Jan 10, 2023 by Fat Fish Farmer
Tags publishing, personal history, salt
Me dear ol’ mum helped me muddle through the initial proofread version of my novel Weight of Space. This for her was an act of patriotic valor.
The woman detests sci-fy as only a mystery aficionado and lifelong medievalist romantic academic can. Think Eric Amber, Agatha Christy, and Andre Dumas et al.
True. Aside from being my teenaged mother, me Mum’s first job was herding this cat and my other sister kittens while trying to run now famous bookstore. For some reason, my parent’s bookstore had a great children’s section. Never mind the Wrinkles in the Time magazines, folks. Baby slobber is part of our First Edition charm.
Yes. For some reason, piles and boxes of books remain strangely comforting to me. I remain surrounded by them.
Silly me. I promised her and me I would see the WOS book published one way or the other. Yeah. I can do that.
This became a Baggins like adventure. You know the drill.
We step beyond the front gate. The road carries us away to Misty Mountains full of nasty goblins and trolls. The hero’s journey includes the notable and the usual epic struggles.
We meet fearsome folks with hearts of stone, a lust for gold, and the cursed assurance that what we have to say don’t mean squat. The witch is more than half the point of the salt far as I can tell.
Important Tasks Preserve Us
Each morning I can still remember that the Master is in charge and those rings of power are mere trinkets on Tom’s pointy finger. Yeah Jackson, you missed that didn’t yah. Eheh.
I learn trades that I believed were about to vanish into the mists of time. I stand corrected. I know the word industry in a deeper wider way.
Ok. I can manage to create, edit, and think in HTML, the other required bizarre publishing dialects. Magically, I partially learned the typesetting trade not once but twice along the way. Fonts and foundries are not the favorite things I want to care about.
The thing I know and fear are those tedious formal copy edits.
I read too quickly. I miss those silly missing little participles all the time.
Funny how a lost “a” or an extra “e” makes all the difference in what we have to say.