Category Archives: Christmas

I returned the galley proof for “The Christmas Wager” to my editor at Dreamspinner tonight, just slightly late.  But they’re in Texas, and two hours behind me, so hopefully they’ll consider it on time. 

It was a lot tougher than proofing “The Meaning of Vengeance.”  Not only was it longer and therefore more prone to have minor mistakes in punctuation, grammar and (depressingly) word usage, but the editor appears to know the Victorian time period fairly well, and was able to zero in on my weak spots.  I sent my characters to the grocers, in one scene.  Were there grocers at that time?  I’m not sure.  How does one address a duchess?  Well, I managed to get it wrong. 

But the really hard part was fixing inconsistencies my editor found in the story.  In one scene, Thomas takes his neice downstairs on their way to meet Hew and Duncan, but they stop to talk to her father.  Susan tells her father something Hew told her.  But when did he tell her?  She was on her way to see him, and hadn’t had a chance to talk to him that morning.  In another scene, Thomas decides he isn’t quite ready to try anal sex.  But we’d earlier established that he didn’t know men did that together, so why would it even occur to him?

Now I just remembered something I meant to change, but forgot.  Aargh!

I’ll have to send a follow-up e-mail…

So you polish your prose until it’s sparkling, eliminating all mispellings and grammatical attrocities, such as the notorious confusion of they’re, there and their, then have friends read it to catch anything you’ve missed.  Then you submit it to a publisher, confident that all of those silly newbie mistakes have been eliminated.

Then you receive your galley proof from the publisher, full of correction marks.  No, I don’t mean things like, “Alphonso’s biceps aren’t big enough.”  I mean, “You wrote ‘His interest was peaked.’  This should be ‘piqued.'”  All through the manuscript.  In one instance, I even used the dreaded they’re, when I meant their!

Embarassing.  I used to ace my English exams.  I used to correct my fellow students’ papers, so they could resubmit them and get A’s.  I was once told by a college professor, “If I didn’t know you’d written this, I’d swear a college student couldn’t write like this.”

Now, suddenly I’m back in High School, being told that one has “tousled” hair — not “tussled” hair, “tussled” being a word that means they’re wrestling.  Also, it isn’t necessary to write “he thought to himself.”  The “to himself” is redundant, since you can’t think to someone else.  (At least, not in a Victorian romance.)

Ah, the humiliation. 

But its instructive.  And I’m glad to have an editor who notices such things.  I’ve read far too many ebooks with bad grammar and mispellings, and it’s far better to catch these things now, before it goes out the door.

Well, I haven’t actually seen the finished cover yet, but Dreamspinner sent me the rough sketch of the cover art for “The Christmas Wager,” my first published novella (coming out this December).  In the rough sketch, of course, the characters look a bit cartoonish, but the artist is Paul Richmond, who painted the cover for “Naughty or Nice.”  He has a great style, realistic but not photographic, with a great sense for soft, rich color.  His covers for the Christmas anthologies have a wonderful Christmas feel to them.  I had, in fact, seen the cover to “Naughty or Nice” and thought, It would be really nice if this artist could do the cover for the novella!

I won’t say, yet, what the cover design for “The Christmas Wager” is, but it’s cute and I’m very excited to see what it looks like as a finished painting.  They actually went with a design I’d suggested, though I wasn’t sure if it could be pulled off.  I suggested one of my favorite scenes in the novella, but it was pretty risque.  Mr. Richmond found a way of portraying it while covering all the naughty bits. 

I also received the “back cover” blurb for the novella, distilled in large part from the summary of the story I’d included in my query letter.  I’m told to expect the galley proof in a few weeks, though I imagine it will be sooner — there’s only a month left before it goes to press!