as in-depth discussion (either via message or voice chat) of my feedback and any questions you may have. I currently charge $0.015 per word, which translates to $15 per 1,000 words. For larger projects (exceeding 20,000 words) a more exact quote will be provided.

I'm also happy to adjust to whatever you're looking for in an editor! If you want me to be super blunt and rip apart each word of your story? I can totally do that. But if you want someone who can give more empathetic advice, (something I can understand seeking, as someone who prefers criticism in the form of a compliment sandwich lol), I am happy to do that instead! I've been told I'm good at being honest without acting as though my advice is the only correct option.

If you're interested in chatting with me about this, please reach out! My DMs are always open. You can also contact me on Discord, at laneybug.

Thanks for reading, and reblogs/shares are appreciated! :)