Edits!

[julian_griffith]

So, yesterday, I got the first round of edits on Love Continuance and Increasing back from gehayi. Five minutes ago, I sent them back.

Seriously, most of the edits were about regularizing the spelling to 100% British, and fixing my two persistent formatting screwups -- I'd followed outdated advice and used underscores to surround bits meant to be italicized, and I hadn't been able to insert em dashes into Google Docs and hadn't fixed it in the final .rtf I submitted. In future submissions I won't do either of those things wrong.

Apart from that, I grudgingly allowed the deletion of a lot of PERFECTLY GOOD commas -- by the end, I was putting in the occasional frustrated note saying "These are respectable, God-fearing parenthetical commas and the sentence is clunky without them, so they stay," -- and attempted to fix what pronoun confusion problems were pointed out to me, and got punchy enough defending hyphens that I resorted to "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" and "Father John's Christmas". And I cited Pride and Prejudice to defend my one use of the archaic spelling "practise". If Lady Catherine DeBourgh can instruct Darcy's sister to practise the pianoforte, my heroine's mother can tell her younger daughter to do so as well. :)

And I put in a few things that I needed, like the acknowledgement that Rockingham wasn't related in any significant sense to the former prime minister, and clarifying George Pennington's position in regard to the Rockingham entail, and sticking an author's note at the end about the HMS Pickle.

I'm bracing to see whether I'll get stronger demands for change from higher up the chain, but as it stands now? I'm VERY happy with my book!

(Cover art, oh, I am crossing my fingers on the cover art, I can't wait to see it, and I really REALLY want it to be good!)

Comments

[icarus]

Yay, congrats! People have no respect for God-fearing commas these days.

[julian_griffith]

The saddest part is that gehayi agrees with me that most of the deleted comments aren't incorrect. It's just that I use them in a way that most people don't (and don't know how to) since American public schools gave up on formal grammar instruction somewhere around 1970. I wasn't properly taught how myself - I just read a lot and picked it up. So you can picture me as a crabby old lady clutching a big bag of commas and shaking my fist at all the damn kids on my lawn. :)

[icarus]

So many commas are optional (yet desirable!) that people get confused.

[julian_griffith]

I know. And I know that I sprinkled mine around like confetti because I was mimicking Austen's style, which was very appropriate for a novel set in 1802-1805, but which looks very little like contemporary usage.

Still. Austen-era prose is NOTHING compared to Ellen Kushner's ability to produce heightened-language verse plays, or fragments thereof. Somewhere in a nearby dimension there's a leather-bound folio edition of The Swordsman's Tragedy, and someday I'm going to lay my hands on it and read it start to finish. And someday Santa will bring me a pony... (you will note that I've never been on Santa's list, as my family is Jewish).

[kittygamble]

Yaaaaaay! That all sounds awesome and hugely exciting.