Incompetence, Sheer Incompetence
My author copies of my latest romance, A Love For All Seasons, were delivered yesterday. My husband and I were on our way out, so the box sat in a corner for a few hours. It was after 10PM when we returned and I was exhausted, but something told me to open the box and look at one of my books. I recognized that "Something's wrong" feeling.
I examined a book. There were my Acknowledgments in the beginning (my goodness, did I recognize so many people?), my dedication. So far, so good.
My chapter titles were there. I remembered that I'd chosen them carefully, with the plan of running a months-long contest that I mentioned in my reader letter. I made a mental note to put the details on my web site.
Then I turned to the end to see what else I'd said in my reader letter.
It wasn't there.
Instead, there was a scene from a chapter more than halfway into the book. My eyebrows shot up. What the hell was this doing here? Is this how they ended my story?
I quickly backtracked a couple of pages. There was my original ending, thank God. But there on the very next page was this out-of-place scene, looking like a continuation of the book that is sure to confuse readers.
Then it hit me.
This was the scene I'd chosen for my "teaser," something I'd submitted under the publisher-described title "Page One," (there's a clue, Sherlock), to indicate its placement in the finished product. So how did this end up at the end? And what the hell happened to my reader letter? (Hint: Look at the title of this blog.)
A flood of memories came back. Me muttering curses as I read the "page proofs" (which had obviously not been, well, proofed) that I had to return because of run-on and repeated lines. A high school dropout could have done a better job. And who knows if all the corrections I pointed out were even made.
I think I already ended a blog these two words, but in this case they fit just as well, so I'm going to say it again.
I'm disgusted.
My Interview with Karen Scott
I did an interview with Karen Scott of KarenKnowsBest.blogspot.com. I was anxious to see it; the interview was some time ago and I've been busy, and I wanted to see what I said!
Anyway, here's the link, so mosey on over if you get a chance:
http://karenknowsbest.blogspot.com/2007/03/racism-in-publishing-author-bettye.html
I did an interview with Karen Scott of KarenKnowsBest.blogspot.com. I was anxious to see it; the interview was some time ago and I've been busy, and I wanted to see what I said!
Anyway, here's the link, so mosey on over if you get a chance:
http://karenknowsbest.blogspot.com/2007/03/racism-in-publishing-author-bettye.html
My Website E-Mail is Dead . . . What a Way To Start a New Week
I think the above heading says it all.
It's like I've been cut off from the world!
And I don't have the faintest idea what to do about it. My last resort is paying that $59 fee Microsoft charges for service on Outlook Express. I just paid Linksys $30 last week to restore my wireless connection after an installation of a name antivirus software product shut it down completely.
I'm disgusted at this point.
I think the above heading says it all.
It's like I've been cut off from the world!
And I don't have the faintest idea what to do about it. My last resort is paying that $59 fee Microsoft charges for service on Outlook Express. I just paid Linksys $30 last week to restore my wireless connection after an installation of a name antivirus software product shut it down completely.
I'm disgusted at this point.
File Under 'This Shit Could Only Happen To Me'
Last Thursday I had a lovely e-mail from a reader about my book, One on One. It was one of those intelligently written reviews I like, where the reader went into detail about what she likes about my writing. She's sharp, with a real eye for detail. She even pointed out an error to me, that I had attributed an action to a character who wasn't even in the scene, including the page number. (My in-house editor only looked at the early portions of this book; it was written as I was preparing to relocate and it was an extremely busy time for me.)
In her closing, she asked me a question and asked me specifically to please be sure to respond. Because I was at a client site, I read this through a web site that allows people to check their e-mail remotely. I looked forward to sending her a response every bit as detailed as her e-mail.
As I always do, I checked my e-mail again just before 4PM (my agent is in the East, where it is an hour later). This time I had an ominous message: "You have no messages."
How could that be? I should have been looking at all the messages I received earlier, plus any new ones. They would remain on the remote e-mail retriever until I got home and brought up my default e-mail carrier, Outlook Express. This suggested that all my e-mail was gone!
I told myself not to worry, that when I opened Outlook Express on my desktop at home my mail would return. That night, after league bowling, I booted up my computer. A few e-mails came in, none of them from earlier in the day. My e-mail had disappeared!
