I feel as though I’ve just taken a shower.
Good luck, Mr. President.
Having watched the inauguration…
StandardI feel as though I’ve just taken a shower.
Good luck, Mr. President.
The TV is on, and I’m sooooo excited
StandardSpecial Unit 2 marathon on Sci-Fi Channel today!
Test.
Standardtesting, testing
Copy talk
StandardTomorrow, the associate copy chief at Del Rey will call to review a couple of choices I made on my copy edit. I’d better drop her an email to let her know I wouldn’t mind if she waited until after Obama’s inauguration speech.
Also: testing, testing.
Okay. How about: testing testing.
My copyedited manuscript for Child of Fire goes into the mail today. Yay! I asked my editor to send it to my in-laws’ house, since I’ll be arriving there early on Tuesday. (I also asked her to address it to “Harry ‘Soon to be Wildly Successful’ Connolly” to impress my wife’s parents. I dunno if it’ll work, so cross your fingers for me.)
Weirdly, she tells me that the copyedit is pretty clean. Who would have thought?
I’m currently working on the proposal for book three. I’ve worked out the plot far enough to write it–I just need to keep it short enough that I won’t have to revise it over and over.
Andrew Wheeler’s “Things Writers Believe”
StandardThis was the part that I didn’t know about:
3: Wal*Mart will demand a higher discount.
Discounts in the US must be offered to all accounts on equal terms, by federal anti-trust law (such as the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936). There was a major lawsuit on that very subject in the 1990s, when the American Booksellers’ Association sued a number of publishers over terms.
That was the only part of his post I didn’t know about, but it makes sense. Check out the rest, though. It’s interesting stuff.
Under the heading: “You can’t please everyone.”
StandardCharles Stross digs up one-star reviews of classic fiction on Amazon.com.
My favorite:
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare:
Son of Sammy wrote: “i just read this book. everybody like always talks about how great it is and everything. but i don’t think so. like, it’s been done before, right?? soooo cliched. omg.”
Honestly, I can’t stop laughing over this.
Things writers shouldn’t do
StandardIf an agent rejects your work, don’t fabricate a request and send it anyway.
I understand the urge here. The querier is convinced the book is good enough that the agent will later be glad she was tricked into reading it.
Really, though, no.
“It was horrible–horrible. Like a chicken.”
StandardThe bad, early version of seven pretty good movies.
It’s funny to see that ALIEN was originally called STARBEAST. I feel a close, loving kinship with other writers who would pick such awful titles.
Worst blog?
StandardA couple places online recently (re)posted an article about the 11 worst blogs on the internet.
I know. I’m not going to link to it, but I am going to quote from their choice for Worst Blog Written by a Fictional Character. Read this:
I took the bag of meth and threw it as far as I could. Fortunately, it landed on a mine and exploded. Unfortunately, the alligators were caught in the cloud of meth dust that resulted and they began freaking out. They tried to attack the rhinos, who were having none of it. I stood there for a time watching the fight. The rhinos seemed to have the upper hand for a while, but the alligators had meth on their sides. They drove the rhinos back, right into the drifting meth cloud. That really turned the tables. By this time, all of the animals were heavily under the sway of the drug. The battle raged back and forth, but none of the combatants sustained serious injuries. After a while, the two sides ceased their fighting and wandered into the tiger’s house to scrub the tile and vacuum. I paled in amazement at the power of this drug and the horrible potential that it had to rob creatures of their minds.
I don’t care what anyone says. That is awesome.