I’ve certainly been following the Mandy De Geit Saga, though I don’t know if you have been. Short version: a sorry excuse for a publishing house rewrote the story they’d accepted for an anthology, without telling her about it, then got snitty when she objected. But that doesn’t really do the horrors of it justice, so you should go read the link.

It caused a friend to email me and ask what I thought of the substantive part of the issue, which I take to mean “what do I think of editors rewriting stories,” and my answer got so long I thought I’d make a blog post of it:

I’ve never met anybody published with a major publisher who’s claimed this has happened to them. Editors don’t do that.

Editors say “I think there’s a problem with this book in that it falls too perfectly between romance and fantasy. Would you consider removing the 30,000 words that are the hero’s point of view and revising it to keep the same story only without his POV?”, causing you to cut 30K and rewrite the other 70K and substantially improving the book by doing so. They will also say “If you don’t want to do that, I will give this book to our romance department and see if they think it would work for them instead of in our fantasy line.” (TRUTHSEEKER)

Or they say “I think X Y and Z need some looking at,” causing you to finally grimly accept that the book actually has no plot (which, frankly, you suspected all along and were hoping your editor would not notice) and that XY&Z can be fixed by ripping out 2/3rds of the book and rewriting what’s left (HOUSE OF CARDS).

Or they say “This book is wonderful except I don’t understand why the main character is doing anything. Can you add motivation?” (URBAN SHAMAN. THE CARDINAL RULE. THUNDERBIRD FALLS. HEART OF STONE. I’d started to get the hang of it by COYOTE DREAMS.)

Or they say “I’m concerned that the cruelty of this scene will lose readers for good. Can you make it more clear that it’s the magic pushing this?” (THE QUEEN’S BASTARD, and if you’ve read it you can guess the scene, and it’s the one change I’ve ever made in a book that I understood and agreed with the editor’s reasons, but don’t necessarily feel it was the right thing to do for the story.)

Once in a great, great while, they say “You know what, I think this one hits all the notes we need, no revision letter this time!”, causing you to be paranoid and suspect that really in fact time got too short and the book probably desperately does need revising but it’s going to print anyway and you’ve never been quite brave enough to reread it to see whether it stands up (THE FIREBIRD DECEPTION).

A legitimate editor/publisher would not do what was done to Mandy DeGeit. Vast numbers of people who are unpublished seem to have a hardcore belief that this kind of thing happens all the time. That sex scenes are added to books, that storylines are revised, rewritten, removed, all without the author’s permission or notification.

This does not happen. Not in real publishing. Editors don’t have time to rewrite your book for you. Indeed, if editors wanted to write your book for you, they would be writers, not editors.

The most ungodly rewrites I’ve gotten from editors have been from copyeditors who apparently dislike my style and feel they should improve it. And believe me, if I ever have that happen again I will send the manuscript back as it was originally, with a big fat note on it that says “Don’t waste my time.” (I was too new to the game to do that when it did happen, which is a goddamned shame, because there are paragraphs in HANDS OF FLAME which are nearly incomprehensible because not everything I fixed back got transferred smoothly to the print files. And yes, I’m still pissed.) That is not a CE’s job any more than it’s an editor’s job, and although almost everyone in traditional, legitimate publishing does seem to have a CE horror story, nobody I’ve ever talked to has said an editor rewrote their book.

As for Ms. DeGreit, I hope she’s a terrific writer and is able to parlay this entire fiasco into a relevant and useful career launch.

I have just gotten four* advanced reader’s copies for BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER to give away. They’re softcover, uncorrected proofs, and actually if the book itself looked like this I would be quite delighted, but it’s going to be even more gorgeous and splendid, so don’t forget to pre-order your copy. :)

But at $40, it’s also going to be expensive. So here’s how this give-away is going to go:

Everybody reading this post, at whatever site you’re coming from (Facebook, Goodreads, Livejournal, mizkit.com, cemurphy.net, G+, Twitter) can put in their name once for a random draw. I’ll give two of the books away that way.

