In which I don't after all know everything...

Post! From America! The contracts for the Year's Best story, and a copy of Lace and Blade, so I can finally read everybody else's story, yay!

Um, after I've read the novel I'm supposed to be blurbing. Whoops.

Oh, and I'm sort of supposed to be reading my own novel as well, aren't I? Yikes...

Actually, to be fair to myself (and why not?), my own book is now five-sixths read and scribbled on, and almost a quarter has been processed. It's just slow, so sloooowwww, I ache with the burden of it all...

And! I was in mid-aching, skullsweating over the pages this morning when this man came up to me - in the Silence Room, yet! - and asked if I was by any chance an expert in Cuban political history.

I denied it, obviously, though I do know more this week than I did last. And so he wandered off and asked someone else, and was as quickly repulsed. And okay, this is the Lit & Phil, wherein all the knowledge of the world is contained (it's kind of like LJ in that respect, only solid), but even so. That's just so ... random, y'know? I might have wondered if I had the look of an expert in Cuban political history, except that the woman he asked next looked nothing like me.

Oh look, something else to read...

I've just had the edit of my "Lost World" abridgement back, for my once-over. I wouldn't care, perhaps, but it is going to have my name on it, so apparently I do.

At least (I'm told) it's a really light edit. Which is pleasing, because it means I got the voice right, more or less. I can still do literary ventriloquy. And at least they've done it themselves, rather than describing what they want and asking me to do it. Ordinarily I'm very defensive about my work and hate anyone else's hand meddling with it, but not in this instance. Not now. I'm tired and depressed and perhaps not entirely well, and just really grateful that all I have to do is read and check it. Tomorrow.

By the way, within that train of thought: Madeleine Robins has a really good post about text wranglers, over on the Deep Genre site. It's a sort of in-memoriam to Robert Legault (readwrite), who has died unexpectedly and will be ferociously missed, though it's disguised as an introduction to the editorial process. I think he would have liked it.