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The silence following the trip is partly LifeStuff, partly illness (minor, but annoying: very sore throat, drippy nose, gut problems) and mostly the 800+ pages of copy edits now occupying the bed with me while I sneeze, suck down liquids, and make frequent runs to the small tiled room. I am doing my best not to contaminate the ms. with lots of hand washing, using clean kitchen towels over anything not immediately being read, etc. I may bake it in the oven when I’m done (you can do that with paper…if you’re careful.) I don’t have enough time to just let it sit for a few days while I recover (I hope I recover in a few days. This started on the train Friday night or Saturday, I see in hindsight. Since I was sneezed on and coughed on in NYC, in subway and diners, plural, that’s probably where I got it.) It’s not flu, it’s just some other viral thing.
Anyway, expect nothing until I’m done with the monster, or at least am far enough along to say something interesting. Early yesterday I did the CEs on the short story that’s in the same world and time period but not spoilerish for the book (or vice versa.) I need to mail that off but forgot until just now that I hadn’t. (That’s what a virus plus the !**!**!!!!! idiots in Congress can do to you.)
Comment by Kip Colegrove — October 1, 2013 @ 6:55 pm
Making the acquaintance of interesting infections is one of travel’s less charming facets. Get better and wrestle all those pages into submission.
Comment by Margaret Poore — October 1, 2013 @ 10:41 pm
too bad Paks can’t go riding into Washington to shine her light on the situation. Of course, those knuckleheads probably wouldn’t recognize a Paladin (or an angelic messenger from Above) anyway. Maybe a good armsmaster could knock some sense into them.
Comment by Naomi — October 2, 2013 @ 3:17 am
Get well soon Elizabeth, eat lots of oranges, have some hot lemon, brandy and honey (might not cure you but you’ll enjoy it)
Comment by GinnyW — October 2, 2013 @ 7:05 am
Copy edits are GOOD NEWS. Fall colds are not. The pollution (soot, smog, and population density) in the Northeast corridor promote minor sinus infections. Perhaps also mild dementia, as Congress and Wall Street are demonstrating. But if Gird speaks to people and bangs their heads up against the brick wall of their own stupidity in this world, we never hear the results.
For sore throat-colds, I drink a lot of chicken bouillion (spelling). The combination of hot water and salt seems to ease both the sinuses and the throat irritation. My grandmother favored scotch, lemon juice and honey, but only if a nap was in order.
Comment by LarryP — October 2, 2013 @ 11:15 am
the booze will not kill the bugs but you will feel better and the bugs mat too. Unhappily the bugs on the hill just make us all sick. Iron and clay is what they are.
Get well.
Comment by Annabel — October 2, 2013 @ 12:53 pm
This is the downside of travelling! I do hope you feel a lot better very soon.
Comment by Lise — October 2, 2013 @ 4:03 pm
Feel better soon!
Comment by Wickersham's Conscience — October 2, 2013 @ 5:24 pm
WOOT! for the copy edits. It makes the next novel that much closer. Bummer on the cold; get well soon.
On the other hand, I’ve never met an author who didn’t wish her copy editor something at least as bad as a cold from time to time. (Rewrite this? What do you mean? It’s brilliant!)
Comment by june — October 2, 2013 @ 10:55 pm
Be careful, several at work have same thing, but turned into Phenumonia. Hope I spelled that right, no spell check and very limited time. Have a rapid recovery.
Comment by Richard — October 3, 2013 @ 1:59 pm
A swallow of brandy or scotch with honey (with or without lemon) doesn’t need a sore throat for an excuse, but pouring alcohol into a virus-afflicted gut doesn’t sound like such a good idea. Elizabeth, you deserve some chocolate. 3 times over – once for the trip, once for the illness, and once for the copy edits (oh, and another for your politicians).
Comment by Kathleen — October 3, 2013 @ 11:33 pm
Hope you feel better soon.
Comment by Mary Elmore Kellogg Cowart — October 4, 2013 @ 5:55 am
Elizabeth, Take care and get well soon.
God bless and keep you
Mary
Comment by elizabeth — October 5, 2013 @ 11:12 pm
So my brain finally cleared up enough today to tackle the copy edits and make progress. (I had looked at them, but when you can’t really read what you wrote, let alone remember what the marks mean or read the CE’s scrawl…nothing really gets done.) Now I’m into them and once more alternately snarling at myself (“How COULD you?!!!”) and at the CE (“How COULD you??!!!”) Naturally all my snarlings at myself are for mere careless errors, and all my snarlings at him are for gross malfeasance (this is a joke, OK?)
