About
I read for whether the feelings land and whether the characters make sense.
EFA member
I’m Ricardo Ruas, a developmental editor working in English from Portugal. Stories are the thing I’ve loved longest: the dark ones, the obsessive ones, the love stories that hurt before they land. Some books grab you on page one and some ambush you three days after you finish, and I’ve spent my life chasing both. Now I spend my working hours inside other people’s stories, helping them become what their writers meant. I can’t imagine better work.
I write fiction myself: two self-published novels taught me what it feels like to hand over a book you’ve spent a year inside, and what a useless note looks like from the author’s chair. So I build my letters like I’d want mine built: honest, specific, anchored to the page, and respectful of the fact that the book stays yours.
The practice has a name now: RedRoot Editorial. I named it for where the work happens. What a reader feels on the page grows from what’s buried under it, motivation, promise, payoff, and a developmental edit digs at the roots instead of trimming the leaves. The red is the pen.
THE PATH
Different pitch, same eye.
Before books, I spent years in professional football performance analysis, watching hours of film to find the one pattern that explains ten problems. Reading a manuscript is the same job in a different field: feel where it drags, then trace the why.
Fiction came next. I wrote, revised, and put two novels into the world myself. Writing taught me craft from the inside. Self-publishing taught me what readers forgive and what they quietly put down.
A novel is a system of promises and payoffs. When it underperforms, the reason is on the page. I find it, name it, and put it in an order you can revise from.
I get invested. When a manuscript is open on my desk, it’s the book I think about in the shower and argue with on walks. I read to feel what your reader will feel, then I dig until I can tell you why. Nothing in this work beats watching a writer get the story out of her head and onto the page, whole. That’s why I do this, and it’s how we’ll work: your goal for the book becomes mine until we reach it.
And I keep sharpening on purpose. I’m an EFA member with their coursework on my calendar, and my desk carries a standing stack of craft: Tiffany Yates Martin’s Intuitive Editing, the letters of working editors I respect, the books my clients’ books will be shelved next to. Every manuscript teaches me something the next one gets for free.
“If a note doesn’t tell you what to do next, it doesn’t go in the letter.”
Emotional truth · Character logic · Earned payoffs · Honest letters
