Crap! I really suck at this Yoda shit.

muHA!

"Step away from the email notification, young Jedi..."

I just sent my Kinkaid WIP reading list new stuff. Second part of chapter two. Must eat dinner now...

I mean, haunting waiting for them to send me a check or the damned thing back, Gus. It was mailed this morning.

And bless Betsy for the machete and Micole for the encouragement.

I mean, ... waiting for them to send me a check or the damned thing back...It was mailed this morning.

Just thought you might want see that again, for a reality check, 'Suela.

I am looking now at a page of my galley.

From the first line to the last, there is no sense. It is all guttural noises and punctuation.

Gus, that may be a signal that you need to put it away for the night.

Seriously. My own "ok, back up and away honey, do it NOW" signal is when I find I'm answering a perfectly reasonable copy-editor query by typing in "(rolls eyes FOREVER)" or "I don't CARE what the transitive form is, damn it!"

Hearing the beat that DG is laying out, in a big way.

Reading your own stuff is hard enough.

It was suggested to me, elsewhere, that every writer not only needs a "stet" stamp: s/he needs a "FOaD!" Stamp.

As in, "fuck off and die".

I'd actually love one of those, so I could stamp it all over my tax returns.

Although one of the things this particular copy-editor got completely wrong was not realising that "woad" - as in, source of blue dyes - was the word I had not only typed, but meant to type. He tried changing it to "wood" and then asked me to check my sources, as one cannot get blue dye from wood.

I would have liked a stamp that said "W-O-A-D. F-O-A-D."

OK, I'm sorry that you have to deal with the inanity, deb, but that's really funny.

that's really funny.

I know. I was laughing even while I was damaging my forehead by pounding it against the keyboard.

Same copy guy did the same thing in "Matty Groves". He very carefully wrote out - on a series of post-its, mind you, apparently using the leg off a lilliputian spider - every definition he could find for "baiting", in reference to me spelling the word wrong.

Only one he left out was the definition, and spelling, I'd used: bating, a sudden upward movement of a falcon's wings, usually when startled.

Fuckwit. I so do need that FOAD stamp...

Okay, galley is done. Dead trees? In the mail.

On final analysis ... on reading the thing as if it was a book I'd purchased ...

... It sucks. The language has a pleasant rhythm that drags the eye along, and the world-building has an inner consistency that mostly works, but it is not about anything new.