The perils of living far, far away
May. 5th, 2008 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penmageWe have an author who lives far, far away.
Most of the time, the magic of email means that this doesn’t matter. I don’t care where he is, as long as he can respond to my email. He’s a good writer who gives us good books.
The only time it becomes an issue is when we have to send each other actual physical things. Hard copies. Contracts and copyedited manuscripts (hereby referred to as CEMs) and first pass pages. Because he lives far, far away, it takes a long, long time for packages to get from us to him, and then from him to us. It slows things down, and makes it all the more necessary for things to happen on schedule.
Case in point, this time. I sent him his copyedited manuscript. If you’ve never seen one of these babies before, then I will tell you that they have copyedits on the page, and then queries on post-its stuck to the page. The page edits are usually simple grammar and word usage notes—the post-it queries are usually more complicated questions that the author really needs to respond to.
Now, when we send packages to our author, who lives far, far away, because he lives in such a remote location, his packages go to the general post office, who send them on to his remote location. This time, he asked the PO to make a photocopy of the copyedited manuscript and hold on to it, in case something happened to the original en route. (FYI: before I send out any CEM I photocopy it, just in case it gets lost. The one time I didn’t, it got lost.) All of this is well and good.
Except the PO accidentally sent him the photocopy and not the original. Okay, still not a big deal. We do need the original back, but we agreed that he could do his copyedits on the photocopy and then send them both back.
They arrived on my desk today, and I was all set to transfer the copyedits from the photocopy to the original, when I discovered
that the photocopy didn’t include any of the query post-its. Somehow they were just not copied.
So he didn’t respond to any of them.
Not his fault, obviously, but I just want to headdesk headdesk headdesk, and call him up and yell “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!” a lot of times into the phone. This is his fourth book. He’s been through the process before. Did he really think his manuscript was so perfect that there were no queries at all, only copyedits? I mean, it’s good, but not that good. Not at this stage. Was he not at all confused as to the lack of queries?
We don’t have time to send this back to him and have him send it back to us. We need the answers to those queries.
I don’t know how we’re going to proceed, but it is going to stir up a lot of unnecessary work for me. Either reading them all to him over the phone, or faxing a 300 page manuscript, or typing up all the queries or something.
I want to hit something.
Most of the time, the magic of email means that this doesn’t matter. I don’t care where he is, as long as he can respond to my email. He’s a good writer who gives us good books.
The only time it becomes an issue is when we have to send each other actual physical things. Hard copies. Contracts and copyedited manuscripts (hereby referred to as CEMs) and first pass pages. Because he lives far, far away, it takes a long, long time for packages to get from us to him, and then from him to us. It slows things down, and makes it all the more necessary for things to happen on schedule.
Case in point, this time. I sent him his copyedited manuscript. If you’ve never seen one of these babies before, then I will tell you that they have copyedits on the page, and then queries on post-its stuck to the page. The page edits are usually simple grammar and word usage notes—the post-it queries are usually more complicated questions that the author really needs to respond to.
Now, when we send packages to our author, who lives far, far away, because he lives in such a remote location, his packages go to the general post office, who send them on to his remote location. This time, he asked the PO to make a photocopy of the copyedited manuscript and hold on to it, in case something happened to the original en route. (FYI: before I send out any CEM I photocopy it, just in case it gets lost. The one time I didn’t, it got lost.) All of this is well and good.
Except the PO accidentally sent him the photocopy and not the original. Okay, still not a big deal. We do need the original back, but we agreed that he could do his copyedits on the photocopy and then send them both back.
They arrived on my desk today, and I was all set to transfer the copyedits from the photocopy to the original, when I discovered
that the photocopy didn’t include any of the query post-its. Somehow they were just not copied.
So he didn’t respond to any of them.
Not his fault, obviously, but I just want to headdesk headdesk headdesk, and call him up and yell “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!” a lot of times into the phone. This is his fourth book. He’s been through the process before. Did he really think his manuscript was so perfect that there were no queries at all, only copyedits? I mean, it’s good, but not that good. Not at this stage. Was he not at all confused as to the lack of queries?
We don’t have time to send this back to him and have him send it back to us. We need the answers to those queries.
I don’t know how we’re going to proceed, but it is going to stir up a lot of unnecessary work for me. Either reading them all to him over the phone, or faxing a 300 page manuscript, or typing up all the queries or something.
I want to hit something.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-06 04:07 pm (UTC)