Editing in Process...Kameron Hurley

Sometimes, everything -- well, almost everything -- just seems to work out, or so I like to believe hope. For example: I worked for Night Shade Books for nine years (which I blogged about here, including a list of the 125 books I worked on during that time period), and then dealt with the demise -- and resale -- of the company. By the summer of 2013, with no new incoming projects from Night Shade, my workload had decreased dramatically, a huge concern for me as a full-time freelancer. But then Bradley P. Beaulieu, a former Night Shade author with whom I had never worked before, contacted me about a book project. He wanted me to line edit and copy edit his collection, Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories -- financed through a Kickstarter campaign -- which he planned to self-publish. My blog post on Brad's collection is here. Brad later referred me to Barbara Webb, who contracted with me to copy edit her novel City of Burning Shadows (here) -- a novel worthy of your "watchlist" -- which Barbara also plans to self-publish. Those were two of my one-on-one author projects in 2013 that came about from my work with Night Shade Books.

Enter 2014: Most recently, I had the opportunity to work with another former Night Shade author, Kameron Hurley. Her new novelette is "The Body Project": a story in her Bel Dame Apocrypha series, which includes the novels God's War (a 2012 Nebula Award nominee for best novel), Infidel, and Rapture. I was fortunate to have worked with Kameron on this trilogy during my stint at Night Shade.

So I was thrilled when I received Kameron's email regarding this new project: we freelancers are always thrilled when a new income opportunity presents itself, but -- and more importantly -- I was especially thrilled because I would have an opportunity, albeit briefly, to work with Kameron once again (a true pro) and to visit once more, as it were, the world of Nyx, Rhys, Anneke, and the bel dames.

Kameron informed me that the story takes place during the seven-year gap between chapters 4 and 5 of God's War; the novelette is meant to be a sort of introduction for those who haven't yet read the trilogy. And for those of us who have read the books, the story provides further insight in to what drives the protagonist, Nyxnissa so Dasheem.

Here are the two opening paragraphs to "The Body Project":

The man's rugged visage—hanging from the upper window of the tenement building—was captivating. The rest of him was less so, as it was a mangled wreck of shattered limbs and shredded torso strewn all over the street at Nyx's feet.

Nyx toed at the burst flesh of his admittedly once-fine form, now split and oozing a sour blend of offal that brought to mind the pungent stink of rotten bodies at the front. That memory, paired with the profile of the man's head, sparked a sudden familiarity. She had a powerful feeling that she knew him.

This brief excerpt is typical of the gritty, hard-edged writing of the entire trilogy. For me, upon first reading God's War, it was like a breath of fresh air had come in across from the desert.... Different, but not unlike when I read William Gibson's Neuromancer, shortly after the book was first published.

"The Body Project" has been posted online for your reading pleasure courtesy of publisher Del Rey UK, to help promote the UK publication of the Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy. In addition, the novelette has been published as an ebook on both the Amazon US and Amazon UK sites. If you're going to buy the ebook, don't hesitate: the current promotional price of 99¢ will increase on February 1.

After I had completed the copy edits -- and Kameron had had sufficient time to review them -- she sent out the following two Twitter posts, on January 10 and 14, respectively...

...Which obviously provide me the opportunity to toot (tweet?) my own horn.

And don't forget: the ebook is only 99¢ (£0.77 in the UK) until February 1.

Editing in Process...Barbara J. Webb

My latest project is by author Barbara J. Webb and is not the novel pictured to the left. The novel I worked on is entitled City of Burning Shadows, which the author plans to self-publish. In the meantime, I'm pointing you to her previous novel, Midnight in St. Petersburg, volume one in The Invisible War series. But I'll be sure to post here when City of Burning Shadows is published. The wait will certainly be worth it.

Unfortunately I don't pimp myself as much as I should. In addition to the work I do with publishers, I also work directly with writers: new and novice writers, self-published writers, and contract writers who understand the value of an editor and copy editor. I'd like to point you to one such project, Bradley P. Beaulieu's self-published short fiction collection Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories. If you have an interest in chatting with me about a project, you'll find my email address listed under my blog profile. I don't attend as many conventions as I used to, but should you see me at a con, please feel free to come up to me and introduce yourself, and let me know you would like to talk about a project. And this should up my pimp quota somewhat....

