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?

I think that pelting them with old metal type would be a just and fitting punishment. (I have a book of poetry that was printed with hand-set metal type--there's something wonderful about the flow of the print).

Mini-meara...

Quark's a great program, but it aint for novices, not at this level.

My first real job was as a proofreader at a typesetting shop (they did textbooks) - and let me tell you, most of the compositors they hired didn't know Quark from a ham sandwich. They're cheaper. Of course, the burden was on us proofers to catch their mistakes... and of course these days a lot of places don't even bother to hire proofers anymore.

deb, you've got every right to be pissed off and make them fix it. The quality of the typesetting is a subtle but hugely important element of how people percieve your work.

Desktop publishing is more curse than blessing. Now they think anybody can slap a book together, and standards are coming down to the point where almost anybody can.

Oh, and I'm completely jealous of anybody who has a spouse working so they can write full-time.

And hi! (waves) I have to cannibalize my Buffista time to work on "Deliberate Breath". I'm only up to chapter 6, so there's a long way to go.

Ms H! Haven't seen you in a bit. I have a very pretty girly-love vampire story for the pornanthology, and will send when you're ready.

And the editing stopped abruptly this morning ("Weaver" edits of the Quark-fried Layout of Death, that is) when I discovered that at a crucial point near the end of the book?

They've dumped about three pages.

And I don't mean forgot to include them in the copy. It continues from paragraph to paragraph, midpage, with about three pages missing. Which I am now convinced was deliberate and diabolical and forcing me to heed their evil ways.

And re the spouse working fulltime? Mine does that, but weirdly enough, I wrote 3.5 novels at the office, when I was the only one of us employed. Thank heavens for a secretary whose mama is a world-class and wellknown poet (DiPrima by name), so I got it done because she grokked and was wonderful about it.

But I couldn't do it now, and I'm with you: blessed is the highly-paid alpha geek spouse who enables writing.

Oh, and re the wonderful AU novel with the idiot idea to screw with it by the agents?

May I quote the lady who wrote said novel, in her livejournal?

16 may 2003

"You know, Mr. Hemingway, in chapter 13 you mention a horse, and I think that this would make a great three-book series about this guy and his horse, and if he -- the guy, I mean, not the horse -- if he wore a ten-gallon hat we could sell it as a Western. I mean, you've really aborted your story with all this business about the war and fishing and stuff, because you don't follow through about the horse. Now as I see it, his horse is really a great racehorse except that nobody knows it yet ... "