Re: Thoughts on Biographical Fiction
Posted by:
Skiffle (---.cache.pol.co.uk)
Date: April 24, 2003 07:36PM
I rarely want to change anything in a book once it's been published, although when I got the first copies of my first book, the first page I opened it at had a spelling mistake...
My fifth was copy-edited by a newbie who had an unparralled passion for hyphens: the bloody things had been scattered through the MS like confetti ! And not always in a suitable place either. Dried raspberry pie became dried raspberry-pie. It wasn't the pie that was dried, it was supposed to be the raspberries ! Dialogue and description were rearranged freely, so that in one place, a character appeared to be answering his own question. AAAAAARRRGGHHH !
Normally, I only make a few changes to the work of the copy-editor. For 'San Felipe Guns', I sent back a list of 43 notes. There was another tussle over the wording of a very important sentence (I won).
Things have gone a lot more smoothly since, although there are still too many hyphens for my taste (mutter, mutter....)
Then there was the matter of the blurb for 'Hyde's Honour', but you can find out about that on my website, which for somewhat inexplicable reasons (although I suspect a corporate cock-up) can be accessed via two addresses:
www.genre-fiction.co.uk
www.gillian-f-taylor.co.uk