I contacted the remote service and asked if they could help me. I'm still waiting for a response, although with the weekend it might take a few days. But I feel just awful about this. The lady who contacted me is going to think I don't want to be bothered, and nothing could be further from the truth. I can't remember her name or anything, just that it was a damn good letter and that I wanted to help her with what she asked me about. I hope she'll see this and contact me again.
Cross your fingers for me that the e-mail service can somehow restore this correspondence. The last thing any writer wants to do is alienate loyal readers.
Sigh . . . .
Last Thursday I had a lovely e-mail from a reader about my book, One on One. It was one of those intelligently written reviews I like, where the reader went into detail about what she likes about my writing. She's sharp, with a real eye for detail. She even pointed out an error to me, that I had attributed an action to a character who wasn't even in the scene, including the page number. (My in-house editor only looked at the early portions of this book; it was written as I was preparing to relocate and it was an extremely busy time for me.)
In her closing, she asked me a question and asked me specifically to please be sure to respond. Because I was at a client site, I read this through a web site that allows people to check their e-mail remotely. I looked forward to sending her a response every bit as detailed as her e-mail.
As I always do, I checked my e-mail again just before 4PM (my agent is in the East, where it is an hour later). This time I had an ominous message: "You have no messages."
How could that be? I should have been looking at all the messages I received earlier, plus any new ones. They would remain on the remote e-mail retriever until I got home and brought up my default e-mail carrier, Outlook Express. This suggested that all my e-mail was gone!
I told myself not to worry, that when I opened Outlook Express on my desktop at home my mail would return. That night, after league bowling, I booted up my computer. A few e-mails came in, none of them from earlier in the day. My e-mail had disappeared!
I contacted the remote service and asked if they could help me. I'm still waiting for a response, although with the weekend it might take a few days. But I feel just awful about this. The lady who contacted me is going to think I don't want to be bothered, and nothing could be further from the truth. I can't remember her name or anything, just that it was a damn good letter and that I wanted to help her with what she asked me about. I hope she'll see this and contact me again.
Cross your fingers for me that the e-mail service can somehow restore this correspondence. The last thing any writer wants to do is alienate loyal readers.
Sigh . . . .
The Great White Hype
People are talking about John Edwards’ decision to continue his bed for President in the wake of his wife’s recurrence of breast cancer, which has now metastasized. Interestingly enough, cancer patients with their firsthand knowledge have expressed all different opinions. Some say he’s power-hungry and selfish to put his ambition in front of his devotion to his family. Others say that his life will have to go on, even if his wife passes away. Still others say he is exploiting his wife’s illness to revive his trailing candidacy. Most uncomfortable of all, many are practically writing Elizabeth Edwards’ epitaph.
I’m no doctor, of course, but personally, I don’t see a particularly positive outlook here. Stage IV metastatic cancer is as high as the meter goes. Somehow I doubt that Mrs. Edwards will have the long survival of former first lady Betty Ford and former second lady Happy Rockefeller, both of whom were diagnosed over 30 years ago. Instead I see images of Michael Landon on the Johnny Carson show a few days after he announced that he had pancreatic cancer. Three months later he was gone.
It’s not up to me to say if the Edwardses made the right decision or a wrong one. I’m not a cancer patient myself, but I’d imagine that the issue of mortality and the future has to be discussed among the affected family, no matter how painful it is to speak about. A few other pertinent factors: 1) John Edwards knew he wanted to run for president even before his wife’s diagnosis. 2) The nature of the disease is to move around. 3) This couple seems to be close.
4) They are clearly intelligent people. All of this makes me believe they decided what path to take in advance, making the best decision for them for their own reasons.
They are wealthy people and can afford the best of care. When the media says things like, “She wants to take care of her children,” I do hope people realize that Mrs. Edwards is not worried about what she will do if she finds herself too weak to cook dinner, or to do the laundry and ironing. Most people with millions don’t do that (many dual-career couples with high incomes don’t do that, either.) They have nannies to care for the children, maids to cook and clean, gardeners to take care of the begonias. (Likewise, the media made so much of Nancy Reagan “taking care of the former President” during his decline from Alzheimer’s, like she was really the one giving him sponge baths and changing his bed linen. I found this implied impression insulting to the exhausted caretakers of millions of other Americans.)
