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Saturday, June 25, 2005

Two Surprises (kind of) In One Day

Yesterday was my day for things that were semi-surprising. It kind of started on Thursday, when I received an email from an online friend congratulating me on winning the Golden Quill. I was like, huh? I did? I had no idea. She was a finalist as well, so I'd assumed she'd received an email and that mine would be arriving, but it never did.

So Friday (yesterday), I'm paging through my RWR, and there, in a full-page ad at the front of the magazine, is the Golden Quill winners listed. And there is The Power of Two listed as the winner for best SF/Fantasy/Futuristic. That was a really cool semi-surprise. :-) The information isn't up on the website yet, so I'm not posting a link. Even though I saw it in black and white in the RWR, it still doesn't really feel official yet, you know? I think if I had an email telling me I'd won, or if the winners were posted on the website, I'd feel more comfortable. Weird. I know.

My second semi-surprise came when I arrived home from work. My galleys had come. Now I was expecting them, so it wasn't a complete surprise, I just thought they'd be a little later since the revision work was done so late. My cover flats were there as well, so now I have more than one cover flat--HURRAH!

I did a quick reading-scan of the galley and it doesn't look too hideous on first glance. I'll have to read more carefully, of course, with red pen in one hand and post it notes on the other. The major thing that I noticed is the epilogue. My editor wasn't happy with the way I closed the story and he asked me to try again. So I did. Obviously, however, version 2 was worse than version 1 because the galley ends with the first one, not the revised one. Only now that I reread it, it just seems so abrupt. :-( I don't like it and I'm trying to come up with one or two (maybe three) sentences to close it more smoothly. GAH! There's not much room to play because this is the galley.

The big plus is that the other changes seem to have been incorporated smoothly enough which is a minor miracle considering how little time I had to do everything.

There's a letter with the galleys from the production assistant that I found amusing. He's my third production assistant in three books, so he doesn't know me, but I still thought it was humorous. He wrote something along the lines of: if I want my changes incorporated, I need to get the galley back to him by July 8th. If he'd worked with me before, he'd have just said to have the galleys back by that date because I'm obsessive.

What he is going to get back is a galley with a post it note on each page where I found something that needs to be changed. There will be comments on the post it notes. He will also receive a spreadsheet with all changes listed in order by page number. It will have the way it is in the galley and what it should be changed to. The information on the spreadsheet will also be in various colors depending on how important the change is to me. :-) Because it's the galley, not all changes will be made, so I think it's vital that production be aware of the order in which to make the changes.

I keep telling people, it's not easy to be obsessive/compulsive. :-)

MN Weather Report: 76 degrees. The humidity dropped, but it's windy today.