But back to this project: Barbara Webb sent me the first chapter of City of Burning Shadows prior to our signing an agreement to work together on this project. I was impressed with the quality of her writing in this opening chapter and didn't come upon any obvious editorial issues through my initial read. But more important, this one chapter presaged a great novel that I wanted to read further. Here's the end of that first chapter:

...I couldn't afford to lose this job.

Getting myself killed provoking fights was one thing. Starving to death in the street was a whole other. Not that I'd probably live long enough to starve. I'd be another headline: former priest of Kaifail beaten to death, or burned alive, or strung up with his intestines hanging out for the crows. People in this city were nothing if not creative in their punishments for those of us they blamed for the state of things.

All this was still fresh in my mind when the intercom on my desk pinged. "Mr. Drake?" The security guard. "There's a man down here asking for you."

Was there any way this could be good? "Who is he? What does he want?"

"Says he needs to see you. Says you know each other." The guard's voice dropped, whispering into his microphone: "He says he was a priest."

Just like that, I was back on my feet. "I'll be right down." Because I hadn't learned my lesson yet about getting involved. Because I didn't have enough to worry about these days. Most of all, because I thought it would be good to see a friend.

In other words, I hurried back downstairs because I was an idiot.

The blunt, choppy sentence structure hints of the noir detective story. The priests have the ability to perform magic, but the kind of magic present in this story brings to mind Charles Stross's Laundry Files stories: magic via technology. There are conspiracies, and plots within plots.

Whatever tool you use to make notes to yourself -- a journal, Google Keep, MS OneNote, Evernote, or just plain old sticky notes -- make this note: Barbara J. Webb and City of Burning Shadows. As I previously said, I'll post on this blog when the book is available.

Added March 14, 2014:

Book Cover Revealed

Editing in Process...James Morrow

Cover Art & Design by
Elizabeth Story

My working relationship with author James Morrow dates back a good ten-plus years. In 2003 I included a reprint of his story "Auspicious Eggs" in my co-edited anthology Witpunk (with Claude Lalumière). Then in August 2008 I line/copy edited Morrow's novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima, which was published by Tachyon Publications the following year. Shambling received critical praise, winning the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2010, as well as being named a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards. Also in 2010, my original Fermi paradox anthology, Is Anybody Out There? (co-edited with Nick Gevers) was published, for which Morrow wrote "The Vampires of Paradox," one of the more celebrated stories in the book.¹

James Morrow is an absolute master of the sardonic, which was one of the reasons Claude and I selected his story for inclusion in Witpunk. (The other, primary reason, being that he is a master craftsman.) But a reader wouldn't need an anthology like Witpunk to know about the sardonic side of James Morrow: simply look at the individual titles of his stories -- "Auspicious Eggs," "The Vampires of Paradox," and "Shambling Towards Hiroshima." And his new book is no exception. The title? The Madonna and the Starship, forthcoming from Tachyon Pubs in early 2014.

I recall the book launch event for Is Anybody Out There? at ReaderCon in Boston in July, 2010. In addition to James Morrow, authors Yves Meynard and Paul Di Filippo were on hand to read from their stories. My blog post "Readercon Recap," published on July 27, 2010, covers the details, but to quote from that post: "About five or so minutes into his reading, Jim [Morrow] reached under the table and -- surprising us all (myself included) -- brought forth a purplish brainlike thing with long tentacles, which he perched upon his shoulder as a visual representation of the parasitic cacodaemons in his story. Great bouts of laughter ensued."

Fast forward three years.... In late September I received an email from Jill Roberts at Tachyon Pubs informing me that James Morrow had requested that I work on his new novella. And two days later I received an email from the author himself: he would send me "a version of the file with a few new nips and tucks and tweaks" when I was ready....

So, here I am working on The Madonna and the Starship, a story that takes place in the early 1950s, the decade in which commercial television was finally affordable for mainstream America. Television sets first appeared in the Sears Roebuck catalog in 1949, and by 1950 nine percent of U.S. households could boast of owning a television set. By 1951 the television networks broadcast a total of twenty-seven hours of children's shows each week, and promoted the educational aspects of television to parents.² Which brings me to Kurt Jastrow, the protagonist of our story. who is the head writer for the NBC children's program Brock Barton and His Rocket Rangers. In addition to cranking out weekly episodes of Brock Barton, Jastrow was also tasked with writing -- and starring in -- a ten-minute segment at the end of each episode: Uncle Wonder's Attic. Wearing a cardigan sweater and hiding behind a fake grizzled beard and equally fake eyebrows, Uncle Wonder would rummage around in his attic until he found just the right materials to perform some experiment related to the Brock Barton universe. Here's Kurt:

I liked my job. Just as our show enabled kids to fantasize that they were star sailors, so did my scripting duties allow me to imagine that I was a playwright, though I knew perfectly well that nobody was about to confuse a space schooner called the Triton with a streetcar named Desire.

