Could there be someone else in pursuit of the tapes for other reasons? Suppose there was someone else who had worked on the album who everyone thought was dead. Maybe the tapes included clues as to what happened to him. Or suppose there was a murder and the murderer knows that some part of the murder or the argument leading to it might have accidentally been recorded during a session. Or perhaps the rights to very popular song had been contested in court for years and the tapes might show who had really written it.

A paper I'm criticizing used a footnote to falsely accuse someone of distorting the contents of a paper cited. Citing a paper as saying something it does not is a major academic sin. So now I find myself using a footnote of my own to point out that the original citation can be backed up by the contents of the papers cited, and it was the accusation of distortion that actually distorts the contents. And probably the right thing to do. But conducting a dispute in footnotes feels - I dunno, like me and the person I'm criticizing should be at a high tea, sniping verbally at one another. Or perhaps conducting a duel at dawn with pistols that need to be reloaded after every shot.

Thanks for all the thoughts. It's easier for me to write things before I have to make a lot of decisions and stick with them(as a writer, I'm like Windows that way, I think.)

Now that's a manuscript!

[link]

hah. I like the dinosaur.

Weirdly, this kind of makes me feel like a real writer. [link] Was I really that out of line, pointing out that this guy's book on investigative protocols was edited poorly? Or did the pissed-off commenter run a Word spelling-and-grammar check on it herself?

I just finished Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and his editor Richard Todd, which is an excellent book about writing. It's obvious that Kidder's books have been collaborations with Todd.

Weirdly, this kind of makes me feel like a real writer. [link]

I think a good number of conservatives believe that Jesus *was* the love child of God and Ayn Rand.

I have a beta reader I'm swapping chapters with who is giving me good feedback, but moving very slowly. At a couple of weeks per chapter it could be literally a year before she gets through it, but I want to wrap things up sooner than that. Would it be rude to say keep sending your chapters but stop reading mine since my timetable is too soon?

OTOH, I'll probably be revising that long anyhow once my agent gets a look at it. But I don't know that for sure, and I'd hate to have a beta reader taking the time to generate feedback that I'm not going to use.

Tell her your timetable, including the bit about the agent, and leave it to her whether she continues to give feedback?