I should have posted the night before Tiffany Trent’s night on Readergirlz, but I’m afraid things have been rather busy at both work and in my personal life and the blog is the thing getting pushed aside. But be aware that Tiffany Trent will be in the Seattle area at the beginning of next week to be a part of the Teen Read Week kickoff, and hopefully she’ll be signing at an area bookstore, most likely just dropping in. When I know more, I’ll post it, or just make sure to follow her LJ (
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
) for more info because she’s better at posting such things than I am lately! Also watch the
Posted in Uncategorized
Congratulations to author Nina Hess! A Practical Guide to Monsters has debuted on the New York Times picture book list at #3! Dang, nobody took me up on the YA LOLcats. Oh well. We’ve been light on editing content this week, sorry about that. Mostly it’s because there’s not a lot going on. Work is work. I finished the final edit of book 3 of Hallowmere (oh, the interesting things that are happening!), within the last couple weeks we’ve sent a couple great books off to the printer and they’re *that close* to being in stores available for people to read. And I’ve been cleared by the doctor so that I can use my poor forlorn arm again (okay, that’s not editing content, but that’s important to ME!). I have most of the range of motion back and it’s feeling mostly better, and I’ve even been rollerblading again and didn’t kill myself. I think had a good idea, so here is the thread to post your YA LoLcats. I’ll start it with her suggestion for my MoggetLOL: And for fun, a bonus LOL with ‘s suggestion, which has nothing to do with YA lit: Now, it’s your turn! Make your own YA LOLcat and post it here in the comments or link to your own journal. I took a picture of Mogget tonight that screams LOLcat to me. I was just telling a friend last night that if my own cat could talk, especially when I first get home at night, it would consist mostly of recrimination for not feeding him fast enough. Winchester, on the other hand, is writing a book. The prize for which is nothing but bragging rights. She might not be squeamish of blood or manure or any number of farm-related things most people found disgusting—Maggie knew she stood out in a crowd, especially at lunchtime–but bugs were the one thing she couldn’t stand. Just what I was thinking when I wrote this sentence? The world may never know. I have no idea, that’s for sure. A reader asks: I can only speak for myself and my own experience, but the odds are very slim. The YA market is so diverse, and we can put “clean reads” like Shannon Hale’s Goose Girl beside Personally, I as an editor choose books for what’s IN them, not for what’s NOT in them. I want a good story. Thus, I can love Tithe and Feed and many books like them because they tell good stories. I feel the content that some might find objectionable is rarely gratuitous in YA (not so for some adult books I’ve read . . .)–it always supports the story. (For example, when you read Feed you feel like the characters’ use of degraded language directly illustrates how their culture has degraded.)* A lot of people feel that “teens talk that way” and if you don’t include foul language it won’t feel real to teens. I know teens who talk this way and I know teens who don’t–just as I did growing up. I myself have never found a need to use a curse stronger than “darn,” but I have many friends who swear like sailors and want to see their own reality reflected to them in books as much as I do my own. If you write a compelling story, no editor I know is going to make you add edgy content you don’t want, unless you’re trying to write an edgy story without edgy content and coming off corny. (Example: if your “bad” character swears a lot but the worst he ever says is “fiddlesticks,” there’s something wrong.) If your characterization and plot work, the story should work without adding anything extraneous. Your content should match the story you’re trying to tell. Here at Mirrorstone we try to make sure our books–even our YAs–meet a self-imposed PG-13 rating. We don’t have any hard and fast rules that I have posted on my wall or anything, but we weigh every swear word, every scene with implied or overt sexual content, and scenes of extreme violence, and ask, “Does it serve the story? How can we tell this without disturbing our younger readers? Is this going too far?” And then we edit accordingly. Usually it’s to tone down a scene already written, not to add content to a scene. For example, for an older middle grade novel I once edited, we had a fight scene that included decapitation. I weighed whether the violence was too graphic. I decided it was okay because the good guys were fighting off monsters and the monsters could only be killed by cutting off their heads (any other ki My take on this: Write the book you want to write. Write a good story. If your story is one that doesn’t need that kind of content, it’s rare that someone would suggest it should. Also . . . But perhaps at some point an editor might suggest that the story should veer in a direction you don’t want to take it. Editors are here to suggest how to make the story better, and you never know, an editor might feel something you are opposed to is necessary for the particular story in question. If