POD.

I've been reading quite a bit about the controversial PublishAmerica. Since I do not wish to receive a cease and desist letter, I will advise all writers to Google this one for yourself. I shall move on to the subject of POD in general. I can see that, for writers with a book that probably has a limited audience, POD makes lots of sense. What about the writer of more mass-market works?

Back when I started writing, there was no Internet. There was, however, vanity press. Which I didn't quite understand. I read. A lot. I read the good, the bad, and the ugly. I wanted my work to be good. When I started writing, it was bad. Really bad. Epic stink-o. I wrote bad science fiction novels for a long, long time. The first one I thought had some promise was number seven. That was the first one that landed me an agent.

Long story short, the novel that will be published this fall is number twelve. Do I want anyone seeing numbers one through eleven? Well, I think I could rewrite number eleven and get a good book out of it. The others will never see the light of day.

I was not a good writer. I did not deserve to be published. I had not earned the right to ask a fellow human being to give up hours out of their one life on earth to read those books. Nobody should have paid any money for those books. And they didn't.

I was learning. It took me a long time to qualify for publication. I am still learning. But I knew on day one that I was not going to buy my way to the goal. When my work was good, people whose job it was to find good writing would tell me.

Your mileage may vary.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem...

I heard from my editor. She's very happy with the manuscript, post-post-copyediting. I think the decision to accept the rather unorthodox copyedit was the right one. Lots o' work, but heck, it's my book. It did give me a chance to polish it all a bit more, and add one surprisingly important bit of character logic that had escaped me. Always surprising what a couple of lines can do.

The new book is going nowhere. I haven't written more than two pages since last October. Suffice it to say that the last few months have not been right up there on the list of Good Times I Have Known. This does not lead to much writing. Oh, well.

On to the New Fun...

Got the copyeditor's version of the book. My editor emailed it to me. Her email began with a plea that I not freak out. Why should I freak out? Because the copyeditor rewrote the book. Starting with the third sentence. I freaked out. Called my editor. Freaked out all over her. They were willing to let me reject the copyedit entirely, and I desperately wanted to. But the copyeditor had found a few valuable things. For one, I apparently use the word "just" more than any living human. And if asked for a number, I will always select "ten." So good for the copyeditor for those finds. I spent a couple of weeks digging through the copyedited manuscript finding the good notes. Quite a task, at the end of the process, considering that there was exactly one misspelled word in the whole thing. "Cryotome," for the record. Which Blogger is showing as misspelled now!

Two edits I rejected: I refused to spell Ecuador with a "q," and I refused to change the spelling of my first name. Criticizing me is one thing, but that's going after my mother.