The other two I want to give to people who can genuinely not afford the $40 price tag on the book. Obviously this is on the honor system, but generally I find my readers to be extremely good people, so I’m going to trust you on this. Leave a comment or, if you prefer to keep the request private, send an email to cemurphyauthor@gmail.com, saying you’d like to be in for the Budget Giveaway. You don’t have to offer up details; it’s not going to be a Saddest Story Wins scenario, but rather another random draw from the second pool of names.

All I request–and this is of all four winners–is that you write a review of the book and either post it on your own blog & give me a link for it, or provide it to me so I can post it for you. I’ve never had a short story collection before, so I’d like to see it get some traction, and this is how you guys can help give it some.

So. That’s how this works. The contest ends sometime Monday, May 21st, so comment before then. Ready set go!

*technically five but I’M KEEPING ONE because i almost never ever ever get ARCs! also so i can do proofs on it. :)

Dear Self:

Lance Armstrong’s wonderful pep talk in Dodgeball ought to be enough to get anybody’s lazy ass out of bed and off to a workout (or whatever), but since that seems to be failing, let me emphasize heavily that your excuses are invalid.

Love,
Me

I dropped by the butchers today to ask if they’d liked the cake. They had; yer man who’d asked for it said it had been devoured and they’d all but eaten the tin. Fighting each other off, they were, he said, and he said to the fellow who was getting me my order, “This is the lady who brought the cake!” And the fellow’s eyes got wide and he said, “It was gorgeous!” So that was great fun. And I said I had another throw-away tin so perhaps I’d have to make them another cake, and yer man, the first fellow, said, “If you must…” So I’ll probably do that in a few weeks here. *laughs* :)

Speaking of baking, how about some Brown butter double fudge chocolate chip cookies? I’m going to have to try making those one of these days. Except I’ve no chocolate chips left so it won’t be soon. Although then I will ALSO have to try that kind of cookie with the Chocolate Migraine Cookie recipe, because that’s the only chocolate cookie recipe I’ve ever had that I thought was worth bothering with.

And to make this a Some Things Make A Post post…

Elephants travel for days to mourn a human friend. Warning: may make your screen blurry.

Changing water to fuel–if this is a repeatable experiment, it has great potential. Of course, all things with great potential will be snatched up by the oil companies and crushed into oblivion. Seriously, the best thing about that Val Kilmer “The Saint” movie? Releasing the inexhaustible fuel supply code onto the internet. I would like all genuinely useful discoveries to do that.

(Also I want the polyurethane-eating bacteria discovered in the Amazon to be released into landfills worldwide. Yes, yes, of course things could go horribly wrong, but I’ve really begun to embrace the “fuck it, it’s already gone horribly wrong and we know what the results of this horrible wrongness are, let’s see what the results of that horrible wrongness are!”)

George Lucas, exasperated with wealthy neighbors refusing to let him build a movie studio on land he owns in their posh neighborhood, thoughtfully backs down and comes up with an excellent use for the land instead.

Oh! And! I’m teaching a Fantasy Fiction writing course at the Irish Writers’ Centre this weekend! Worldbuilding, magic development & more! It should be fun, so come along if you’re in the neighborhood! :)

- post printer on jumbletown
- answer cover art email
- call brady
- do dishes

I’m feeling sort of sorry for poor cover artists who have to work with me directly, because I’m terribly finicky. OTOH, Tara O’Shea found an amazing model for the OLD RACES: ORIGINS e-book collection cover, and has made a gorgeous, gorgeous cover for it (which I am finicking about :)). I am so very glad for the Magick 4 Terri auction that introduced me to Tara, ’cause I am SO HAPPY with the covers she’s doing. Yay!

