Where Anna the Piper geeks out
Closing in on the tail end of Chapter 19, at last. It’ll feel good to finish this up.
I know I’ve said this before, but it continues to amaze me how much better Faanshi (to me at least) comes across when I tighten up her dialogue and actions. Even if I don’t actually change her words much. I’m hopeful I am now better walking that line between keeping her gentle and making her strong.
Edited tonight: -58
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,362
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,061
So as I was waiting for Norwescon to wind down, I settled in to hang out in the lobby and check in online. And I found that the Internet has apparently exploded this afternoon. Yeah yeah yeah, I hear you say, isn’t the Internet always exploding about something or other?
This one, though, is personal. They’re calling it #amazonfail on Twitter, and here’s the sitch: apparently Amazon has started de-ranking books on “adult” topics. This has the effective result of making books so quantified very, very hard to find on the site; it’s the equivalent of pulling them off the shelves in a physical bookstore and forcing people to go to the Customer Service desk to ask for copies.
The problem? By “adult”, they’re including a whole host of GBLT-themed books, many of which aren’t “adult” in theme at all, such as Heather Has Two Mommies and John Barrowman’s autobiography. To add insult to injury, if you search for “homosexuality” on Amazon right now, the top hit is something called A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Books of similar nature also show up in the top ten search results.
And this hits me where it hurts. Those of you who have read Faerie Blood know that two of the second-tier characters are a male couple, and should I get to write Books 2 and 3, chances are good that a couple of the other second-tier, female characters will form a couple as well. So if this policy of Amazon’s remains in place by the time Faerie Blood comes out, it’s certainly possible that you’d have a hard time finding the book there.
While I respect the principle of needing to be careful with adult content on a site that can be searched by minors, I am deeply offended that what’s getting called “adult” in this case is so blatantly discriminatory. I’ll be telling them as much, and I’ll be prepared to take my business elsewhere if this policy does not reverse itself pronto.
Pertinent links I’ve found so far include:
http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11369.html
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/12/amazon-censors-its-rankings-search-results-to-protect-us-against-glbt-books/
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/12/amazon-rank/
http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html
http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/comments/amazon-rank/
For those of you on Twitter, follow the #amazonfail hashtag. There’s also a petition you can sign if you choose to here.
ETA: Since I’ve been asked on Facebook, here’s a quote from dearauthor.com about how to express your opinion on this matter to Amazon:
Amazon executive customer service email is: ecr@amazon.com and the customer service phone number is 1-800-201-7575.
I suppose it’s hopelessly lame introverted of me to have spent a good chunk of last night holed up in my hotel room editing Chapter 19 of Lament rather than being out talking to people. But this is what I get for being a hopeless introvert. Hey, I figure I did exchanging words with one total stranger in the bar, and letting another one fasten one of those glow-bracelets around my wrist.
Besides, Lament is waking up again with a vengeance and I need to humor it as long as possible.
Read over a couple of pages and realized that yeah, there’s still some work that needs to be done to finish this off. The last big scene in the chapter–Faanshi, Julian, Alarrah, and Kirinil trying to figure out what the hell they’re doing–is not fundamentally changing in terms of basic detail. And yet, it is; I am finding myself still rewriting a lot of Faanshi’s specific actions in an attempt to strengthen her up. Hopefully it’ll read okay; I’m not sure yet how the Faanshi of Chapter 17 and Chapter 19 will flow out of the Faanshi of the earlier chapters of this draft. Will definitely have to have a beta reader or two make another pass through this when I’m done.
Edited last night: +90
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,420
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,119
This means I need to beat up on Lament of the Dove some more.
Fortunately, my brain’s come back enough that this is an option. I’ve actually made significant progress on Chapter 19; there’s some stuff that still needs to happen to polish this file up, but the end is in sight on it now. Soon I’ll be able to proceed to Chapter 20, which also promises to give a few editing challenges given how much I’ve had to do with 19.
But then there’ll be 21, and I’ll be back to Kestar, and can hopefully spend just about all of that chapter doing a serious word count reduction. I still have about 5K to kill, and I’ve got five more chapters and an epilogue in which to do it.
Edited as of Wednesday: -413
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,330
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,029
Well, to its intended audience of one, anyway: my editor!
Finished off the last four chapters tonight, which went a lot faster than I expected since there was hardly anything for me to go over in the main climax of the story. I had a couple of tweaks I wanted to put in the final tying-up-all-the-loose-ends chapter, but other than that, pretty much nothin’. So I’ve fired the file off to Deena, and now get to commence a) being fidgety about the next round of reviewing, and b) trying to make myself not be fidgety and working on Lament instead.