this rare occurrence ever happens to you, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Discuss it with your editor. Find out what she feels is missing, and then see if you can find another way to solve the problem the editor has identified. I know few editors who will say you MUST do this or I won’t publish your book (it has to be a BIG problem for that to happen after a contract has been signed). Both editors and authors must learn the art of negotiation, and of getting to the heart of what’s wrong in a story. I give suggestions as a way to spark ideas for the author. Suggestions rarely mean edicts. *I must say, if you haven’t read these books because you don’t want to read bad language, you’re missing out on a good story. But then, I rarely watch rated R movies despite being told they’re a good story because I find that few balance out against the content that got them the rating, so I understand where the concern comes from. I can skim things as I’m reading that I can’t as easily when I’m watching something. (But I won’t give up Glory. Or, well, I have a soft spot in my heart for Terminator 2.) The feeling when an editor looks at the final correction on a galley and passes it back to the typesetter without any more corrections is a very happy moment. It means a lot of things: the first is a feeling of relief–one less book to juggle on my schedule! But it’s also a joyful feeling of the culmination of a year or more’s work (and that’s just the time I spent on it, not counting the artists, art directors, designers, typesetters, and of course the author). Soon it’ll be out there for people to read! Manuscript I send edits on the hard copy, along with an editorial letter, to the author, keeping a copy for myself. The author revises and sends the revision back to me via email, and this process continues through whatever number of multiple drafts that might occur, until we’re mutually satisfied. This is the stage at which the big changes must happen–once we get to the next stage, making corrections gets harder. Then the manuscript gets copyedited–a very specific process that looks for grammar and punctuation problems, any continuity problems that I might have missed (“he has brown eyes in the beginning, but has blue eyes on page 250–which is right?”), and a few other very detailed issues. After that, the proofreader gets a pass at finding typos, misspellings, and anything errant like that–a final cleanup. That’s all happening on the manuscript, either on a hard copy or an electronic file. Galley Then this is printed out and it comes back to the editor, and these big printouts that look like the actual pages of the book are the galleys. If you’ve ever heard an author say “I got galleys to look at!” that’s what those are, and now the job of editor and author is to catch anything else that might have been missed in that process, plus some things that are specific to this step. One thing that you can’t ever know until you have a galley, for example, is how the text will flow in the particular design that’s been set up. There’s no way of knowing where a word will break on a line until you see the galley, so you might have to adjust things–rephrase, ask for the typesetter to break a line differently, etc. Ellipses and dashes might end up in places that look funny, standing alone at the beginning of a line rather than up next to the text it connects with. It’s my job to make sure these things are corrected. At any publisher, the time that this stage takes is getting smaller and smaller, which means that any changes made at this stage take up precious time. The galley stage is not the time to rewrite a book! All those kinds of changes should have already been made in the manuscript. There will be the occasional emergency–I once heard Linda Sue Park talk about a dire mistake she realized she’d made right as the book was about to be sent to the printer–but most of the time, the corrections made at this stage are more copyediting and proofreading related, fixing small things that got overlooked in previous stages. Once all those final little corrections are made, and the editor and all the other people involved with the making of the book agree that everything looks good, a book can be sent off to the printer (which involves a lot of pre-press processing that I don’t deal with–but there are people who put all the specs together and make sure the printer has what it needs to print the whole book. In some houses this might be a production editor, in others it might be someone specifically assigned to pre-press tasks like compiling electronic files into the right format for the printer, etc.). So when I say, “I finished a galley” (some houses might call it a “proof”), I mean that I finished the last step I need to do for the guts of a book to be ready for the printer. (The cover is another process entirely, which happens separately from the inside of a book.) Bound galleys I think the authors I work with can attest that I tend to haunt them. I can’t seem to link to today’s, so I posted it with a link to the comic, which came out in the PW Children’s Bookshelf, a really informative newsletter that comes out every week. That link is to last week’s strip, which I got when I clicked on “see the most recent installment.” Maybe by the time you read it, though, it’ll be updated?Monsters!
