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September 16 2007

Revising, revising, revising (and blowing my nose).

Meljean POW!, Revisions, Writing

It never fails. Deadline or revisions/copy-edits? I get a massive kick-my-ass-and-call-me-Sally head cold.

This is what pulled me out of it long enough to blog: Oscar Wilde kicks ass in a Jonah Hex comic. Totally surreal.

The revisions/copy-edits have to go out on Tuesday, so I should be alive again then. I have a guest blog tomorrow at Jacquelyn Frank’s, and another later this week at bam’s, and I have no idea yet what I’ll be doing for either of them, but there will probably be a free book involved. Then I’ve had two ARCs to talk about that I thought I would be able to before the revisions landed on my doorstep, so I’ll finally get to those, too. I also answered a questionnaire for an upcoming ATBF column, but I’m not sure any of my responses were actually coherent, due to revisions/DayQuil (no matter what it says about being non-drowsy, I get woozy.)

Things I have learned from recent copy-edits:

I’ve been spelling ‘draught’ (as in a deep gulping swallow) the British way. It should be ‘draft’ instead. It doesn’t look right to me, but according to Bartelby.com, it’s true. I blame it on the Harlequins I read growing up.

I still use too many semi-colons. I still can’t remember if ‘semi-colon’ should have a hyphen in it or not. Or if, when I set off ‘semi-colon’ to point out that it is a word functioning as a word, if it should have single quotation marks or double. I think it’s supposed to be double.

I knew this, but I have a really hard time doing it (because it looks stupid): putting an internal quotation mark outside the sentence punctuation. This is correct:

“What you don’t know,” Jane said, “is that Manny told her, ‘You’re fat.'”

But I want it to be,

“What you don’t know,” Jane said, “is that Manny told her, ‘You’re fat’.”

Microsoft Word is retarded. I can’t count how many times a line of dialogue ended with a dash (or rather, two hyphens) and it closed the line with an open quotation mark. All of them had to be flipped around, *sigh*. Does anyone know of a way to create an auto-text thingy that will override the MS Word default, and force it to use close-quotation marks after a dash/double-hyphen?

I use a lot of dashes.

SOUL SONG and THRESHOLD I made a video.

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About Meljean

Meljean was born on a small farm in the country of Florin. Her favorite pasttimes were riding her horse and tormenting the farm boy who worked there. His name was Westley...but she never called him that.

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Please direct all queries regarding rights, contracts, and blurb requests to Nephele Tempest of The Knight Agency.

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