A Twitter discussion just now made me go scour the intartubes to see if *anybody* is making a chair-mounted split keyboard like mine anymore (picture here, though that’s not actually mine). As far as I can tell, no one is. I tell you what, if somebody created a boutique shop for those things, they would sell. I live in fear of mine dying, and from comments around teh intarwebs, so does everybody else who has one. How does one go about creating a small boutique shop for this kind of thing? (Much like one goes about making a small fortune in publishing, I expect: start with a large one.)

Let’s see. Yep, yep, yep, nope, that’s it. Got nothin’ else right now. :)

eee eee eee

YAY SQUEE yesterday Subterranean Press said the BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER advanced reader copies were shipping! You’ve pre-ordered your copy, right? ’cause it’s going to be SUPER PRETTY and, er, well, I rather like the stories in it too.

This book is a hidden history of the Old Races, following the stories of Baba Yaga’s Daughter and of Vanessa Grey as they use and are used by the Old Races’ greatest rivals: dragonlord Janx and master vampire Daisani.

Trust me: if I ever write more books in the Old Races universe, you’re going to want to have read these stories. Between them and the Old Races e-collections I’m releasing this summer, everything will be set up to launch into the next Old Races series…

Sort of, anyway.

Every once in a while* I must remind myself that I do not have to do All The Things All The Time. And sometimes I must say No Stop Don’t Take On Any More Projects, Because Otherwise Your Head Will Explode.

So in a momentary fit of sanity prevailing, I declare myself full-up of projects for the next 18 months. Not taking any new ones on**.

This does not, of course, include projects on proposal which may sell, or the ones you guys don’t yet know about, of which there are at least three. But beyond that, yeah. Sanity Must Prevail.

Dammit. :)

*by which i mean CONSTANTLY
**I will reconsider if, y’know, I get invited to an anthology with 3 NYT headliners, but yeah.

Ted, whose employer is a company that contracts tech support for Microsoft, just met the global head of customer experience for Microsoft, who is from Kenai and graduated the year before I did.

Cue the song. :)

Dear Persons Who Have Been Following The Cake Saga And Want To Know When I Will Make You One:

Come to Eurocon 2014 in Dublin and I will. August 22-24, the weekend after London’s Worldcon. Seriously, you cannot possibly get a better deal than this: 10 days of fandom, PLUS CAKE.

Love, Me

I brought a cake to the butcher today, as promised a few months ago. :)

Luckily for me, the man who’d asked for it originally was there, and I said if he didn’t mind, I needed a moment of his time. He said “You’ve my full attention!”

So I said to him that a few months ago I’d been in and had bought some small eggs rather than large, and he’d been giving me a hard time about it, but I’d said I preferred the smaller ones for baking, which I liked to do, and that he had said, “You should make us a cake!” at the time.

His eyes got very round and he said, “Ah, no, ye never…”

I said, “I did!” and produced the cake from beneath the buggy while he kept saying, “No, ye didn’t so, you did…! Thank you! Ye never, but…what kind is it,” asked he, as he tugged the plastic wrap away from the top.

“Lemon,” said I, and he got a whiff and his eyes got even bigger. (It was a very lemony cake, made from my Perfect Lemon Cake recipe, and it was probably the best PLC I’ve made, in fact. I know this because it’s a generous recipe so I had enough to make not only a sheet cake, but a handful of cupcakes so we could taste test it. :))

“It smells garges*,” said he, and to the man next to him, “Take a whiff of this! This lady bought eggs a while back and I slagged her and said she ought to make us a cake and she did!” Another butcher walked by and he said, “Smell this!” to that one too, and to me he said, “I ought to slag you more often!”

I allowed as how he should, and he spluttered more thanks, and I went off very very pleased with myself as he was walking through the shop making everybody inhale the cake’s scent and telling the story over again. :)

ETA: I should’ve known to just link to it in the first place: here is the Perfect Lemon Cake recipe, tidied up and shaped more like a recipe than what I actually originally posted years ago. :)

*gorgeous