John Edwards may be trailing behind Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama among the Democrats (even if he’s getting all the headlines at the moment), but it is still early in the race. What no one in the Edwards camp is saying, but what they had to have thought of, is that he represents an alternative for the millions of Americans who are aghast at the thought of a woman or a black man in charge of the country. He is also likely to learn much sympathy for the way he rushed home from the campaign trail to be at his wife’s side (a situation that is likely to arise again). And he puts every single one of his opponents in the unenviable position of not being able to criticize him - for anything - without looking like insensitive oafs.
But whatever happens, I do wish Elizabeth Edwards the best.
People are talking about John Edwards’ decision to continue his bed for President in the wake of his wife’s recurrence of breast cancer, which has now metastasized. Interestingly enough, cancer patients with their firsthand knowledge have expressed all different opinions. Some say he’s power-hungry and selfish to put his ambition in front of his devotion to his family. Others say that his life will have to go on, even if his wife passes away. Still others say he is exploiting his wife’s illness to revive his trailing candidacy. Most uncomfortable of all, many are practically writing Elizabeth Edwards’ epitaph.
I’m no doctor, of course, but personally, I don’t see a particularly positive outlook here. Stage IV metastatic cancer is as high as the meter goes. Somehow I doubt that Mrs. Edwards will have the long survival of former first lady Betty Ford and former second lady Happy Rockefeller, both of whom were diagnosed over 30 years ago. Instead I see images of Michael Landon on the Johnny Carson show a few days after he announced that he had pancreatic cancer. Three months later he was gone.
It’s not up to me to say if the Edwardses made the right decision or a wrong one. I’m not a cancer patient myself, but I’d imagine that the issue of mortality and the future has to be discussed among the affected family, no matter how painful it is to speak about. A few other pertinent factors: 1) John Edwards knew he wanted to run for president even before his wife’s diagnosis. 2) The nature of the disease is to move around. 3) This couple seems to be close.
4) They are clearly intelligent people. All of this makes me believe they decided what path to take in advance, making the best decision for them for their own reasons.
They are wealthy people and can afford the best of care. When the media says things like, “She wants to take care of her children,” I do hope people realize that Mrs. Edwards is not worried about what she will do if she finds herself too weak to cook dinner, or to do the laundry and ironing. Most people with millions don’t do that (many dual-career couples with high incomes don’t do that, either.) They have nannies to care for the children, maids to cook and clean, gardeners to take care of the begonias. (Likewise, the media made so much of Nancy Reagan “taking care of the former President” during his decline from Alzheimer’s, like she was really the one giving him sponge baths and changing his bed linen. I found this implied impression insulting to the exhausted caretakers of millions of other Americans.)
John Edwards may be trailing behind Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama among the Democrats (even if he’s getting all the headlines at the moment), but it is still early in the race. What no one in the Edwards camp is saying, but what they had to have thought of, is that he represents an alternative for the millions of Americans who are aghast at the thought of a woman or a black man in charge of the country. He is also likely to learn much sympathy for the way he rushed home from the campaign trail to be at his wife’s side (a situation that is likely to arise again). And he puts every single one of his opponents in the unenviable position of not being able to criticize him - for anything - without looking like insensitive oafs.
But whatever happens, I do wish Elizabeth Edwards the best.
Why I Never Get Tired of Looking at Terrence Howard
Terrence is on the cover of the April Essence.
The fellow on the right is my husband, as he looked when he was in his early 30s (In addition to picking up weight in the years since, he now has a liberal sprinking of gray in his beard, which he attributes to Yours Truly.) His widow's peak doesn't really show, and his eyes photographed dark (they're not quite as light as Terrence's), and his skin has more of a red tone to it than Terrence's . . . but damn if Terrence doesn't remind me of him. Terrence looks more like my husband than his own brother does, something my other half vehemently denies ("That man don't look nothin' like me.") Everybody else can see it except for him.
I'll have to bring this magazine along with me the next time we visit my mother-in-law. If she says there's a resemblance, that will stop the protests once and for all!
It's Good To Be Confident, But A Little Ego Goes A Very Long Way
I started a new temp assignment recently, a professional one involving proofreading and formatting documents before submission to the FDA. After two weeks, all is going well, and I'm pleased with my performance and what I've learned. My eye is getting sharper all the time (a skill that no doubt will come in handy when reading over my own manuscripts), and I am more comfortable working with MS Word (I'm a WordPerfect gal, but of course that software is pretty much obsolete in our Microsoft-dominated world.)
