After some predictable last minute struggles, we got Heavy Time and Hellburner up last night. Thanks to all you hard-working little scanners, Carolyn remains sane and ready to move on to the final chapters of her current book.
(And the crowd goes wild!)
Lynn is posting regularly and you must check out her posts. She really should put them together eventually for a mainstream market…you know, those collected essays by humorists? They are wonderful!
And the joy you “hear” in her writing voice it back in her real voice. It’s sooooo cool!
I’m back to finding where I was in the copyedits on RoI. Was up til 4am and back at it this am at 8:30. I’m trying, but we keep having little mini-disasters…like the hacking and recalcitrant files, and, well, life! :D It’s hard to get the brain back onto this particular little 52 card pickup.
This is turning into a nightmare of painful memories and a massive jigsaw puzzle. Picture three 2500 piece puzzles, very similar but not quite identical, all mixed up…with pieces missing from all of them.
I could just put the ms up the way it is now. There’s nothing “wrong” with it that every published ms ever set by human beings doesn’t have…i.e. a word missing here and there, the occasional it’s instead of its….you know the kind of thing. (In fact, the versions of the GT, UL and Harmonies are all of them sans CE…which I kind of regret, as it it another layer of polish, but I don’t have the CE for them…lost in a move somewhere, darn it. But those are the “raw” versions with another very careful pass by me for errors…and a lot of corrections for the typesetters’ typos that made it into print! 
)
The problem is, any time you let me at a ms, I find things to tweak, and I wouldn’t tweak them if I didn’t think the changes improved the story and/or prose. In this case, I was presented with the copyedits and page proofs all at the same time, with a very short deadline. The problem is, so much of what was in the copy edits was just plain wrong, and most of the other changes were not the way I wanted to present my work to the world (predominantly spelling choices, as referenced elsewhere). But there were some very legitimate errors of the nature expressed above, so I really want to get those into the CC version.
But that requires sorting them out from the CEs.
Well, Carolyn went through one copy of the CE, I went through another. I then went through the changes we wanted and put the ones I thought I could get onto the pageproofs, which were then sent to DAW. Which means, the page proofs hold the bare minimum and those CE hold the changes I’d really like to have.
To add to the fun, these three versions were all mixed up. (The joys of moving several times, and flooding disasters…and thinking I’d never reference them again.)
And have I mentioned, the file I’m going from, while very close, is not the file I actually printed to send to DAW. I thought it was, but I’m finding some formatting differences that imply otherwise, so I’m having to be on the lookout for Significant Differences between my file and what I think of as the “real book”. Anyway, I’m just about through the page proofs and after that, I’ll do a scan of the CE for missing words and rejected changes, then I s/b golden.
As I recall, Lightning was the worst. After that, I knew not to request my stylistic choices, so the constant spelling changes and single quote changes aren’t hiding the legitimate CE changes.
Well…this has become TMI. Big time. I’m just a little foggy this AM and trying to get my braincells back on line.
Caffeine…that’s what I need. Serious caffeine….
Later!
Oh, enjoy the new books! I love this set, and haven’t had time to reread the e-versions. DS and Cyteen and 40,000 are great books, but I really love these “smaller” stories…HT, HB, Merchanter’s Luck, TriPoint…These are the type of books that made Carolyn’s A/U universe come to life for me.
Oooooo…I’m so excited.
