I have to take a break and blog a little here.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow (it would have been today, but DHL in Ireland has done something weird to their pickup and flight schedules: never mind…) — tomorrow, I say, the copy-edited manuscript for Wizard’s Holiday<\/em> goes back to the publisher. I’m in the middle of the last changes I can make before we go to page proofs, probably in about a month.<\/p>\n The MS is presently a pile of paper which has many, many Day-Glo Post-It notes sticking out of it. I thought I was done with the MS this morning, but noooo, I had to read it through again…and find all these things that need dealing with that didn’t get dealt with. Ah well: better to deal with them. But how is it I missed them on the first pass?<\/p>\n I feel like a complete basket case…but at this point in a MS-grooming, that’s completely normal. I find myself looking at things I wrote as if I expected my readership to just intuit them somehow…and I feel like I’m not the writer I was (if indeed I ever was that writer. If you see what I mean.) This perception has as much to do with blood sugar and eyestrain as anything else, I know<\/em> that…but there it is regardless.<\/p>\n One by one the Post-Its come out as paragraphs and sometimes whole pages get inserted to clarify issues which I thought (at the time of writing) would have been plain even to paramecia, but which I now see were obscure to everyone on Earth but me. I roll my eyes at my own obtuseness. (Just once or twice I roll them at my editor and copy-editor, but only a little: here and there they’ve missed something that really is<\/em> obvious. In 99% of the notes in the MS, though, they’re right on. And in Lynn I am truly blessed in a copy-editor who does not<\/em> do what one of Peter’s did, correcting his MS not to house style, but to her own…which included removing all apostrophes from dialogue because “the use of apostrophes gave an unnecessarily modern flavor to a period fantasy novel”. He put every one of them back; the dialogue was “contemporary” to those speaking it, and if you take the C-E’s line of reasoning too far, you wind up writing novels in Gothic, or Norman French. “Which limits your market rather,” P. says.)<\/p>\n (sigh) This process is kind of like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. So much fun when you stop… I look forward to about 1 AM, when I should be finished, with great joy. …Yet good things are getting done here. At least one scene got written which made me tear up slightly: a rarity. A couple of other scenes made me chuckle out loud (also fairly rare). It’s too soon for me to tell whether this book is any good; ask me again in October, when it comes out. .<\/p>\n And this always happens. Always. <\/em> The Big Mood Swing, spread over months — from finishing the first draft in a blaze of sweat and glory, to the rewrite and copyedit, usually spent cowering and clutching my head in multiply recurring fits of acute embarrassment, to the point where I go over the page proofs, a little calmer but still not fully convinced. But at the same time, there’s usually another book in progress, and this complicates the clinical picture somewhat. (There will be this year, for sure: Wizards at War<\/em> really needs to go to the publisher in October.)<\/p>\n …Sigh. Back to work. I tell myself everything will be fine when I’m done. But right now I don’t believe it.<\/p>\n Mothers, don’t let your kids be writers!<\/p>\n (…As if you could stop them.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have to take a break and blog a little here. Tomorrow (it would have been today, but DHL in Ireland has done something weird to their pickup and flight…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[754,70,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2","category-writing","category-young-wizards"],"yoast_head":"\n