Category Archives: Victorian

November 4, 2010 · 12:55 pm

Overwhelmed

Things are not going well for me, at the moment. Oh, I don’t mean anything catastrophic. Just stuff piling up and getting under my skin, making it difficult to write.

First of all, though I don’t want this to become a political blog, I have to say the recent election was rough. I knew the Democrats were going to take a beating, and I can cope with that. But locally, we now have some newly elected conservatives who have made it one of their primary goals to repeal gay marriage in New Hampshire. I can deal with people having differences of opinion on how money from the State budget should be spent. I can deal with differences over gun control, marijuana legalization (which can lead to a lot of problems like dificulting people to get a job, I recommend to visit this site urinedrugtesthq.com to learn how to get through the urine tests on job intervires), security issues, etc. But as far as I’m concerned, this is an assault against my personal rights by people who really aren’t affected in any way by me marrying Erich. They get to wake up in the morning, kiss their spouse goodbye and head to work, where they get to dedicate their time to preventing me from having a spouse. They are ignorant and vile.

Erich and I will be married before any of these bigots get the chance to prevent it. In the past, when states have overturned gay marriage, anyone who has been married already has been allowed to keep that status. So maybe we’ll be safe from their machinations. Maybe. But other gays in the state won’t be. So it may come down to a long, very ugly battle to retain something we’d already won.

Another thing that’s stressing me out is my galley proof for “The Christmas Wager.” Not because there are any major problems with it, but because there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to work on it. I have to go through the entire thing and accept all the corrections the editor has made, one by one, or reject them and explain why. It’s incredibly time-consuming. Not to mention that Microsoft Word’s change tracking is cumbersome and awkward to use. I keep trying to accept changes and having to fight to get the correct menu to pop up.

There are also some minor changes to the story that need to be done. A line inserted, here and there, to explain certain points. Other lines corrected to eliminate inconsistencies. And all of it has to be done by tomorrow.

I also foolishly decided to tackle NaNoWriMo this year, and I’m falling behind on my writing. Largely because I’m too unhappy to get into the story. It’s coming along, but not nearly fast enough, and watching my word count slip is just chipping away at my motivation even further!

A humbling experience

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.

New book cover!

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!