It was amazing when my brain cleared–in about a 20 minute period, suddenly I could read, absorb, and think. Whomp. The lights turned on, the blowers started, the cursors were blinking on all the screens, and the soft automated voice said “Your copy edits are waiting, Ms. Moon” and I quit fussing around at what I was trying to do, got the copy edits, a pencil, and a lap board, and started. (It did take me longer than it should have to remember the term “split infinitive” which my CE and my HS teacher hated, and which I regard with Churchillian insouciance.)
Comment by elizabeth — October 6, 2013 @ 9:30 pm
If any of you happen to be copy editors, cover your ears. No, actually, don’t. This CE does some things extremely well. This is not a bad CE, and this is not a full-on slam at all CEs or this one.
BUT any CE who changes words rather than query…is not my buddy. No CE has ever–EVER–picked a word better than the word I used unless the word was an obvious typo. (Leaving the /t/ off of “thought” for instance.) Sometimes it’s been OK. Sometimes it’s been atrocious (years ago, the one who changed the command “Man your weapons” to “Staff your weapons.” Yes, really truly.)
What CEs do that I admire greatly is find the typos, find the continuity glitches (“X died back on page 459.” “Same name as cook in chapter 8…change one name?”) and query (without changing!) punctuation or passages they find confusing. Finding the nits is something that I find difficult, more difficult as I’ve looked at the same pages so many times, and I love it when someone saves me a stupid mistake.
What CEs do that makes me want to clout them with a clue-bat is try to rewrite the book to their taste…and in doing so fill up the margins and between the lines so the writer has no way to straighten out the mess. Or leave snarky remarks to and about the writer on the ms. Yes, that has happened, and not just to me. (Not this time: a past unpleasantness.) CEs should not be changing sentence length, but can/should comment that a sentence sure is long and maybe author would like to recast? Nine times out of ten, when CEs have messed with my sentences, their fixes do not work for a variety of reasons: they don’t know what the sentence’s non-verbal function was. They make it clunky (perfectly correct, but pedantic and stiff and boring.)
CEs should keep their paws off dialog. Characters do not have to speak grammatically, in complete sentences, or with standard punctuation. CEs who are offended by “language” should restrict their clientele to writers who don’t use it. (The same applies to CEs who are offended by a book’s content–sex or violence or politics. Don’t CE that kind of book–it’s not fair to trash the book because you disagree with the writer, and it will give you a bad rep in the long run.)
CEs should be aware that in specific areas the writer probably knows more than they do. Particularly true of specialized terminology for sports, weapons, machinery, agriculture, sciences, etc. Query, if confused, but do not change these terms to what you think is more familiar. “Nominal” is not “normal.” “Hand gallop” is not “hard gallop.” “Contiguous” is not “continuous.” Along the same lines, many perfectly valid words are not found in your desk dictionary and even those may have a use you’re not familiar with. (I’m a lifelong word junkie with a serious habit, some Latin and Greek in my past, and a houseful of dictionaries. For the fantasy, in particular, I care about the etymology of the words and have spent, in some cases, weeks looking up the best choice for a particular use. I’m not a linguist, a philologist, a scholar–but a passionate amateur.) So the CE should look stuff up, or ask the writer. Don’t just change things. That’s the writer’s job.
Be aware that the writer may choose one of several possible words for reasons not immediately obvious: it fits the era of the book, or it avoids (or creates) a particular sound pattern with a word nearby (and that sound pattern may involve consonants, vowels, number of syllables, stress patterns creating meter, etc.) Do not change any word without asking.
This includes words jammed into one, or hyphenated, when this is not standard business English. For example, in the current book, “child-thieves” are people who steal children. “Child thieves” are children who steal. The hyphenated “something-thief” has been used for a long time, even though the same confusion isn’t possible with horse-thieves and horse thieves (for instance) so why this CE chose to eliminate the hyphen I don’t know…but I also don’t like it. it’s a world in which some children are thieves and some children are stolen away.
Every time a writer has to “stet” a CE’s marking, it takes the writer time–first, to determine if the marking has any validity, and if so, if the CE’s choice of change is the best that could be made. Even when the change is valid, there’s often a better (for that book) way to improve the passage. Therefore CEs should strive not to make any change that is not clearly correct, using a query for other things that catch their attention.
So if you’re a CE and reading this, and if you CE fiction, tread as lightly as you can. Use the question mark freely. Change no words without a query. And if you’re already doing all that, you’re probably one of the CEs whose names writers pass around increasingly as writers move toward self-publishing. Comes the day I want to self-pub something, I’ll be looking for you. (Yes, life might be easier if we could communicate with each other during the process, instead of communicating with red pencils and STETs.)
Comment by elizabeth — October 10, 2013 @ 8:27 pm
So…except for rewriting a couple of sentences that I’m still pondering, the CEs are done. Whew! They must go off tomorrow to be in NYC on the 14th, thanks to the weekend effect.