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