Wednesday, March 05, 2003
All day yesterday, and much of the night, until 11:30 p.m., sacrificed to reworking Low Red Moon and tidying up the ms. Finally, when a little sticky bit of gray matter leaked out my left ear and fell, plop, on the office floor, I stopped and watched Farscape DVDs (all three parts of "Liars, Guns, and Money"). Today, Spooky and I have to go through all of Jennifer's notes. Hopefully, tonight I can begin printing the revised final draft for Roc. I loathe this tedious work. Discovering that Sadie's cherry-red hair suddenly turns black partway through the book (it was black in Threshold, of course). Discovering that four different characters at four different points in the novel say, "You won't shoot me." Or something damned close to "You won't shoot me." But the worst of it has been issues of continuity relating to time: days of the week, phases of the moon, the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, etc. At some point, I moved all the action forward, because the book has to climax at moonrise on Halloween 2001, and Spooky started discovering places where Jennifer and I had missed references to time that needed to be changed. Thursdays that ought to be Sundays. Stuff like that. Almost impossible to track it all down. And my copyeditor will be far more obsessed with capitalizaing trademarks than actually editing for continuity and suchlike.
The issue of capitalizing trademarks is a particular sticking point with me. It never came up with Silk, but became an issue with Threshold. I was told I had to capitalize words like Laudromat and Dumpster, or Roc would be sued by the copyright holders. Sheetrock, for Christ's sake, has to be capitalized. This all arises from fears by trademark holders that their trademarks will be devalued if words like Spam and Naugahyde fall into "common usage," and a belief that allowing authors to demote the TMs from proper to regular nouns is a significant agent in that fall. Corporations actually buy ads in magazines like Writer's Digest, imploring authors to respect trademarks. Nothing looks stupider to me than a manuscript filled with capitalized products. Especially things like "laundromat" and "dumpster," which have long since fallen into the common vocabulary. Copyeditors are quite zealous about trademarks. Without them, capitalism as we know it would collapse over night.
No, I'm not exactly in a bad mood. But I am tired of picking at this poor ms. I want to write something, do an honest day's work. And the galleys for The Five of Cups will be along very soon, and the galleys for the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon won't be far behind.
My idiot "grammar checker" in MS Word has been trying to convince me to use "that" when "who" or "whom" is actually called for. It insists that inanimate objects and persons require no distinction. It can go to Hell.
I should stop now, before someone gets hurt . . .
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