Thanks EE!

The EVIL EDITOR critiqued the first draft of our query letter yesterday. I'm happy that he did not seem generally appauled by it -- nor did the minions who are known to sometimes have passionate feelings (often of distate) for the letter/premise. The fact that most of the comments were spent talking about an obscure weed that grows in the Southern States I take as a good sign! That you EE -- some suggestions are going to be taken, others pretty well disregarded. As usual, the critique was quite amusing, made even more so because it was ours.

Today's editing went well even though it felt more like work than it has in the past couple weeks. When we began our weekly editing, we felt hugely accomplished to get 10 pages done a day. Today we did 17. I'm thinking this is a combination of the writing getting better, us getting faster at editing, and more leniancy on both our parts. We're really less likely to quibble about things like commas, and if we're opposing on something, usually either one gives in fast or we just cut it altogether. Compromise is our friend.

In other news, Jim Baen passed away yesterday. I am not exactly a science fiction fan, though it is an area I am actively interested in learning more about. The tropes are interesting, and there is much within the SF genre that parallels the nifty societal insights that can be made in fantasy. And I certainly respect and admire what Jim Baen was able to do to the industry of sci-fi publishing -- he did more for it than many others have. He was the founding force for some of the biggest names in SF, main editor of one of the biggest publishing houses in SF Baen books, established the SF lines of both Ace fiction and Tor, and worked for a couple of magazines. Fantasy and sci-fi have a tendency to be grouped together, and surely some of the good he's done SF is good done also to its sister-genre. There is a very touching piece written about Jim Baen here by David Drake -- even most non SF readers have surely heard of Drake.