Black Ship done

View 716 Wednesday, March 07, 2012

I have finished editing The Secret of Black Ship Island by Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes, and sent it off as release candidate 1. Since everyone was pretty well satisfied before I tore into it, and I think what I did was improvement, I think it will go pretty quickly now – instead of the months it takes to produce a book from the final draft with print publishers, it ought to go fairly quickly now. We have a cover, and a preface, and acknowledgements, and a good clean text.

One thing about self published books. Most authors are not very good editors of their own work. Niven and Barnes and I have developed pretty good editorial habits and we’ve worked together long enough to know some of each other’s weaknesses, such as my tendency to overly long and complex sentences and Steve’s addiction to gerunds, so our works are generally well edited; having said that I don’t want to diminish the contribution of editors like Ed Kuehn, Bob Gleason, and Jim Baen on our works in the past. In this case we have had the benefit of my advisors as well.

Good editing is a major part of good publishing. I expect to see more editing services offered and accepted as traditional publishing firms decline. Some will be excellent and some not so much so, and choosing among them will be a real problem: there will be many including academics whose opinion of their editorial abilities may be more favorable than is warranted. I expect to see a flock of editorial services offered followed by a general shakeout.

My other accomplishment was to get set for my trip to Colorado Springs where I am to take part in a conference sponsored by the Air Force. I confess that I have never had much practice in doing my own travel arrangements. For a long time I used the excellent travel agency run by Rick Foss, and when the internet shook those out there was always someone else to set these things up for me. It turns out to have taken a lot longer to figure out how to get to Colorado Springs for a couple of days than I would have believed. I wanted to go out of Burbank, but that turned out to be nearly impossible, and almost always involved two place changes and many hours wasted. Eventually I found a way that has me in Colorado the night before I had to get there – getting from here to Colorado Springs by dinner time is nearly impossible even from LAX unless you are willing to leave at bloody dawn. Anyway, I managed it, but it ate a lot of my time. I sure miss the old days of travel agents. Ah well. I suppose this Internet stuff is all for the best.

It’s dinner time. I’ll try to do a full mail bag again shortly. And I am feeling better. A physician reader recommended food grade glycerin as a nasal lubricant, and it sure helps. It works well with Sudafed.

For those who took me to task for my discussion of Sandra Fluke, apparently you were not reading what I said. I don’t fault Ms. Fluke for being an advocate; she’s rather good at it. I suppose I need to address the subject again, but it’s dinner time, and I have used up most of my energy. Another time.

Major space weather tomorrow, but from what I have heard this is biggest solar eruption since 2000, which puts it in a different class from the 1859 solar flare. But your GPS may not work so well tomorrow. But we’re due for a really big one sometime this century.