Tell me why everything turned around
April 07, 2010
Final edit gone, very early this morning. There's always a final edit. Namely the finished version with whatever errors you spotted now corrected. When I worked at Rip It Up the editor Murray Cammick would barely glance at the magazine on the day it arrived from the printer: if he read it closely, all he saw were the mistakes. After I started working there a lot of the mistakes were mine, which made me feel terrible until I started noticing the mistakes other people had made, including errors added to my copy. After that it became a war of attrition.
There's a golden rule in life: if you write something about typing errors, it will contain a typing error.
Last night I also had to write what Americans call coverage for the manuscript, or what the British call the blurb. This is more difficult than writing the novel itself because it requires taking a step back from the thing that has consumed you for, in this case, a very intense year, and summarising it in simple terms everyone can understand. Please note that the simple terms cannot include a word that might trigger a negative response. So, if noir is out of fashion at the moment (as is the case, apparently), then it's better not to use that term. Try not to have an attitude about this. Try to make things easy for yourself, just this once. Please step away slowly.
Since the iPad was launched there has been further discussion about (yawn) ebooks and whether or not printed books will disappear. I still write by hand (ink, notebooks, legal pads, Kirby-style chunks of plaster board torn from the ceiling) but so much of my writing and editing is performed on screen now, I wonder if ebooks might be already here as far as authors are concerned. Then again, it's no different from editing a film on a Moviola. But then again...
Likewise "the cloud." I have copies of the ms everywhere: on paper, on my weary Powerbook G4, flash drives, even a Micro SD. But the files least likely to be lost, stolen or incinerated are the ones I've emailed to my various Gmail and Yahoo accounts. I don't trust the idea of cloud computing but it's become part of my process without my even realising it.
It's cloudy today, so the Ms. Zunshine isn't out.
There's a golden rule in life: if you write something about typing errors, it will contain a typing error.
Last night I also had to write what Americans call coverage for the manuscript, or what the British call the blurb. This is more difficult than writing the novel itself because it requires taking a step back from the thing that has consumed you for, in this case, a very intense year, and summarising it in simple terms everyone can understand. Please note that the simple terms cannot include a word that might trigger a negative response. So, if noir is out of fashion at the moment (as is the case, apparently), then it's better not to use that term. Try not to have an attitude about this. Try to make things easy for yourself, just this once. Please step away slowly.
Since the iPad was launched there has been further discussion about (yawn) ebooks and whether or not printed books will disappear. I still write by hand (ink, notebooks, legal pads, Kirby-style chunks of plaster board torn from the ceiling) but so much of my writing and editing is performed on screen now, I wonder if ebooks might be already here as far as authors are concerned. Then again, it's no different from editing a film on a Moviola. But then again...
Likewise "the cloud." I have copies of the ms everywhere: on paper, on my weary Powerbook G4, flash drives, even a Micro SD. But the files least likely to be lost, stolen or incinerated are the ones I've emailed to my various Gmail and Yahoo accounts. I don't trust the idea of cloud computing but it's become part of my process without my even realising it.
It's cloudy today, so the Ms. Zunshine isn't out.