A homosexual calls for reparations.
(Thanks to Dale Nelson for the link.)
Change for a Darker Tomorrow
Thursday fight (real life edition)
This is a truly bizarre story:
INDIANAPOLIS – Police have charged an Indianapolis man in the death of his 77-year-old grandmother, who died after trying to break up a sword fight between him and her 69-year-old brother-in-law.
Not funny in the least. Just very, very strange.
Painting Pictures of Egypt
I love this song.
Publication update
I copied a map out of a book and made some marks on it last night, then scanned it and sent it to the house artist. From those lowly elements he plans to construct a handsome original chart, for the benefit of those who remain unsure which hemisphere Greenland is located in. So that’s done, from my end.
I also got a chance to look at some prospective covers, a part of the project also still “in process.” I think I’m going to get a picture of a Viking ship on the cover, which is the main thing for me. In my opinion there is nothing on earth cooler than a Viking ship. Ninjas? Ha! We laugh at ninjas.
It looks as if this is going to be the most expensive book I’ve ever written. It appears that it will be what’s called a “trade paperback.” That’s one of those big paperbacks they sell you (the small, old-fashioned kind are called “mass market paperbacks”). The price looks to be about $25.00. I have a hard time imagining anyone paying twenty-five bucks for anything written by me, but Nordskog thinks that’s the way to go, and I assume they know their business. Sometimes people want a thing more when you ask more for it, so I’ll wait and see. Also, I know there are reasons, having to do with the bookselling business, why trade paperbacks are more cost effective for publishers.
Someday, hardcover!
God is not dead
“. . . nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”
The Glory of the Unfinished
Earlier we talked a bit about the completion of the morbidly long fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Today, Stephen Moss writes about newly discovered unfinished works by the late Michael Crichton. The publishers wants to get those babies finished up, but Moss argues against that.
Leave his work be: publish it as he left it, and let Crichton fans try to work out his intentions for themselves. The urge to complete – exemplified by the numerous attempts to conclude Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood – is based on a misconception: that only a finished work is of interest. The reverse is true: unfinished works are often the most interesting of all.
Any one here read C.S. Lewis’ unfinished works, The Dark Tower and After Ten Years? As we all know, if Lewis did it, then it’s been done right.
Reading through the Proofs
Lars isn’t the only one reading proofs lately. Author A.L. Kennedy writes about reading through the proofs of her new short story collection. Proofs, she says, “are also a source of almost primal panic for the writer.”
If your proofs are awful, wrong, badly-spelled, oddly-italicised and otherwise dysfunctional, they are a very real demonstration of both your complete powerlessness within the editing process and your witless lack of talent within the writing process. They alarm, containing, as they do, all manner of peculiarities and absurdities which have been added by strangers for no clear reason, along with the plethora of screw-ups which are utterly your own fault. How did you miss that non-agreeing verb? Did you ever know what this final sentence means?
In Time for the Holidays
The Hubble telescope has photographed the “Crown of Thorns” galaxy.
Cartography before the horse
My big job tonight is to make a map. My publisher wants a map for the new book. I’m going to try to cobble something together in MS Publisher, showing what’s where, so that the cover artist can make one that looks decent for actual publication.
I’ve always thought that my Viking books ought to have maps, concerned as they are with places that most readers don’t know much about. But I never felt qualified to produce one myself, and could never afford to hire somebody to do it for me.
But my publisher, who is a “boat guy,” wants a map, and apparently he’ll spring for the cost. This means I must toil like a dwarf tonight to put together something vaguely helpful as a guide.
So that’s what I’m doing instead of writing a long blog post.