Hi, Teresa! As for that old message: you just read it in its entirety. I reproduced the whole thing in my LiveJournal, but I simply was including the link to the original site, for reference for anyone who wanted to know where the original message was posted.
I got here from another weblog that said you'd written an entry about how bad copyediting can be. I imagined I'd get here to find you doing the canonical Bad Copyediting Rant (including such popular arias as "I'm going to have it written into my contract that this person NEVER TOUCHES MY WORK AGAIN"); but no, it was a decent copyedit and you're just describing the text production cycle.
Yes, exactly; actually the copyeditors on my two books were both quite good and they saved me from making some very embarrassing errors. Going through the marked up final draft and galleys gave me a whole new appreciation for what an exacting, fiddly job it is.
You're the only person I've ever heard of who reads their copyedit backwards.
Really? Patricia C. Wrede taught me to do that. I just assumed that it was a common practice. As I said in response to someone else's comment, it is a tedious way to do it, but you do catch a lot of errors doing it that way that you might otherwise miss.
As far as Jo substituting "mother" for "father," I don't think it was a typo, exactly. It was instead a failure on her part (possibly due to time pressure) to think through the events of the plot to their logical conclusion: if Harry's father was killed before his mother, and the priori incantatum spell reverses a wand's spells, then logically his mother's ghost had to come out of the wand before his father's ghost. When the book was released and the fans read that scene, they started tying themselves into knots with ever increasingly wild theories to explain this baffling inconsistency, and many of these theories were discussed on that listserve. That was my reason for making this post originally, to point out that, hey, did you ever think of the possibility that the reverse wand order problem might have simply been a dumb mistake? Mistakes happen in the manuscript-into-print process, even when everyone's doing the best job that they can, and here's why: (spellcheckers, fatigue, lack of time, just missing simple errors, etc.) It was only when the fans pointed it the discrepancy in the scene that Jo realized she'd made a mistake. So they went and changed it in later editions. I didn't say it directly in my post, but that would be the kind of plot detail error that I suppose a good copyeditor might notice, and flag with a query post-it for the author.
Glad to see you on LiveJournal, by the way. I've certainly enjoyed your own blog. (Eggplant paramecium: I love it!)
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Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 09:32 pm (UTC)As far as Jo substituting "mother" for "father," I don't think it was a typo, exactly. It was instead a failure on her part (possibly due to time pressure) to think through the events of the plot to their logical conclusion: if Harry's father was killed before his mother, and the priori incantatum spell reverses a wand's spells, then logically his mother's ghost had to come out of the wand before his father's ghost. When the book was released and the fans read that scene, they started tying themselves into knots with ever increasingly wild theories to explain this baffling inconsistency, and many of these theories were discussed on that listserve. That was my reason for making this post originally, to point out that, hey, did you ever think of the possibility that the reverse wand order problem might have simply been a dumb mistake? Mistakes happen in the manuscript-into-print process, even when everyone's doing the best job that they can, and here's why: (spellcheckers, fatigue, lack of time, just missing simple errors, etc.) It was only when the fans pointed it the discrepancy in the scene that Jo realized she'd made a mistake. So they went and changed it in later editions. I didn't say it directly in my post, but that would be the kind of plot detail error that I suppose a good copyeditor might notice, and flag with a query post-it for the author.
Glad to see you on LiveJournal, by the way. I've certainly enjoyed your own blog. (Eggplant paramecium: I love it!)
Cheers,
Peg