Copy-edit

Fifteen hours over four days in the library, and I have been all the way through the copy-edit of 'River of the World'. And changed very little: a couple of minor inconsistencies (the best one being the stepping-stones that turned into a bridge: the sad news is that it was the stepping-stones - a much more interesting paragraph - that had to go, because the bridge was much more useful plotwise) and otherwise little more than punctuation. People always want me to use more commas than I like, and wherever two or three English-speaking people are gathered together, they will disagree about hyphenation. That's about it.

Now I have to go through the whole thing at the desk here, to record all the changes in my master-files. Just in case we ever sell a UK edition: it'd be good to start out with equivalent texts.

That's my boy

Hah! You know how animals are supposed to be craven about fireworks? Pshaw, we say. Barry is sitting in my upstairs office window here, utterly enthralled by all the flashes and the bangings. Bring it on, he says. Give me more.