Argh Ink

So I am back at work on AKMG, and revising what I’ve written and thinking about the Wild Ride copy edit (which went to Bob yesterday, so now it’s his nightmare) all of that has made me think about punctuation. I used to be an English teacher, which meant that punctuation was rules, as in two independent clauses without a conjunction must be joined by a semi-colon. I was all over The Chicago Manual of Style. And Strunk and White. And The MLA Handbook. Then I became a writer and thought, “Maybe not.”
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You know, when I started getting all the annoyed comments on the Copy Editor rant post, I figured some of them were coming from the copy editing class. Then a pal told me she’d forwarded the URL to a copy editor listserve, which I think is great. Any situation is better with two sides. So while we do have a new pseudonym post up to play on, I thought it was only fair put up another to give any copy editor a place to vent about authors or the business. I fully realize that complaining on the internet may be dangerous to a copy editor’s financial well being, but anybody who can disguise things sufficiently is welcome to post here showing the view from the other side.

Note:
I’ve just remembered why I’ve had such easy copy edits on the last books that I did solo. My editor told the copy editors to write any changes they wanted made to the text (as opposed to punctuation, spelling, etc) on post-it notes. That way I could make the change if I thought it was good and pitch the post-it if I didn’t without having to write “stet” on everything. I assumed this didn’t make any extra work for the copy editor since she was just writing what she wanted on a different piece paper. How much of a hassle was that? Because I’m going to remind my editor to do that again.

A friend of mine–you all know Rox, right, huge celebrity on Ravelry?–posted on a list we’re on this list of pseudonym generators (we have a mutual friend who’s choosing one now). (Rox says she found it on another web site that had found it on another website, but I’m citing Rox.) I read it and laughed and then got completely caught up in it. I’d seen the porn star one before, but this list is just . . . a wonderful time sink. So here you go, eleven ways to choose a pseudonym, brought to you by Rox:
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So I’m working on the copy edits for Wild Ride, and the copy editor is annoying me. For one thing, she loves m-dashes. It’s bad enough that she deletes my ellipses and puts in dashes–they’re not the same thing, okay?– but she also takes out my commas and puts in dashes. Is she INSANE? Then she thinks she knows more about the Army than Bob does, so she keeps putting a lower case “a” on Army, when Ethan is talking about the American Army which is capped. She also keeps crossing out my “as” for her “so,” as in changing “She looked different, not as bouncy,” to “She looked different, not so bouncey.” Bite me. read more >>

One of the worst things about being a professional writer is that you have to write synopses so that people know what your book is about before they act on it. I can sell without synopses now, but I still have to write them for catalog copy so booksellers know what they’re getting. My method is to write nine lines: the first scene, what happens in Act One, the first turning point, what happens in Act Two, the second turning point, what happens in Act Three, the third turning point, what happens in Act Four, and the climax. Those nine points, I will argue, are the outline of the story, are, in fact, the story.

But that’s techie stuff, the structure, the bones in the story. The things that truly sell the book or movie and bring readers and viewers back to read and see again are most often not those turning points, they’re usually the moments where the reader or viewer connects most strongly emotionally, gets the most pleasure or the biggest thrill. read more >>