Carol Berg's Blog, page 6

Momentum and Description

I've talked several times about working to regain momentum after life events, vacations, distractions such as revisions or proof reviews for earlier books. I usually have a few days of spotty work, where I'm easily distracted, trying to pick up the threads of plots and subplots, the dynamics of character understanding, of relationships, of evolving mysteries... At times words flow. At times, they're balky and spurty, like turning on the water after the main system has been shut off for a wh...

Fascinating and Depressing

Here is a great blog post about science fiction and fantasy's continuing struggle for literary recognition:


John Howell on sffmedia

As anyone who's ever heard me rant, this is a pet peeve of mine. I groan every time someone says, "Oh, you're published! What do you write?"

And I say, "I write epic fantasy."

And the face blanks out. "Oh, my kids read that."

Or, "Oh, I don't read that sort of thing. I like to read about real people."

And, of course, it doesn't help that fantasy is dissed by many h...

The Heart's Coda

Last spring I received an invitation to submit a story to an anthology of high fantasy. With such a tight schedule for the Collegia Magica books, I wasn't sure I'd have the time. (Still not sure I had the time!) The editor offered to send me copies of her previous two anthologies so I could see if I wanted to join in the third of the series.

The anthologies are called Lace and Blade, from Norilana Books, a small press that puts out absolutely gorgeous editions of classics, as well as some o...

The Proof is in the Pudding

One thing electronic copyedits did for my publishing schedule was to shorten the time from turning in copyedits until seeing proof pages! Well, it certainly seemed to shorten the time, because the Packet of Proof Pages from Penguin arrived last week while I was off having a great weekend at the Colorado Gold Writers' Conference.

Of course, just because they got them back to me quickly, it didn't mean I had a lot of time to work on them - about ten days. And darned if I wasn't just getting ba...

A Gritty Myth Goes Live

So I don't write short stories very often. When our local non-profit writers organization, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, asked me to contribute a short story to their anthology, Broken Links, Mended Lives, I hesitated. I was in the middle of working on The Spirit Lens, and I only had one piece of a story in my trunk. I really wanted to support the organization, though, so right after I turned in The Spirit Lens, I pulled out the fragment and spent a little time with it. If I could f...

So Right!

My friend Kathy pointed me to this blog post.

http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/09/05/...

Yes, yes, writing is really hard. I had no idea, but then I never really wanted to do it either.


Though I loved to read, it had never been a dream of mine to write books. It seemed like it would be too hard. So it always surprises me how, upon hearing that I am a writer, so many people say, "You know, I've been working on this novel..." or "I'm going to do that when I retire." As in

The Soul Mirror Redux

Here we go again. After intensive revision on The Spirit Lens, some family fun and summer timeouts, writing the Song of the Beast story, and spending almost ten days doing nothing but reviewing Spirit Lens copyedits, the new book has sat sorely neglected over the last few months. Scarily neglected, in fact.

As always when I've been away, I take the first couple of days to read through what's there. I can't really fault it, except that it's wordy and perhaps a bit repetitive in some areas. (A...

Spirit Lens Copyedits: The Nitty Gritty

As my long ago post noted, I've been fortunate with copyeditors through the years, having only one bad experience - an overzealous copyeditor who worked on Revelation. I had to spend a lot of time undoing what she had done. I've never had any problem getting my copyedit changes accepted, whether I've rejected or altered the CE's suggestions.

One glance at the Spirit Lens manuscript, and I knew this was going to be more complicated than usual.



As you might be able to tell from other postings, I am

Spirit Lens Copyedits: Electronic!

So how is electronic copyediting - as implemented by my particular publisher - different from paper copyediting?


Roc has hooked its electronic copyediting to Microsoft Word 2003's version of Track Changes. [Note: they may also have other varieties for authors who don't use Word, but I do, so this is what I received to work with.] I am familiar with Track Changes, and unlike many who curse it, I find it very useful, especially late in the revision cycle. Say I want to change the personal history

Spirit Lens Copyedits: Readthrough

No sooner had I come off a month of family visits and working on a short story last week, than the copyedited manuscript of The Spirit Lens arrived.

First task? Do a complete read-through without looking at the copyedits. Well, OK, I could have done this the week before the copyedits came, but...did I mention family fun? Short story? A little bout of summer surgery? Updating website? Actually, I wanted to wait until the last possible moment to maximize my distance from the words.

The purpose of a