Paksworld

…and tomorrow the book’s out in the stores.  I hope you in the US are as excited as I am, and that if you pre-ordered online, your copies arrive on your doorstep (or whatever you use) on time tomorrow.    (Those of you in Europe who already have the UK version…try not to hand out too many spoilers.  At least until the end of the week, OK?)

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…and I am Not Ready.  Anxious, of course.   Eager, of course.  But if “ready” is supposed to include organized, all supplies in place, wardrobe chosen and prepared, etc, etc, etc….no.  Not Ready.   And thanks to the misery that’s Daylight Savings Time (every year I scream silently at the heavens “It does not save any !**! daylight!!!”  And here in Texas we pray all summer for night to come and give us small relief from the day’s heat and glare)  it is already 9:30 in the morning when it should be 8:30.

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As this is March 1, in 15 days Oath of Fealty will hit the streets in the US.    If any of you are near Austin, Texas,  I’m doing a book signing on Tuesday, March 16, at Book People (6th and Lamar) at 7 pm.   Earlier (4 – 5 pm CST) I’ll be doing an online chat at Suvudu with John Hemry (writing as Jack Campbell, author of the Lost Fleet series) and editor Betsy Mitchell, who will try to keep John and me from taking off into the wild blue.

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…”Out of period!” sniffs the judge of exclamations.  “Does not fit the book.”

Well, no, but my copies of the Orbit edition of Oath of Fealty arrived today.    They’re both in the study with me where I gloat over them every few minutes.    Read the rest of this entry »

…for ConDFW (I leave in the morning, won’t be back until Monday night, and may not post until Tuesday),  Editor sent me an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy, also known as a review copy) of the book.   (Let me tell you, hearing that people had bought one on e-Bay, when I didn’t have one, was a strain on my equanimity!)   However, I now have something for show-and-tell, even though it doesn’t have any of the artwork. Read the rest of this entry »

And it’s gone, and Editor has received it (email is a lot easier, I will admit.  No days of waiting to find out if it actually got there.  OTOH,  no days of absolute safety during which I can’t be told it’s awful.)

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Yesterday I finally (!) got the copy edits boxed up, taped up, and ready to go when (out of the blue, literally) a storm landed on top of us and for over an hour we had lightning, wind, and (wonderfully) rain.  The power flickered on and off and I declined to go out in it, risking the manuscript, until things settled down, which they finally did.   Then I drove the 20-something miles to the Kinko’s/FedEx place and handed over the box to the nice fellow keeping the doors open until closing time, and drove back home, lighter in heart and pocket both.  (You really don’t want to know what it costs to send over 850 pages of paper ‘overnight’ to New York City from central Texas…)

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When you get the manuscript back from the copy editor (via the publisher) it’s conveniently referred to as “the copy edit” or “the copy edits.”   (Plural for its many pages, I guess.)

You find out at this point that your carefully prepared manuscript has mistakes in it.  You changed something but left one word of the old version of that sentence and did not see it.   Oh, the shame!   You misspelled something–and you a writer of many years, how could you!?  Oh, more shame.

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And I now have permission to share.  

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C. S. Lewis discussed part of this, in a couple of essays, but I’m going to extend what he said, a little.

Lewis said bad books succeeded, when they did, because they had some literary virtues.   No book devoid of all literary virtues, he argued, would be read–it would be too painful.  (Unless it’s assigned by one’s teacher, I mutter…)     “Bad” writers have to be doing something right–and usually, it’s telling a story.

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