A Detail Lost....

[alfreda89]

There are things I can catch and change, like "monstrous" carpetbags, or corn "stooks" instead of stocks. But I just realized something that was lost from the original manuscript that will have to remain lost, unless there is ever a special edition of Night Calls and Kindred Rites. Marta is a language chameleon--she changes her voice patterns to

Comments

[pameladean]

Oh, how very annoying. I don't feel, myself, that copy editors should mess with dialogue at all. I had some characters use the locution "you better [do or not do x]," and the copy editor added "had" into every one of them and I HAD to take them all out. The most a copy editor should do with the actual structure of the dialogue is to query it. Mmph.

P.

[alfreda89]

I still have the STET stamp you and DDB gave me! ;^)

And used it!

[pameladean]

Oh, that's wonderful!

We concluded at some point that we really should have made the stamp slightly larger so that its marks would be easier to see. At the time I was incensed by the lower-casing of a great many names in the Secret Country trilogy, and mostly concerned with being able to stet numerous words in the same line or paragraph.

P.

[alfreda89]

Yes, if you were re-doing it, a tad larger would probably be good--if only because vision is challenging right now.

I should send you the 25th anniversary piece I wrote to go inside the ebook for Fire Sanctuary. I talked a bit about being a new author, and allowing a copy editor to lower case Initial Caps or Initial Cap lower case words for a language that was thousands of years in the future.

So I matched the copy edit on the second book.

Then the CE on the second book lced the ICs and ICed the lc.

On the third book I went back to my original manuscript style and STETed the life out of the manuscript. By that time, I'd figured out that up to a point it was a game, and although I was not an English major, I could play, too. ;^)

[sheilagh]

so you know that the editor changed some number of lines -- do you know which scenes?

how is it that you know lines were changed?

[alfreda89]

I hit a big change one, said #$%$ It and matched the book. One of those side effects of sometimes SQUIRREL and continuing through trying to get it done.

Some days I hate my brain.

[6_penny]

I remember in (I think) the first book, Allie also notices this ability of Marta's.

[alfreda89]

It's in there somewhere still, if diluted, which is why I think I can leave it behind for now. I might go looking for one example, but it's a small thing in the overall presentation of the book. I have to finish today. Have to!

[6_penny]

I remember trying to see where in the dialogue Marta had changed her patterns of speach and not seeing it. It itched a bit at the time.

Yay on the progress of the book.

[alfreda89]

I was too tired and just changed one example to the HC version as I was going through, but when I hit a tiny but telling one among friends in the very last chapter, I left the original manuscript unedited. So you will have an Easter Egg to find if you like!