On the down side, there’s a cold going round these parts and I’ve been sucking on vitamin C and zinc drops like candy. Tonight will be an early night, so I can make it through the rest of the week. anYALOLcat, with a bonus
LOLMogget
But I’m having trouble coming up with a good caption. Here are my two options so far.
Suggestions for a better one?If Mogget could talk, it wouldn’t be like this
Ellsworth’s Journal gives me a giggle every time I read it, especially with the photo illustrations. 🙂A contest
Background: I have been roped into a church talent show for this weekend. I could have offered a number of my talents–photography for the display portion, singing a song or playing on my trumpet–but I don’t have enough time to prepare anything interesting. I’d have to spend money to print and mount my most recent photography, etc. So I volunteered to read something. I know. What was I thinking?
But I figured I must have something I could read. Just now I was rereading a partial manuscript of a story I’ve been working on forever, and I have a chapter that, reading it a year later, I wondered if I’d really written. It’s actually pretty good!
So I’m polishing it tonight, making sure it’s ready for a reading. And I run across this sentence:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it? Make this sentence fit. Give it context in which that clause in the middle actually makes sense!
Go!Q&A: Sex in YA
edgier work like Holly Black’s Tithe or M.J. Anderson’s Feed (both books that tell great stories but have some language content some might not want to read), and both kinds of books will be valued and enjoyed by their target audience. There are so many different kinds of teens and so many different kinds of readers that I think a good story will find its home.
nd of wound just temporarily slowed them down). It worked for that book and the author handled those fight scenes artfully.
As you go through the editing process, your editor will undoubtedly say many times, “It feels like a scene/paragraph/reaction is missing here . . .” She might suggest something, but usually she’ll leave it up to you to answer the questions she asks. Done!
I start with a manuscript from the author, a simple Word document that I print out and edit on the hard copy. (This is a book that is contracted before it’s written. Wit
h a book an author submits to me and then gets approved and contracted, I’ll already have a hard copy to write on.)
Then comes typesetting, though of course nowadays we use programs like InDesign and Quark rather than an ancient Linotype or Teletype. An editor sends the electronic file with all the “guts” of the book to be flowed into the book design. This is the step where chapter openers and artwork are placed, and the insides of the book are made all pretty.
Occasionally you might hear someone refer to “bound galleys,” though, and might wonder what that has to do with the loose paper I make final corrections on.
“Bound galleys” is usually just another way of referring to an ARC, or advance reading copy (though some houses might differentiate between the two because they have different processes). These are early copies that are used for marketing purposes. They’re printed and bound version of those early typeset pages I was referring to, perhaps hot off the early press or perhaps specially made for promotional purposes. ARCs gets sent to other authors for blurbs, to reviewers, and perhaps to librarians and teachers at trade shows or to other influential readers. It often looks just like the final book would but with marketing information on the cover, or perhaps it might have a plain paper cover but look the same inside as a final book. But bound galleys are different from the galleys an editor works with to make final corrections right before the book is sent to the printer.
*If you’re
wondering, the book in question is Red Dragon Codex by R.D. Henham (with assistance from Rebecca Shelley!), the first of a series of books featuring the dragons from A Practical Guide to Dragons. In the first book, Mudd lives a peaceful life in his small town, tinkering with the mill and any mechanical devices that he can find. But his peaceful life soon changes when, out of nowhere, a red dragon attacks, burning the town and kidnapping Shemnara, the village seer. Only one clue is left behind—a cryptic note telling Mudd, “Seek the silver dragon.” It’s a fantastic adventure in which dragons take center stage. Look for it this coming January–I hope you love it as much as I did.Today’s Tales from the Slush Pile
