a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-01-31 04:11 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-01-31 04:11 pm
Entry tags:
Won't put you on the outside
I've been really sick for the past few days, and have essentially spent all of today in bed up until now. I'm exhausted, my bones ache, and all I really want to do is sleep. I've cancelled everything non-essential, but I could definitely have done without being sick right at this specific moment.
In better news, I received a late gift for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomtrees after the fest closed: this fic based on Welsh folklore/mythology by kalloway. That was definitely a lovely and welcome surprise!
One fest closes, another is opening tomorrow:halfamoon, which is a fest focusing on female characters. The full list of prompts is already available.
once_upon_fic is now open for nominations, with details and the full schedule available in a recent post.
snowflake_challenge is doing its post-challenge friending meme. Click on the poster to join in:
It seems a waste to write a (rare) post on a Wednesday and not talk about my recent reading, which consists of a single book: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. This is in some ways the vampire novel of my dreams — when I'm seeking out stories about vampires, this is essentially exactly what I want. Our hero, Remy, is a vampire hunter in a world in which aristocratic families of vampire hunters coexist uneasily in alliances with aristocratic kingdoms of vampires, teaming up against the unspecified threat both of rogue, unaligned gangs of newly-turned vampires, and more established vampire kingdoms.
Remy's backstory piles on the angst — there's a cloud surrounding the circumstances of his birth (which killed his mother), his father treats him as a weapon to be wielded, the other vampire hunters either distrust or use him, etc, etc. Through an escalating series of dangerous circumstances, Remy ends up working with a powerful vampire couple, he ends up falling in love with both of them (and they with him), and a good time is had by all, against a backdrop of epic battles, political machinations, and huge heapings of angst. The worldbuilding is contradictory and at times nonsensical, but that doesn't really matter to me since the draw of the book is the characters and their relationships, which are very much my thing.
If that were all I had to say about the book, I would have given it an enthusiastic five-star rating and moved on (since I give that kind of rating on the basis of how well I think a book has achieved what it set out to achieve, rather than any objective scale of 'good quality literature'). However, it has serious problems on a copyediting level, to the extent that at times I wondered if it had even been professionally edited at all. This is a book professionally published by Hodder & Stoughton — hardly a dinky little small press — the sequel is coming out later this year, and yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.
This is not the first time I've noticed serious problems with editing (either on the level of copyediting/proofreading, or on the level of the actual structure and content of the book) in professionally published works of fiction, and I'm definitely not the only one to have raised it within my Dreamwidth circle. Without knowing the ins and outs of the publishing industry, my impression is of an industry cut to the bone, with the effects of these cuts and lack of resources starting to be felt in areas that are noticeable to the reader — namely, editing (or lack thereof). My assumption (and this is just a theory; I don't work in publishing) is that it is more cost effective to do book deals with a large number of authors (often with quite low advances), larger than the publisher has the capacity (both financially and in terms of staffing) to edit well, and get all those books out there and published. More books, bought cheaply from more authors, means the potential for more sales, and most readers of these books aren't going to notice or care about poor quality editorial work — and those of us who do have already bought the books, have already given our money, and aren't necessarily going to remember the typos and grammatical errors by the time we attempt to buy another book from the same author or publisher. As I say, just a theory, but whatever the cause, this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.
In better news, I received a late gift for
fandomtrees after the fest closed: this fic based on Welsh folklore/mythology by kalloway. That was definitely a lovely and welcome surprise! One fest closes, another is opening tomorrow:
halfamoon, which is a fest focusing on female characters. The full list of prompts is already available.once_upon_fic is now open for nominations, with details and the full schedule available in a recent post.snowflake_challenge is doing its post-challenge friending meme. Click on the poster to join in:It seems a waste to write a (rare) post on a Wednesday and not talk about my recent reading, which consists of a single book: Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco. This is in some ways the vampire novel of my dreams — when I'm seeking out stories about vampires, this is essentially exactly what I want. Our hero, Remy, is a vampire hunter in a world in which aristocratic families of vampire hunters coexist uneasily in alliances with aristocratic kingdoms of vampires, teaming up against the unspecified threat both of rogue, unaligned gangs of newly-turned vampires, and more established vampire kingdoms.
Remy's backstory piles on the angst — there's a cloud surrounding the circumstances of his birth (which killed his mother), his father treats him as a weapon to be wielded, the other vampire hunters either distrust or use him, etc, etc. Through an escalating series of dangerous circumstances, Remy ends up working with a powerful vampire couple, he ends up falling in love with both of them (and they with him), and a good time is had by all, against a backdrop of epic battles, political machinations, and huge heapings of angst. The worldbuilding is contradictory and at times nonsensical, but that doesn't really matter to me since the draw of the book is the characters and their relationships, which are very much my thing.
If that were all I had to say about the book, I would have given it an enthusiastic five-star rating and moved on (since I give that kind of rating on the basis of how well I think a book has achieved what it set out to achieve, rather than any objective scale of 'good quality literature'). However, it has serious problems on a copyediting level, to the extent that at times I wondered if it had even been professionally edited at all. This is a book professionally published by Hodder & Stoughton — hardly a dinky little small press — the sequel is coming out later this year, and yet there are multiple instances of tense changes not just from sentence to sentence, but sometimes within a single sentence.
This is not the first time I've noticed serious problems with editing (either on the level of copyediting/proofreading, or on the level of the actual structure and content of the book) in professionally published works of fiction, and I'm definitely not the only one to have raised it within my Dreamwidth circle. Without knowing the ins and outs of the publishing industry, my impression is of an industry cut to the bone, with the effects of these cuts and lack of resources starting to be felt in areas that are noticeable to the reader — namely, editing (or lack thereof). My assumption (and this is just a theory; I don't work in publishing) is that it is more cost effective to do book deals with a large number of authors (often with quite low advances), larger than the publisher has the capacity (both financially and in terms of staffing) to edit well, and get all those books out there and published. More books, bought cheaply from more authors, means the potential for more sales, and most readers of these books aren't going to notice or care about poor quality editorial work — and those of us who do have already bought the books, have already given our money, and aren't necessarily going to remember the typos and grammatical errors by the time we attempt to buy another book from the same author or publisher. As I say, just a theory, but whatever the cause, this poor quality editing is something I've noticed frequently, and it's a shame it affected this book as well.