Thursday, January 29, 2004
Remarkably, we finished with the copyeditor's marks on the CEM yesterday afternoon. I've never before made it through a CEM in less than a week, and we did this one in two days. Which leaves me a little extra time to look at tweaking. I don't tend to rewrite. It usually comes out the way I want it the first time. But this is a very strange and complex novel and I might need to chisel a little.
All in all, this was the least annoying CEM I've ever had to deal with, I think. Yesterday there were only a few things that made me balk. I refuse the capitalize "internet," because it looks stupid and I don't see it as a proper noun. And if you think that you've ever had coffee from a Styrofoam cup, let me tell you, Dow is out there to set you straight. So, what the frell does one say instead? Foam cup? No one would know what I was talking about. I just changed it to a paper cup. But when you get to the scene wherein Marvin Gale is having a conversation with a San Francisco police detective, and he gets coffee in a paper cup, remember that it really a "Styrofoam" cup, sensu lato, in disguise.
I think my difficulties with this sort of editing can be summed up thusly: Language serves man, not the other way round. Artists must never be held, strictly, to grammatical standards and rules, especially when those rules arise from corporate concerns and when they cannot be demonstrated to be anything but arbitrary, embracing no systematic and internally consistent infrastructure. A distinction needs to be made between that which is written for simple "solid" communication (letters, advertisements, online posts, etc.) and complex "fluid" communication (art and spoken conversation).
There were a lot of phone calls and e-mails yesterday: my editor at Penguin, Ryan Obermeyer, Ted Naifeh, Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press. Days like that, my office actually seems like an office, instead of just this big, cold room where I write and keep all my books and action figures.
This cold is driving me nuts. Someone needs to tell the Canadians to shut their backdoor, please.
Make me feel all warm and fuzzy by buying something from our eBay auctions today. It's still not too late to use "buy it now" and get one of my little monster doodles. The offer stands until midnight on Saturday.
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