A busy, but productive day at work, and a day of unexpected sun and good weather. Except for a very delayed subway connection this morning and an uncomfortably crowded car when it arrived, today was pretty much just your average, busy Wednesday.
work
A night at the library
I spent another day wrasslin’ with a manuscript, taking all my corrections and putting them back into a Word document to send to the authors. We’ll see how quick they can respond, and if they agree to all my changes.
A few other e-mails aside, and a quick escape for lunch, that was pretty much my day. My evening was spent at an event called Speculating on Fiction at the New York Public Library. The guests included John Scalzi, Scott Westerfeld, Cat Valente, and of course my favorite author, Lev Grossman. Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press emceed, and Brian Slattery and friends provided music.
It was a lot of fun. John Sclazi was quite entertaining, essentially just repeating the story he tells here about The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. Cat Valente was maybe the best reader of her work, making me wonder what’s wrong with me that I’ve never read any of it yet, and Scott Westerfeld not for the first time made me want to read his Leviathan series. And even Grossman was good, reading from the forthcoming Magicians sequel, which, at least in the section he read, focuses more closely on one of the first book’s most woefully mistreated characters, Julia. It wasn’t good enough to convince me to actually read the new book — I don’t think anything could do that — but he didn’t seem out of place on the stage or anything like that.
(I did note that only one person had a question for him during the Q&A, about how he manages being a full-time critic for Time with writing a novel. But the man’s not tedious idiot. Anybody can write a lousy book. A really, really, really lousy book.)
What’s shakin’
A busy day at work, spent mostly continuing to read the manuscript that arrived in my in-box on Friday. I finished, for the most part, although I’ll have to spend tomorrow making a few structural changes, as well as converting all of my handwritten corrections into the Word document I can send back to the authors. (Therein lies the drawback of preferring to edit on a printed copy.)
And tonight, for dinner, we had leftover Chinese food. Hence, the leftover fortune cookie.
A romantic evening awaits you in the off-world colonies
How is that Friday, the very last day in the week, was also by far my busiest?
Maybe it has something to do with the manuscript that landed in my lap, or rather my e-mail in-box, first thing this morning. I started reading through it and realized it needed more corrections — mostly typos, but some factual — than at first glance. So, aside from another project that ate into a lot of my time, I spent the day reading the book, with my red pen in hand. As I noted via Twitter, sometimes I don’t feel like I’m correcting grammar, but rather introducing it to a manuscript for the very first time. (I also realized that my life would be very different, at least in the way I think about my job and the way I do it, if I hadn’t taken that copyediting class my senior year of college.)
When I left for the day, I was about halfway through the manuscript. With luck, I’ll finish on Monday and send my corrections and queries off to the authors. It would be nice to put the book into production soon, even if at this point it’s unlikely to make the year.
And yeah, I’m fairly sure the world isn’t going to end this weekend.
This evening, after dinner, I got a fortune cookie, the one in the photograph up above. (That’s allowed even when you don’t eat Chinese food for dinner, right?) It said, “A romantic evening awaits you tonight.” So, of course, I spent the evening watching a zombie movie with friends over Twitter. Well, I had a lot of fun, even if I can’t say my feelings on 28 Weeks Later as a film are much revised from my original opinion.
Though never let it be said that zombies can’t be romantic.
Thoroughly Thursday
The sun actually came out for most of today, which was a shock. I ate my lunch in a little public park — basically just some benches in the courtyard next to a building — a couple of blocks from the office.
Beyond that, it was a pretty ordinary Thursday. I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea. I got my business cards — a whole box, with no one, really, to give them to. And the not-quite-as-dreadful instant coffee flavors arrived today as well. That’s about the level of excitement we’re dealing with here, this particular Thursday.