Five Magic Spindles will be out on July 22. I am terribly excited, and I hope you are too! One of the other anthology authors, Rachel Kovaciny, has been hosting a series of interviews with the authors on her blog, Hamlette's Soliloquy. Check out http://hamlette.blogspot.com/ and look for her posts from June 2, June 9, June 16, and June 23.
We've all had a chance to go through the book's galleys, and the influencer readers have now received their e-copies of the book. Ironically, the influencer readers see the final version before we authors do! (I'm really curious to know who ultimately won a certain grammar battle in my story... The editors and I went back and forth about a particular verb form several times. They kept changing it to a perfect tense form, I kept changing it back to a past progressive. The funny thing is, the first few times I thought "Oh, I must have made a mistake," and changed it without realizing that I was reverting to my original text!)
Having other people read my story closely and edit it has been a very interesting experience. We've mostly disagreed about punctuation. Apparently, my understanding of the common comma is stuck in the 1800s (Edgeworth, Dickens, Burney, Trollope). I use commas in every possible spot. The Rooglewood editors get rid of commas in every possible spot. Ah, well. It could be worse. They could have wanted to mess with my semicolons...
I devoured the other stories within about 48 hours of receiving the galleys. I enjoyed all of them. Rachel created one of my favorite characters and narrator voices in Man on a Buckskin Horse. Michelle Pennington really impressed me with her confident writing. Ashley Stangl created a world and a culture I need to hear more about in Out of the Tomb. And Grace Mullins wrote the story that made me laugh the most and that I will most enjoy reading to my young relatives (fans of Patricia Wrede and Christopher Healy, rejoice!).
NOOOOOOOOOOO! Not semicolons! Never semicolons. Perish the thought.
ReplyDeleteYou have young friends who love Patricia C. Wrede? My son (8) loves her books! She is his favorite author, and he got The Thirteenth Child out of the library so often, I bought him his own copy, which is now about worn out. I need to sit down and read it myself one of these days.
Thank you for the compliment, by the way :-) I'm getting so excited for this release!
Hey Kathryn! Just wanted to let you know that I've featured your short story contribution to the Five Magic Spindles collection in a review on my blog :) --> http://hiddendoorways.blogspot.ca/2016/08/five-magic-spindles-review.html
ReplyDeleteThanks for your review! As you can tell, I'm not as used to the novella length... I think that "Guardian" is the shortest complete story I've ever written! But I enjoyed writing it despite the length restrictions and will have fun continuing to explore that world in other stories. :)
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