Wednesday, March 16, 2005
I have many words in front of me today and the hope that I might reach the end of Chapter Three before nightfall, so this will, hopefully, be brief.
Yesterday, I did 1,002 words on Chapter Three of Daughter of Hounds. What I thought at the start of the day would be a short two- to three-hundred word scene grew into a thousand-word scene, Sadie reading to Emmie from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and discussing wormholes. Sadie has become more important to this novel than I ever expected her to be. I thought she'd only be Emmie's stepmother, off in Manhattan, mentioned in little more than passing, and now she's become awfully close to a central character. I think what this means, and it frightens me to say so, is that the book wants to be bigger than were my original intentions. Bigger means more months spent in the writing.
I can happily announce that To Charles Fort, With Love is pretty much on schedule. I just got Ramsey Campbell's afterword this morning (and if ever something could inspire me to spend the day sitting here slamming these keys, that was it), which I will be forwarding to subpress. Now the book can be laid out and the ARCs printed for reviewers and copyediting. Also, Bill Schafer has the cover art from Ryan Obermeyer (who did such gorgeous work on Low Red Moon) and will soon have the interior artwork from Rick Kirk.
Speaking of copyediting, a subject so near and dear to my heart, I meant to mention the trouble that Tolkien had with the CEs at Unwin and Allen in 1953, which just goes to show that some things never change. As recounted in Carpenter's biography, dwarves was changed to dwarfs, elvish to elfish, further to farther, and ("worst of all," said Tolkien) "elven to elfin. Fortunately, all these changes were caught in the galleys and uncorrected. Uncorrecting the correcting work of CEs forms a great part of the work of authors, I have found. In the case of these changes to the text of The Lord of the Rings, the defence offered by the CEs was that they followed dictionary spellings! Never mind that Tolkien was an Oxford professor and philologist and certainly would have known what he meant, or that the dictionary excuse hardly explains the insistence upon further over farther, which certainly are not interchangeable.
The chilly weather is back, making me miserable.
Okay, that's more than I meant to write. Off to make the doughnuts...
12:05 PM
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