Novel Editing, anyone?

Waking the Dead, a novel I wrote last year, is (finally) at beta-editing stage. From post to sffmuse...

Novel is 242 pages, I think, a little over 90K. .rtf format.

It's urban fantasy - magic, the real world, teen protagonists trying to save it. Etc.

What's in it: A lot of weird things. Talking dogs without heads, ghosts, witches, wizards, magical powers and the like. Viewpoint does shift between characters, though it's done as first person from each character, with two interludes and lots of odd pieces tossed in. Novel is NOT in chapter format, though each day is marked.

What's not in it: Sex or swearing. Moderate violence is in it.

Below is the first 4.5 pages. Contact me in chat if you want a copy of the whole thing to edit and I'll email you one. If you want something in return besides gratitude, ask :)

The goal (hope :)) is to get the edited copies back within 2 months, read over all of them, and edit ruthlessly according to the hive mind.

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De mortiis, aut bene aut nihil.
("Of the dead, speak well or not at all")

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
- Sir Thomas Browne

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.
- Robert Graves, from "Bring The Dead To Life"

WEDNESDAY

The corpses were bleeding. In their hollow cages under the ground staining them with embalming fluid leaking from pores, eyes opened, voices screaming without sound. The earth muffled it, contained it, embraced it. Earthworms died, but no one took notice, no one heard. Who comes, if no one hears your call?

Elsewhere, screams are muffled by drugs, replacing tears from eyes too dry to weep. The men in grey enter a room, smiling their bland smiles, holding needles. The needles make it all go away. The mute screaming no one can hear is unheard. Outside the window shines the moon, oblivious. The screaming man speaks to it, but he is a man, and the moon does not hear him. Soon he stops screaming and the world get fuzzy in a pleasant way. He floats away, gently, lost in bliss of forgetting.
It takes them two more minutes to unclench his fists, pale gouges in palms a testimony to terror washed away by cold water. The man in white sleeps, in a room of soft walls, and dreams the ground leaked blood that no one saw because they were too busy eating their eyes and ears.

Jansen

"The urban world is a wilderness, a jungle of a kind," Uncle Alvin was saying as he paced the front of the class room. He's tall and a fair bit on the chubby side, constantly adjusted his glasses (he calls them spectacles) and tends to use his hands a lot while talking. Which he also does a lot, but he has the kind of voice people love to hear, deep and smooth like rough velvet.
"This is generally an accepted analogy of the modern world," he said, waving a hand absently to the window, "but not well understood. The problem with such metaphors is that too often they contain more than they seem, and don't really explain enough of what they contain. Too much water enters the glass, and what overflows - that which cannot fit into the paradigm - is discarded.
"This, of course, does not invalidate the symbol, but should serve to warn that the symbols are not to be trusted, if only because we value them so highly. Can someone tell me why we came down from the trees only to go back up in them with high rises?"
The ringing of the period bell barely covered the sighs of relief from the class. If he noticed, my uncle gave no clue.. "We'll take up tomorrow where we left off. Mythology and symbolism, people. Unless we know the sources for our symbols we are trapped by them. Read chapters six and seven by next Friday as well."
The class filed out, most of the other students shaking their heads and a few making jokes under their breath. I could have told them they were wasting their time, but I didn't bother. It took a lot to get under my uncle's skin for longer than five minutes, though my parents had come close a few times that I remembered and Cass was, well, Cass.
"I thought today's lecture went well," he remarked as I made my way up to the desk. I sat down on a desk and leaned my cane against his, waiting. We hadn't talked much recently, not about anything important. I think he was hurt I hadn't told him about Evan, but I hadn't told anyone, even if people had guessed.
"You're just lucky Liz is sick," I said. "Otherwise she would have asked you about the glass of water as the primordial egg and if you could actually explain symbols without using symbols and, if not, if it was of any use at all."
Alvin chuckled lightly, digging some more papers out of the desk. "Well, at least you didn't Jansen."
"I kind of want supper tonight," I said dryly. "Well, actually a late supper. I need to go downtown."
Alvin shoved some more books into his briefcase and managed to snap it shut. "Oh?"
"Yeah. Mom and dad want to talk."
"Oh." He looked up at me. "It's yes, not yeah. Is this going to be like last week?"
"You mean when Cass caused that fire hydrant to shower the street? Nah. Sorry, no. They don't want her coming, though, to be on the safe side. Besides, she has yearbook club stuff tonight. She's the photographer."
Uncle Alvin frowned. "There's something you're not telling me."
"Lots of things," I said cheerfully. "Now, can we get going? I'm hungry and I can't very well eat until after I do whatever they want. We can beat the traffic and -"
"Jansen," he said warningly.
I sighed. That was the trouble with my uncle. He wasn't weird like me and Cass, just good at knowing when he was being lied to. Even by omission, unfortunately.