The documents I work with have been composed by medical writers, and I have been warned not to actually change anything they've written, just point it out for them and let them decide what to do. That makes perfect sense to me. They're the authors; the final decision should be theirs. I admire their skills, and I'll say this: It's much easier to say what's wrong with a document than it is to actually create it, whether it be background information relating to a new pharmaceutical product or a work of fiction, the latter being my specialty.
But what doesn't make sense to me is the attitudes of some of the writers, the ones I'm told will react to suggestions by haughtily saying, "Leave it the way it is." In other words, they won't even consider the possibility that perhaps they've gotten a word or a punctuation mark wrong, left out a word, etc.
I find this attitude incredulous, and more than a little pathetic. As a fiction writer, I continually strive to improve my product. I still struggle with certain grammatical rules, like the difference between lay and lie, and the difference between that and which. When I lived in Florida I attended a critique group, not regularly anymore because of time constraints, but occasionally, like when I wanted feedback on a new project. Some of their suggestions were completely outlandish, because they either didn't "get" the story or understand the culture of the characters. But other suggestions they made were invaluable. The trick is, you have to know the difference, what will work for your story and what won't.
I also welcome feedback from readers, even the negatives (at least those that give explanations as to why they didn't like my story). I get nothing constructive out of a review that says something like, "Terrible! Couldn't finish it!" Although I must admit, my personal favorite was the person who wrote simply, "A note to the author: Please don't ever write another book." Even now I'm smiling; it was hilarious. I bristle when I hear authors say that people who write negative reviews "have it in" for them. Do they really feel they've written masterpieces? Can they honestly say that they absolutely adored every book they've ever read? So why should their work have universal appeal? (I know, because they wrote it.)
I wonder if I'm the only author who feels this way. Because, in my opinion, maintaining the belief that you know everything about writing and/or are immune from errors and/or cannot possibly do anything to improve your work, no matter how many hundreds of documents or short stories or novels you have had published, is a demonstration of ego so strong it's laughable.
I started a new temp assignment recently, a professional one involving proofreading and formatting documents before submission to the FDA. After two weeks, all is going well, and I'm pleased with my performance and what I've learned. My eye is getting sharper all the time (a skill that no doubt will come in handy when reading over my own manuscripts), and I am more comfortable working with MS Word (I'm a WordPerfect gal, but of course that software is pretty much obsolete in our Microsoft-dominated world.)
The documents I work with have been composed by medical writers, and I have been warned not to actually change anything they've written, just point it out for them and let them decide what to do. That makes perfect sense to me. They're the authors; the final decision should be theirs. I admire their skills, and I'll say this: It's much easier to say what's wrong with a document than it is to actually create it, whether it be background information relating to a new pharmaceutical product or a work of fiction, the latter being my specialty.
But what doesn't make sense to me is the attitudes of some of the writers, the ones I'm told will react to suggestions by haughtily saying, "Leave it the way it is." In other words, they won't even consider the possibility that perhaps they've gotten a word or a punctuation mark wrong, left out a word, etc.
I find this attitude incredulous, and more than a little pathetic. As a fiction writer, I continually strive to improve my product. I still struggle with certain grammatical rules, like the difference between lay and lie, and the difference between that and which. When I lived in Florida I attended a critique group, not regularly anymore because of time constraints, but occasionally, like when I wanted feedback on a new project. Some of their suggestions were completely outlandish, because they either didn't "get" the story or understand the culture of the characters. But other suggestions they made were invaluable. The trick is, you have to know the difference, what will work for your story and what won't.
I also welcome feedback from readers, even the negatives (at least those that give explanations as to why they didn't like my story). I get nothing constructive out of a review that says something like, "Terrible! Couldn't finish it!" Although I must admit, my personal favorite was the person who wrote simply, "A note to the author: Please don't ever write another book." Even now I'm smiling; it was hilarious. I bristle when I hear authors say that people who write negative reviews "have it in" for them. Do they really feel they've written masterpieces? Can they honestly say that they absolutely adored every book they've ever read? So why should their work have universal appeal? (I know, because they wrote it.)
I wonder if I'm the only author who feels this way. Because, in my opinion, maintaining the belief that you know everything about writing and/or are immune from errors and/or cannot possibly do anything to improve your work, no matter how many hundreds of documents or short stories or novels you have had published, is a demonstration of ego so strong it's laughable.
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