Stakes and Garlic
From GRACE NOTES - an elderly composer speaking to a young one, who is visiting him. She has just played one of her compositions. He says very little, then he asks to hear something she is working on. "Let me hear work in progress. If I hear an opus you think is finished and I say do this and do that - you are unhappy. But if an opus is under construction, if you have problem with it and I say do this and do that - you are happy."

Which pretty much explains our reaction to another round of edits on TP, prior to its formal print-run. I went through this stage with LEGACIES - struggling with BLUEHEART, which was sinking like a stone canoe, and every time I laid LEGACIES to rest, it would arise rise again. At least once it went between covers, that was the end of it; it was finished, Thovalt's magical shirt, Lian's duplicate actions and small medical boner immortalized. But TP, it seems, is not yet finished. More remains to be explained. And so I have sent a bunch of edited-edits back to Lynda, who has borne the brunt of this one with me being (a) in the UK, (b) sick and (c) not cc'd in.

Sent them to me by e-mail, at my work address, I hope. I have booked off tomorrow to marathon the wrap on the edits. Here's hoping all will fit together and be back in EDGE's court by Monday. Looks like the editor accepted my spirited defense of Gelack invective. I was worried for a bit there, that "vent" and "gap damn you" were going to be stumbling blocks. Kept thinking about Rebecca's "pocketing" and "may his bones give forth flowers". I suspect most cuss words new minted for a SF/F world view don't feel adequate to us at first. Mental disorders that cause swear words to spew suggest they are stored in a very particular and deeply rooted way in our brains as they are shaped by our cultural experience. Kept wondering whether I couldn't have come up with something more weighty to the English ear than "vent" or "gap"--or even worse, "blank" as a Reetion expletive. (I did give up "blank" more or less, I think, after someone assumed it meant "censored" and was cutsy, whereas an arbiter--or person--blanking out is the Reetion equivalent of the Gelack horror of being Lost or suffering a Long Night due to gap.) I just don't know. And I wasn't looking forward to trying to wrestle with it, and the masses of rethinking, searching and replacing ... shudder. Just don't want to think about it. On the other hand, I am a lot happier with the quality of the text from the point of view of punctuation, consistency and clarity. Can't believe I never knew before this how to do an em dash properly. :-)

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