I wish I was familiar with the romance market, but Old Buddy (who I'm screaming at in lieu of screaming at BB, who thank Jah is not my agent) is definitely familiar with it: her last published book was a modern romantic comedy and she adores regencies.

Cool--if it's not too obnoxious of me, I may ask for more information about her when I've finished this thing.

And meanwhile, I'm going to tear myself away from the computer and go do some actual writing for an hour or so.

And for dinner and meds. Nic's homeward bound, and he's my Medicine Man.

Basically it's a historical novel set in AU circs because she needed a specific climate (cold) and a specific stage of society (just pre-industrial, with the first telegraph wires being strung). She refuses to allow it to be shoved into the genre fantasy niche. It's about a woman who wants to be a cartographer and who works for a guild who won't let her go do that, because she's far too good at representing the local PTB and collecting their enemies and whatnot.

Oh, I want to read this...

Deb, you are right to be so angry, not that you need me to tell you. And although RMB is a favorite novelist, I'd forgotten she's a poet.(And I don't just mean the kitty books...I liked her other fiction too.) So there are five poets, off the top of our(admittedly educated) heads. Victor, I would be honored to get that thoughtful of a eulogy as the one you gave BTVS...not that I'm going anytime soon.

The publishing insanity continues.

This morning, it's apparently my turn. I got the first passpages (formal layouts, how the pages are going to look, do the major corrections now) for "Weaver." This morning I sat down to edit.

Very few typos, which is good. Insisted on misspelling "Honourable" all the way through, omitting the 'u", annoying but an easy fix.

Alas. They put the frellin' thing through an automatic layout program, I'm guessing Quark, and never bothered to go back to kern.

Which is fine if you're dealing with a writer who uses words of five characters or less. Which is not fine if the writer is me.

Every second page has between five and eight hyphens at a line-break. I've called Dan, my editor's assistant, and told him. He was very cross about it and offered to extend the deadline. Not necessary; I've already done half and this will go out two weeks ahead of schedule.

But I have eyestrain and a headache and I want to kill someone.

Every second page has between five and eight hyphens at a line-break.

You mean 5-8 lines in a row with a hyphen at the end of it? Like:

This is a fantast-
ic idea, he said sus-
piciously. Over-
ly involved machin-
ations always wor-
ied him.

Because Quark can set how many lines in a row can be hyphenated.

Steph, it's more complicated than that (how they've done it, I mean).

Quark's a great program, but it aint for novices, not at this level. And whereas I've only got two lines maximum consecutive with hyphenations on any given page, the fact that every damned page has at least three hyphenated line breaks makes it almost unreadable. (some of them have NINE hyphenated line breaks)

Plus, most of it wasn't necessary. They've opted for what appears to be 10 on 14 Bembo typeface, nice and readable, but looking at the spec sheet? They had masses of room to play. So right now, they've got words squeezed together where one breath of moving whitespace would have lost all need for hyphenations.

They just didn't go back and check their layout. And coming on top of having had to correct their edits to the wrong version of the original MS? Not to mention dealing with the Pillock Copy Editor?

Bored now.

I resent doing their job for them. I shouldn't be better at this than they are. I shouldn't have to be writing "page 48, two line consec hyphenation plus existing hyphenation usage on second line - see "lych-gate" - makes excessive usage look clumsy". I am not getting paid to do that.

I'm not a perfectionist, but I am a professional. Why can't some of these people be pros, as well?

Deb, I'll pin back their arms while you administer the beating.

Can I hit 'em with a rock? Pleeeeeease?

Or maybe an old fashioned printing press?