But this is another milestone, people. We’re getting that much closer!
But editing of Faerie Blood RC1 does continue! Two chapters knocked out tonight with reasonably little pain; in particular, I was really rather satisfied to observe that the sequence at the beginning of Chapter 18 where Kendis and Christopher jam was almost entirely untouched. A little bit more tweaking needed to be done in 19, both from my editor and from stuff I noticed myself. I’ve found myself yanking out a lot of ellipses and adding in contractions–a result, I think, of me having spent so much time these last many months editing the hell out of Lament.
I won’t significantly reduce Faerie Blood‘s word count, I think, but fortunately I don’t have too. We’re holding pretty steady around 97K, which is a nice fast read! If I do say so myself.
Edited tonight: Up through Chapter 19; four more chapters to go!
If you liked the piece I did with Joely featuring her character Herakles, you should go check out the rest of the March 2009 blog tour posts, linked in now on drolleriepress.com.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t encourage you all to in particular note the piece hosted by the fine David Sklar, featuring my very own favorite (fictional) bouzouki-playing Newfoundlander, Christopher MacSimidh, bumping into David’s hero Tam from Shadow of the Antlered Bird. Because Seattle is just chock full of fey like that, and a young Warder-to-be cannot help but find the fey even if he would really rather not!
Go! Enjoy the goodness, folks, and tell ’em I sent you!
For this month’s Drollerie Blog Tour the theme is Character Interviews. This is the piece that resulted with my working with Joely Sue Burkhart on an interview of her character Herakles from the novel Beautiful Death. Enjoy!
Only when she is safely behind the protection of her closed and locked apartment door does Iris let herself explode. She can swear with impunity; her domicile, after all, was the best that the salary of one of New Olympia’s top news anchors could be. The walls are very well insulated, both to keep any urban din without, and her own temper within. For good measure she seizes a few expendable and satisfyingly fragile trinkets, and takes vicious pleasure into hurling them into her fireplace. Each one shatters, and one, a slender glass bottle filled with potpourri, sends sharp bursts of fragrance into her living room as its contents burn.
Continue reading “Drollerie Blog Tour: Joely Sue Burkhart’s Herakles from Beautiful Death”
Only one chapter tonight, but that’s okay, because some of my writing-related time this evening went into finalizing the next post I’ll be putting up for tomorrow’s Drollerie Blog Tour! Y’all be sure to come by and see what I’ll be posting on behalf of Joely Sue Burkhart, giving y’all a glimpse of Marshal Herakles from Beautiful Death.
Went through Chapter 17 tonight, as well as tweaking a couple of small things in previous chapters to clear up things that niggled at me through this edit pass. And it has occurred to me, after all the yammering I’ve done about writing a book being a lot like doing a software release, that this is pretty much RC1 for this book. This brings me lulz.
Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up the pace tomorrow evening. I’m feeling a little off-kilter and am really hoping I’m not coming down with whatever crud is going around at work. Now is really not the time. Besides, I’ve got Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Season 4 DVDs to look forward to as my incentive for getting done with this edit pass! I can’t keel over now!
Edited tonight: Up through Chapter 17. Six more chapters to go!
The Editing Marathon of a Whole Bunch of Editing continued through most of today. I didn’t get all the way to the end of the book–but I did make it about two-thirds of the way through.
Most of the changes my editor’s asked for continue to be small. Amusingly, though, a couple of the side characters have now been tweaked a bit. Jude’s ethnicity has changed a bit and Carson is now a Seattle native; I decided I needed a bit more representation of Seattle-born characters in the cast, in no small part because both of Seattle’s Warders in this book aren’t from Seattle at all.
Out of general technical interest I tried briefly to load my revision version of the manuscript into Open Office, just to see whether it would handle all the change-tracking stuff. The answer to this question, for those of you who might be interested, is “somewhat”. I did notice that the program had noted various changes that had been done, displaying the old text with strikethrough and the new text in blue. But it wasn’t nearly as cleanly handled as it is in Word.
So I guess when any future manuscripts of mine go into beta reading mode or (fingers crossed) being edited by actual editors, I’ll need to stick to Word for change tracking purposes. It’s just too damned useful that way.
Edited today and tonight: Up to the end of Chapter 16. Seven more chapters to go!