2 items

[yagathai]

1) May he never sell another book ever again. Fellow copyeditors, I know you hear me on this.

2) cmpriest is looking for help naming her new fish over at this post. Make me proud, FL!

Comments

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't have any problems with copyeditors bleeding all over one of my manuscripts when it's in the proofing stage. Not only is it your job, but you may be right. The only time I get pissed off is when I get an editor who rewrites me without letting me know, and then screws up the manuscript and refuses to take blame for the goof. I used to have to deal with one such prima donna, who honestly seemed to enjoy rewriting whole articles (to the point where I'd recognize individual words I'd written, but not in any such order), who'd leave the author's byline on the article and then refer all complaints about the facts he'd gotten wrong to the author. Oh, I could have beaten the hell out of him, but simply noting that "having Fat Elvis's physique, Buddy Holly's glasses, and Phil Collins's hair don't make you a rock star" was a lot more effective.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was an incredibly unprofessional thing to do on the writer's part. Couldn't he have just, I don't know, punched a pillow and dealt with this without basically threatening the poor copy editor (well, threatening in a pretty hyperbolic sense, but if someone said they'd better never find out where I lived, I'd be frightened. Maybe that's just my PTSD talking, but still).

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

When I was still writing, I heard a lot of idiotic threats from editors about how "unprofessional behavior", such as quitting magazines that didn't pay and that put out one issue every two years or so, would come back to haunt me. For the most part, the threats about how "nobody's going to deal with you ever again once I let them know how you left me in the lurch" come off as lover's spats, and the editor is much more likely to get laughed at and given wedgies at conventions than the writer. However, this one has probably killed his book career, especially as far as writing Star Trek novels is concerned.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd hate to see anyone's book career killed over what amounts to doing something really stupid, but probably in a moment of anger (if he directly threatened the editor or copy editor, though, as one chucklehead did to poor mroctober a few months ago, then that's another story). But yes, he behaved very poorly here, and that can't have helped him.

[kylecassidy.livejournal.com]

same thing happened with fitzgeralds star trek novel.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

I loved how the Andorians of East Eggtronulus IV looked down on the Andorians of West Eggsti Alpha Prime. It was very poignant.

[arya.livejournal.com]

I love how a schlock author who makes his living selling tripe, gets all indignant as though it was some work of art that was somehow defiled.

Heh.

[regina-of-york.livejournal.com]

Mwahahaha!

Thank you for sharing that, I haven't read such a "good" internet wank in a while.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

I challenge your assertion that writing Star Trek novels qualifies as a "career".

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, but it sure seemed to put A.C. Crispin on the map. By the late Eighties, she was so well-known for quickie movie novelizations and Star Trek novels that she got the nickname "The Kenny Loggins of science fiction".

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

It's nice that her fanfiction hobby got her career started.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

You read my mind. (Actually, there's nothing funnier than Shadows of the Empire novelist Steve Perry actually bragging about how nobody can take away his listing as a "New York Times Bestselling Author" for grunting out Star Wars novels. I crashed a panel of his twelve years ago, and the only thing funnier than listening to him blather about how he got to play in George Lucas's and Gene Roddenberry's universes was listening to him scream and yell about Bantam Spectra's then-new royalty policy. See, Lucasfilm had increased the royalties it expected from Bantam, and Bantam had no choice but to change its royalty rates to authors. Instead of paying $40k and a percentage of sales, authors got paid a straight $60k, and Perry spent that entire weekend screaming about how unfair Bantam Spectra was being, without once acknowledging why BS had to do so.)

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

You don't want to know what happened to Hunter S. Thompson's Babylon 5 novel. "We were somewhere outside of Centauri Prime, on the edge of hyperspace, when the drugs began to take hold."