Editing Unconventional Styles

Any author that is halfway competent knows never to edit or proof your own work.  Yet that same competent author knows that such work must be edited or proofed.  As we read that with which we’re already so familiar, our mind tends to overlook errors, filling in the gaps of where we’ve screwed things up.  Sure, we can catch some stuff, but it takes an outside eye to find what we can’t see.

Yet how do we handle edits and proofreading when the style within is so unconventional?  I’m running into this problem with Schism, and it’s driving me mad.  I know I need to have someone look at it, but any “normal” editor is going to get very frustrated with what I’ve written.  The novel isn’t written in any kind of conventional style most would recognize – it’s a series of news articles and blog posts in lots of the body, and those are intentionally not conventional.  How would an editor handle looking over something so wildly disconnected?  How does one correct that which is intentionally wrong?

My editor has done a terrific job with my previous novels, but I’m wary even getting her involved in this one.  I know I should, but I don’t know if the results could be usable since so much “wrong” is supposed to be that way.  It’s not like there’s an editor on the internet – no matter how much we may want one at times – so things can’t be corrected without removing authenticity.

This conundrum is driving me crazy, both from the standpoint of usefulness and that of time, for although I’ve pushed back the date for the publication of Schism, it has to be out by mid-August if I’m to take advantage at all of the November election and the climate surrounding it.  I have no choice but to figure it out, but being unlike anything I’ve written before, the answer isn’t so obvious.