The rewards of doing it— the sheer petty joy of typing grEy instead of grAy, an Americanism I detest; the delight of cleaning up things I noticed AFTER it was in print…the freedom of being able to use a long dash WITHOUT butting it up against the prior word and overriding a comma, thus:
John—come here! becomes John, —come here! The sheer luxury of not having to re-correct my subjunctives when some copyeditor has misconstrued them. The delight of being able to say leapt instead of leaped (I swear the next pernicious change will be sleeped) —And the happiness of doing a book as long as I want it, with the typography I want, and the ending I want…and without the philosophy of an editor, who arrives new on the scene and doesn’t like ooky scary things, getting between you and your book. That definitely happened on Faery in Shadow, and to a certain extent on Rusalka.
Plus—a decade can give you a clearer vision of what you needed to do, and experience gives you a whole arsenal of skills you didn’t have back when…
I am so, so, so much happier with the Rusalka set (aka ‘what it’s REALLY like to grow up a wizard’–)
I’ve gotten through the new Yvgenie edit. You’ll notice some other changes. Rusalka is under my name, Chernevog is me and Jane, because Jane had such good insignts, and actually wrote some that I happily used, that I happily shared the authorship (my idea, not anything she asked;) and the third book, Yvgenie, is back to me again. This is honest-to-God magic-works-in-our-world fantasy that will also give a nice little aha! to people who do like physics; AND to people who know something about Russian folklore. How’s that for pleasing a diverse audience?
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The short story is Foreigner, of course, before Bren arrived on the scene….I hope you enjoy it.
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And Jane’s new book is Netwalkers, which begins the NEW version of her whole universe. This is brilliant, gutsy science fiction—and if you THINK you know where it’s going or you THINK you’ve seen this sort of thing before…don’t be too sure. This is sf of a very special sort, and if you’ve not read Jane’s sf, —read this!
Launch date is the 24th of October, and we are on schedule.
Well…it’s almost 2:30 and dimmbulb here can’t get to sleep. Shu gave up on me after I fed him his bedtime snack.
Joe…I’m doin’ fine, thanks. Not even really tired, just ready to have it all done. I have only myself to blame. I was supposed to come back from Dallas and do all this stuff, and instead I played with Wiishu. I thought I had the conversions in the bag this time, and discovered (predictably) a whole new set of problems…Like the small caps thing. It would help if I were the least bit organized and didn’t keep getting versions mixed up…
One of the problems is, I keep trying to find a way to make a pretty book. I know a lot of people don’t care, they just want the words, but in the same way I would want to use nice tack on my horse, or put makeup on to go out in public, I just think it’s showing respect to the book and our readers to make it as elegant as possible. And for me, it really does add to the experience.
Guess I’d better try to go to bed. ‘Night all! Go get the freebie!
Oh…I forgot about the craziness with AT&T…and a couple of other things that just fried my nerves and sent a day into the garbage bin.
I’ve also been trying to get back in touch with a very tricksy part of Homecoming Games and the sad thing is, and what has truncated my production for three years now, the whole Closed Circle thing and its attendant puzzles/problems, just keeps my brain about as far away from writing as it can get. One of the reasons for indulging Little Mr W is that his silly little photostories are helping prime the pump for writing real story.
Dear Jane, I want to add my thanks for all the work you are doing on Closed Circle … and hope that you can get back to your writing very soon.
I find Kindle a very bland and boring reading experience and am sad that I can’t really appreciate book design on it … I make up for that by buying old Folio editions of my favourite books …. but it’s a shame I won’t see your art work on it.
thought this story might ring a few bells on the old computer front! http://www.spacemart.com/reports/50-year-old_computer_restored_in_Britain_999.html