But, Jastrow's day-to-day normalcy was interrupted by the arrival of two lobster-like aliens -- Wulawand and Volavont, from the planet Qualimosa in the Procyon system: a planet of "logical positivists." Unfortunately, this didn't bode well for Kurt Jastrow's love interest, Connie Osborne, who wrote and produced a Sunday morning religious program called Not By Bread Alone. Certain that the program's audience represented "a hive of irrationalist vermin," the Qualimosans planned to piggyback their death-ray onto the broadcast signal of Not By Bread Alone, to every NBC affiliate. Come Sunday morning, at ten minutes past ten o'clock, the Earth would be cleansed of nearly two million irrationalists.

Kurt and Connie now had less that two days to write, cast, and rehearse a replacement episode of Not By Bread Alone, one that was so perfectly rational and utterly absurd as to foil the Qualimosans' plans.

The Madonna and the Starship is available for preorder on Amazon.com.

---------------
Footnotes:

1. This blog also has a dedicated Is Anybody Out There? page, which includes the complete text of six of the anthology's stories.

2. "Television History - A Timeline: 1878-2005," The University of Texas School of Law, Tarlton Law Library, Jamail Center for Legal Research.

Editing in Process...The Very Best of Tad Williams

Art by Kerem Beyit

My latest copy editing project is a hefty collection of Tad Williams stories, 135,000 words (including front and back matter) to be exact, titled The Very Best of Tad Williams, forthcoming from Tachyon Publications in May 2014.

I have Tad's four-volume Otherland series in my library, but except for the Otherland novella, "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World" (included in Legends II: New Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy, edited by Robert Silverberg, Tor Books, 2003), I've not read any of the author's other short fiction --

Until now. And my excuse for not having read any of Tad Williams's other short stories? Well, can I plead insanity? As I must have been insane to have overlooked some of these stories.

I was pleased to see that this collection contained the more recent Otherland story, "The Boy Detective of Oz" (originally published in Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen, 47North, 2013), which I hadn't previously read -- so now my Otherland series is complete.

My favorite story, by far, in the collection is "The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of" -- a story of stage magicians, a locked-door mystery, and a missing book of memoirs. This novelette is pure gold, written in the style of the noir detective story, with just the right touch of sardonic wit provided by the occasionally drunk protagonist, one Dalton Pinnard -- also known as "Pinardo the Magnificent." And, of course, we have Pinnard's receptionist Tilly, and the requisite damsel, Ms. Emily Heltenbocker.

Second favorite would have to be another novelette, "And Ministers of Grace" (originally published in Warriors, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin, Tor Books, 2010). A heady tale of two religious factions: the Rationalists of Archimedes and the Abramites of Covenant. An assasin's beliefs are so ingrained that he completely closes off the ability to even listen to, let alone consider, the beliefs of others.

Here's the table of contents:

The Old Scale Game
The Storm Door
The Stranger's Hands
Child of an Ancient City
The Boy Detective of Oz
Three Duets for Virgin and Nosehorn
Diary of a Dragon
Not with a Whimper, Either
Some Thoughts Re: Dark Destroyer
Z is for...
Monsieur Vergalant's Canard
The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of
A Fish Between Three Friends
Every Fuzzy Beast of the Earth, Every Pink Fowl of the Air
A Stark and Wormy Knight
Black Sunshine
And Ministers of Grace
Omnitron, What Ho!

The last story, "Omnitron, What Ho!" is original to this collection. It's the tale of Werner Von Secondstage Booster, his Aunt Jabbatha, and how "Wernie" first met his robot servant Omnitron. As I read this story, I pictured Jeeves and Wooster....only instead of Jeeves rescuing Wooster from one of his typical hijinks, Omnitron saves Wernie from a more deadly romantic liaison.

