Tuesday, June 21, 2005

More on In the Mood

I'm currently communicating with my editor about her suggested edits for In the Mood. I'd be very surprised if the book is released this week. But I'll keep you updated, so stay tuned!

And check out the review of All I Ever Wanted at Paperback Reader. They both gave it a B-... not overwhelmingly great, but not horrid, either. I am, however, perplexed by HelenKay's comment about editing issues, including excessive use of adverbs and "obvious misspellings." I am aware I overuse adverbs (she says wryly:-), but misspellings? Obvious ones? I take great pride in the fact that my books have fewer typos than the average New York-pubbed book. I know of two typos in All I Ever Wanted, and neither is a misspelled word. I'm wildly curious as to what HelenKay spotted that I didn't.

5 comments:

  1. I said this to Ellen privately and will go ahead and say it here. I didn't mean to suggest All I Ever Wanted is riddled with spelling errors. It's not. There were a few spellings that struck me as odd and that's why I commented on it. I'll go back through and if the criticism (which was about editing, not about Ellen's writing)is unfair, I'll revoke it.

    About the grade: it's subjective, hard to pin down and feel free to ignore it. Think of it this way, Wendy has a shrine to Emma Holly in her house and only gave Holly a C in the last review. Everybody should focus on the review's main points -good writing and interesting hero - buy the book and assign their own grade. Writing a beta hero can't be easy and I liked Max (enough to be mad at the heroine for not immediately liking him). He is worth the read.

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  2. I should add I'm not suggesting that the grade should be higher (or lower:-). I really don't think all my books are perfect, honest! And I actually found this review to be very helpful and very well written.

    I may be a little overly sensitive about the spelling issue. (I was the champion speller in my city in junior high, and I think it gave me a permanently big head:-). I told HelenKay privately that my concern was that people tend to think of ebooks as poorly edited, so her comment might reinforce that idea. That being said, it IS entirely possible that I misspelled a bunch of words. Just because I *think* I'm a terrific proofreader doesn't prove that I am, and it is quite easy to miss your own errors. So no criticism of HelenKay or Wendy is intended here. I'm delighted they picked my book to review among several bigger and better-known authors.

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  3. Over the weekend I had a futuristic novel accepted, so I was working on the artist suggestion form. One of the scenes I find relevant had a "btu" where I know a "but" should have been. I checked and doubled checked all those things. How in the heck that typo/spelling error happened... ??? Computers have gremlins. I swear they do.

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  4. I also proof obsessively and have excellent critique partners with eagle-eyes. It amazes me how some things still slip past us for my editor to discover.

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  5. I went through Catching Caroline at least a dozen times. It went through three cp's (one of them twice), two editors at AQP (who each read it twice and three times respectively) and it still went to print with a "my" where a "me" should have been.

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