Friday, June 27, 2003
Yesterday, I wrote 1,178 words on Chapter Five; today, I will begin with page 200, which means I'm probably about 1/4 - 1/5 of the way through the novel.
About 6 pm, UPS showed up with the first-pass page proofs of Low Red Moon from Roc. It figures they would arrive now, and need to be back in the production editor's hands by July 9th. Oh, what does "first-pass" mean, you ask? Typically, I'm provided the copyedited ms. first. That's just the typescript I turn in to my editor, with the copyeditor's notes. That came back in April, you may recall. Then I get the first-pass proofs, which are typeset, all laid out just like the book will be. At this stage, I have one last chance to make minor changes. If I make changes that amount to more than 10% of the total, I'm billed for them. "Resetting is costly," the cover letter reminds me, "and if your changes exceed 10% of the original cost of composition, you will be billed for any such excess." Fair enough. By this time, I should have my act together. But I am amused that they talk about it as though we're working with actual movable type ("Adding or deleting even a comma means that a whole line of type has to be reset."), when, of course, it's all done on computers these days. Anyway, Spooky and I have to read through this pass and get it back in the mail ASAP, and I have to not allow reading this book to distract me from writing that book. Later, in another couple months or so, the second-pass proofs will arrive, which basically just allow me to make one last check for typos. Then - voila - it becomes a book (that School House Rock song about the bill trying to become a law just popped into my head).
So, now I have to keep Murder of Angels moving along, have another fifty or so pages done on the screenplay for Threshold by the next meeting (which I think is July 15th), write my story for Candlewick Press' Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales by July 30th, and handle the LRM page proofs. Oh, and the proofs for the Subterranean Press edition will arrive in a couple of weeks, not long after were done with the Roc pages. July has gone insane. June was merely frantic.
Yesterday, at twilight, Spooky and I walked around the old school grounds, watching fireflies and getting mosquito bites. We found a small black marble mostly buried in the ground and dug it out with a stick. It was pitted, but perfect ebony. It made me think of the alien spacecraft from Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, only a tiny bit of it showing above ground. And I wondered how long since some child dropped it there. How many decades. Forty years? Fifty? The school was built in 1907, so there's no telling. The child is certainly an adult now, perhaps elderly, perhaps long dead.
Anyway. Time to make the words.
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