And the longest story in the collection, "Black Sunshine," which clocks in at nearly 28,000 words, is written as a screenplay. Five friends, Brent, Eric, Janice, Kimmy, and Topher, party down on the last Saturday night of the summer, before school begins. Then, twenty-five years later, on the last Saturday night before school begins, they all meet once again, and slowly begin to realize exactly what happened that night, twenty-five years ago -- except that it is happening right now.

Editing in Process...Charles Stross

I promised myself -- and readers of this blog -- that I would post updates of my current editing work in process, so....

I'm currently line editing and copy editing the fifth Charles Stross Laundry Files novel (and my fifth volume as well), The Rhesus Chart, to be published next year by Ace Books.

I have seen the preliminary cover art, but since it's not the final cover art, and I'm not permitted to post it here, you'll have to make do with the SOE Department Q coat of arms -- the World War II precursor to the Laundry.

If you're not familiar with Stross's Laundry Files stories, I have written previously on this blog about the events surrounding the acquisition and publication of the first two Laundry Files books, originally published in hardcover by Golden Gryphon Press, and currently available in trade paperback from Ace Books: The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. That blog post, entitled "Charles Stross: On Her Majesty's Occult Service," was posted on December 10, 2009, and can be found here. I also wrote extensively about my work on the previous Laundry Files novel, The Apocalypse Codex, as Ace had imposed a new requirement on me: providing a style sheet (which I must provide this time around as well). Posted on January 27, 2012, "Doing Charles Stross's Laundry with Style" can be found here.

And you can read Stross's latest Laundry Files story, "Equoid," available for your reading pleasure courtesy of Tor.com.

Now, where did I put my warrant card....

Follow-up blog post:

The Rhesus Chart Revealed

Editing in process....Michael J. Sullivan

For the past couple years, I've been posting my current editing work on Facebook, on Google+, and on Twitter -- but not on More Red Ink.

Consequently, two (or more) weeks may pass before I post a new update here, which may lead dedicated readers to believe that I've not been working, that I've been out enjoying this beautiful Northern California weather, that I've been spending all my time on my Nexus 7 tab (only partly true).

So, beginning with this post, I will be updating the blog with a brief entry on each of my new projects, when I receive new books, and essentially anything that may be relevant to my work, that I have previously been posting on social media.

My current project, pictured to the left, is copy editing the forthcoming novel Hollow World by Michael J. Sullivan. Hollow World will be published by Tachyon Publications in April 2014.

Bradley P. Beaulieu's Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten

Artwork by Sang Han

Fate (if you believe in that sort of thing) has a way of, occasionally, flipping reality onto its head.

I have worked for Night Shade Books for these past nine years: the very first book I worked on was Adam Roberts's Swiftly, which I completed in May 2005; the last book I worked on, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan, was completed in January of this year. In the course of these nine years, I edited, line edited, and/or copy edited content for approximately 190 books for Night Shade. 190. One of these days, I just may list all the titles. Unfortunately, I should have stopped working for Night Shade at least six months ago, but we'll leave that discussion possibly for another blog post.

About the same time I was wrestling with the decision whether or not to take on another Night Shade project (which I didn't, thankfully), another author was wrestling with a similar decision: Bradley P. Beaulieu (pronounced "Bowl-yer") was owed money by Night Shade Books (Aren't we all?) and the publisher had decided to push out volume three of his Lays of Anuskaya trilogy for at least another full year. Brad chose then to leave Night Shade, take volume three, The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, with him, and self-publish the book. He explained all this in a blog post entitled "A Slight Change of Plans," which he published on February 19, 2013.

Now, while all this was going on, Brad was also running a Kickstarter campaign for his short story collection, Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten & Other Stories. Funding ended for Brad's collection on January 11, with the primary goal reached, as well as all six of the stretch goals.

Which brings us to the present: Bradley P. Beaulieu was in need of an editor for Lest Our Passage Be Forgotten, and I was in need of a new editing gig -- and I am pleased to announce that I will be working with Brad on this project.

Initially I edited the three stories written exclusively for the collection as part of the Kickstarter stretch goals:

"To the Towers of Tulandan" is a prequel story to his Lays of Anuskaya trilogy (The Winds of Khalakovo, The Straits of Galahesh, and the forthcoming The Flames of Shadam Khoreh).

"Prima" is somewhat of a sequel story to the trilogy: the story takes place 25 years after the end of The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, but is not related to the main events in the trilogy.

"Unearthed" is a prequel story to the world of Bryndlholt, a new middle-grade series that Brad has recently begun writing.