Yes, you're right about the author character and that's why I liked it more this time around, as I could ignore the editor character and focus on the author character, who really does work. Perhaps Gailey works better for me when I can ignore the parts that strike me as over-the-top?

Heh, now I'm wondering about writing the story where the editor itself is an AI, which would neatly solve the problem of the editor being clueless in that particular human-emotional-subtext way. Could easily become even more too over-the-top, though, I suppose :)