When I wasn’t writing, cooking, or sleeping at the retreat, I re-read the Old Races trilogy (affiliate link), which I started because I needed to figure out where scene breaks were in some cases because the conversion from the old epubs to the new ones isn’t always tidy.
I spent so much time swearing at the copy editor, though.
These books, which I’ve talked about the difficulties of writing in places that I can’t find in two seconds so am not linking to right now, had an additional difficulty to the general difficulty of writing them, which was:
The copy editor hated my writing style, and rewrote MASSIVE CHUNKS of the first and third books to suit their tastes.
No editor is supposed to do this. Ever. Copy editors are ESPECIALLY not supposed to do this. If an author’s writing style doesn’t fit comfortably into the house copy editing style, the copy editor needs to adjust. They ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT be rewriting ANYTHING. EVER. And this was back when copy edits were still done on paper, and I was too new an author to send them back an uncopyedited manuscript with a note that said “don’t waste my time,” which is what I would do now. And it was so appalling and so comprehensive a revision on the CE’s part that it was physically difficult to see what had gone wrong in places, much less correct them, so there were still A LOT of relatively minor, but glaring to me, errors that made it to print, and have never been corrected.
The CEs on the first book were so bad that even as a newbie writer I did tell my editor to never, ever give me that CE again. I didn’t have them for the 2nd book, but I got them again for the third, along with my editor’s apologies, which did fuck all in terms of the decimation the CE did on the book. I will die mad about it all. There are SO. MANY. STUPID. LITTLE. MISTAKES that are ENTIRELY the fault of the CE.
I’m correcting them now, though.
Last time I read these books I was trying very hard to have my Editor Brain turned off, and I enjoyed reading them a lot more than I did this time. This time involved a lot of me yelling swear words and flipping double birds at my e-reader as I took pictures of all the pages with errors on them. There are more than sixty of them. There was a LOT of swearing.
Despite that, though, I did catch myself off-guard a couple of times – there was one chapter end where I went, “OOPS!” out loud and everybody around me was like “what? what???”
Me: my own book surprised me
My son: o.O
and other bits… well, chapters 17-25 of HOUSE OF CARDS are probably one of my favorite sections of writing I’ve ever done. (It’s the ball and quorum scenes, if you’re wondering.) And I did think, as I was reading HANDS OF FLAME, that I had really done a pretty good job of ratcheting up the tension from one book to the next.
I also really thoroughly enjoyed the wildly unreliable narration, particularly but not exclusively in context of Janx and Daisani; there were places where, having now written a bunch of supporting short stories that often completely contradict the story as recalled by those two (and indeed, Alban), I had moments of proper feet-kicking glee as I went “LIAR! BAHAHAH, LIIIIAAAAARRRR!”
So, yeah. I’m utterly thrilled to have these books back out in the world, I LOVE the new covers by Fakel Barros Studio, and I can’t wait to show you the updates for the short story collections to go with these!