Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Yesterday, Spooky and I made it through the prologue and the first five chapters of the Murder of Angels CEM (258 pp.). The copyeditor was somewhat more merciful this time around and it's going much faster than anticipated. With any luck, we may finish today. So far, it's mostly me insisting that the ms. use "towards" instead of "toward" and stuff like that. There are a few weirdnesses, apparently brought about by the superfluous eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster's. I don't have a copy, because I prefer the OED and figure my Web. 10 is still perfectly sufficient for my ends. It seems, though, that "rest room," which I have long argued ought to be one word, is now one word, "restroom." That's a good thing, I suppose. On the other hand, it now seems that when compound words for colors (blue grey) are used as modifying adjectives (blue-grey sky), no hyphen should be used (blue grey sky). Baloney, says I. The hyphens stay. It took me too goddamn long to learn that the hyphens "should" be there to stop using them now, just because a bunch of language geeks have changed their minds. Anyway, this is the sort of silliness that consumed yesterday and shall consume today.
And speaking of reviews...
It has become clear that the someone/s (I shan't name names, except to say that I don't mean Bill Schafer/Subterranean Press) whose responsibility it was to send out the advance reading copies of Low Red Moon to prospective reviewers did, at best, a half-assed job of things. Puzzled at how few reviews LRM has received, compared to Threshold and Silk, I've been making inquiries and discovering that a lot of people who should have gotten ARCs simply didn't. And now I'm wondering how much damage this has done to the sales of the novel and if it's too late for me to do anything about it. This is, of course, the sort I thing I shouldn't have to worry about, ever, the sort of thing other people get paid a salary to worry about. But this is how publishing works. The author must be hands-on. The author must micromanage. The author must obsess and fret and nag. Or risk this sort of crap.
Anyway, the day's bleeding away and I've got corrections to uncorrect. Blah, blah, blah.
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