DEEP INTO EDITS AND BELATED NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

I'm somewhat distracted from emails and messageboards and other electronic ephemera by the edits I'm currently working on for Shriek: An Afterword. My editor at Tor, Liz Gorinsky, has done a superb job of being sympathetic to the text while not letting me get away with stuff. It's wonderful because the comments help me to see the novel in a fresh light. It'll be a much stronger novel as a result of her work on it. This is the first time I've been edited, really, in that the indie presses I've worked with haven't had an in-house editor per se, so I've been my own editor. And when Pan Mac and Bantam took City and Veniss, the text was pretty much set. Shriek, being a wilder, more expansive, and deliberately less tightly structured novel really needs the edit, and I'm really beyond happy to have the opportunity to work on the book with Liz.

In other news, I just realized what my New Year's Resolution was. I found it where I had written it in tiny letters on a back of a Chinese fortune from Jan. 2: "If a certain talented technophiliac British fiction writer who should know better tries to make some kind of generalization about British SF based in part on the Hugo Awards, you will not enter into the discussion. You will not waste hours debating it. In fact, Jeff, you will not engage in any such discussions of *any* kind in 2005, about *anything*. Because, if you do, you won't get all your fiction writing projects done."

Jeff


Evil Monkey: "Is it just that you'd rather try to create a well-turned sentence?" Jeff: "I think it's because I'm almost 37 and I'm sick of wasting time." Evil Monkey: "Was this blog entry a waste of time?" Jeff: "No. All that's on TV is some dumb-ass reality show about a girl who wants to look like Jennifer Aniston." Evil Monkey: "Really? What channel?" Jeff: "Oh, go look it up yourself, monkey."