1Lying in the ground cold and barren. No one hears their cries, no one sees their tears. The dead; weeping for the living.
In the underworld no one can hear you scream. In the empty places where body parts once lay, hollowed bones release memory, casting nets into the dreams, speaking in words the living cannot understand.
Elsewhere, a door opens; the man in white is unaware, floating, flying in his head where he cannot hear the dead. The grey men whisper things, voices impersonal as scalpels, and he almost makes out words, almost understands. Then they die, and continue walking unaware. Sometimes, effect comes before cause. This comforts him when they strap him in the chair. "You are dead," he tells them but they do not understand.
Somewhere, she is laughing. He can almost here it. He can almost see it, like the alimony checks she got, and child support though they had no children. Hate almost clears his mind, but almost counts for nothing.

"I told you it was nothing important," I said, trying to sound casual.. The car took the corner down Broad Street too fast and Uncle Alvin turned and glared at me as he stopped at the lights.
"Not important? Your sister is taking pictures of everyone male student naked!"
"But it's just for her private collection."
The silence that followed that was calm, except for the vein pulsing in his forehead like an alien worm under his skin. "Private collection?" he said slowly, but the anger was already draining from him, as it almost always did.
"Well, they won't go in the yearbook."
"And you let her do this?"
"It's Cass. I couldn't have stopped her, uncle."
"You could have told me."
"Well, yeah. But she promised me copies."
The silence was really loud as he swerved around another corner.
"That was a red light you just drove through," I said carefully.
"Would it have mattered?" Uncle Alvin snapped.
"Yes, because cars tend to go through intersections. If you have a red light you don't go. I'm pretty sure Driver's Ed covers that sort of thing, but insurance companies might not."
"You would have lived."
"Maybe. But, uncle, I don't know about you. And it's not infallible. You know that." I rubbed my knee, pulling my hand away when I realized what I was doing. "I know that."
The car slowed a fraction, then stopped as he swerved into a free parking space. I checked the meter out of habit, but someone had already paid up for three hours. Uncle Alvin caught my glance and snorted, opening the door. "You know, I'd think that you of all people wouldn't bother checking things like that," he said dryly, an apology of sorts.
"You never know," I said, and it sounded defensive even to me.
The pre-Christmas rush had already begun downtown and the streets were thronged with people and decorations. I closed the door and limped to the sidewalk, trying to hide my relief from my uncle. I'd had the cane for over a year now and still hated it. I was in high school, and needed a cane to get around. People noticed that, and I don't like being noticed, not like Cass does.
Uncle Alvin bought me one, then another when the first one accidentally broke. He'd never said a word when he got the third one and I've had it ever since. Something in his gaze had told me I was pushing my luck, but it had run out that one day anyway, for a moment. Just a run of the mill car accident, but I never knew for sure. We always want it to be more, to have some special secret meaning. We don't like to believe in accidents; we'd rather believe in some meaningful coincidence that gave purpose to our pain.
I've avoided being in cars as much as possible ever since. I know it's silly, but that doesn't mean I don't do it. I spend a few seconds shivering, not just from the cold, but trying to hide it from my uncle. He might not get how much his running the red light scared me.
Cass and I are weird, and mom and dad are even weirder, which was why Uncle Alvin was going to go shop for things while I went and talked to them. He didn't mind the fact the fact that mom and dad were dead; it's why he took us in after they died in the crash. He did have issues with them showing up and talking to us, though. I think it offended his sensibilities.
I waited until he'd gone into the mall, just breathing in the cold air to remind myself I was alive and made my way south to the park. I'd never noticed it last Christmas, but there are benefits to being lame. People get out of my way without thinking about it and don't notice me specifically. Which would be good except that "the young man with the cane" sort of narrows down the list of people in town to, well, me.
The park was deserted except for a few hobos, some of them local and the rest just wandering around the country from place to place. The police, or at least Constable Christensen, patrolled it about once every day to make sure they weren't bothering people and they got to sleep under the trees and out of the public eye, which spends most of its time closed and pretending they don't exist anyway. I gave a few some change, because I didn't want to live in a world where people didn't.