The rewards of doing it— the sheer petty joy of typing grEy instead of grAy, an Americanism I detest; the delight of cleaning up things I noticed AFTER it was in print…the freedom of being able to use a long dash WITHOUT butting it up against the prior word and overriding a comma, thus:
John—come here! becomes John, —come here! The sheer luxury of not having to re-correct my subjunctives when some copyeditor has misconstrued them. The delight of being able to say leapt instead of leaped (I swear the next pernicious change will be sleeped) —And the happiness of doing a book as long as I want it, with the typography I want, and the ending I want…and without the philosophy of an editor, who arrives new on the scene and doesn’t like ooky scary things, getting between you and your book. That definitely happened on Faery in Shadow, and to a certain extent on Rusalka.
Plus—a decade can give you a clearer vision of what you needed to do, and experience gives you a whole arsenal of skills you didn’t have back when…
I am so, so, so much happier with the Rusalka set (aka ‘what it’s REALLY like to grow up a wizard’–)
I’ve gotten through the new Yvgenie edit. You’ll notice some other changes. Rusalka is under my name, Chernevog is me and Jane, because Jane had such good insignts, and actually wrote some that I happily used, that I happily shared the authorship (my idea, not anything she asked;) and the third book, Yvgenie, is back to me again. This is honest-to-God magic-works-in-our-world fantasy that will also give a nice little aha! to people who do like physics; AND to people who know something about Russian folklore. How’s that for pleasing a diverse audience?
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The short story is Foreigner, of course, before Bren arrived on the scene….I hope you enjoy it.
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And Jane’s new book is Netwalkers, which begins the NEW version of her whole universe. This is brilliant, gutsy science fiction—and if you THINK you know where it’s going or you THINK you’ve seen this sort of thing before…don’t be too sure. This is sf of a very special sort, and if you’ve not read Jane’s sf, —read this!
Launch date is the 24th of October, and we are on schedule.
I be excited! — And I empathize. I prefer “grey” over “gray” myself, and it irks me when a spell checker hangs on “grey.”
I take it one step further and don’t ask me why: gray is pinkie-gray, grey is neutral or bluish-grey. But then…we always knew I was weird…
I view it exactly the same way, and always have. Granny’s favorite dress-up color was grey and gray, depending what—grey on Grandad and gray on her. I can still see them.
oh you are absolutely right there …. why is a pink and e more neutral – weird!
Foreigner short story? O_O Yippee! I keep hoping that at some point (in your copious free time) we eventually get to hear Ilisidi’s back story.
Instead of ‘The Director’s Cut’, it’s ‘The Author’s Edition!’
I’ll have to read these and then go back and read the print to see what you ‘fixed’.
*SO* agreed… Reading the new Chernevog was like a breath of fresh air. Places where I’d previously had to go back a few pages to understand how the story had suddenly transitioned are now just seamless parts of the narrative.
I just found out about Faery Moon today, BTW… I remember being VERY confused by Faery in Shadow, which was offset somewhat by later finding the novella Brothers that set the stage, but still a big leap. I’ll be buying Faery Moon in the next day or so. 🙂
Oh and CJ: How does an American boy like me pronounce “Dubhain” ??? I’ve guessed “De-VAUN” as a maybe, but the “Du-BINE” that comes from reading it with English rules just sounds wrong in my head.
I’ve always adored this series…which is a bit weird, since I’m not really that much of a fantasy-person. I get the extreme pleasure of editing all CJC’s stuff, but Chernevog was special. I spotted some hanging strings that when I tugged on them, the seams just slid into place, making shapes I’d never guess at, and Carolyn gave me leave to run with them.
I really don’t know how CJ does it, book after book and with all that’s been going on around here…sheesh. And editing a backlist story that was written at a difficult time…it was hard enough doing the rewrites of the GT series. Rewrites rouse all kinds of associations, good and bad, and keeping your head clear of those associations to finally…get it right…is almost harder than writing it in the first place.
Yvgenie has some wonderful new bits. I helped a lot on that one, too! (She says, jumping up and down with her hand raised. :D) but more in the way we help each other with every book.
Lol—Dubhain is Doohan, as in James Doohan, or DOO-an. The bh- goes to v in names like Cearbhallain (ker VAL en—not in this book) —and Caith is more like Keith. Dubhain incidentally, means black — kind of fitting for a pooka. (compare Dubhlinn (Dublin) Black Pool)
Thanks for the kind words.
I’m so glad to find another fan of “leapt.” I hate it that spell check doesn’t think it’s a word. I’ve put Chernevog on my wishlist. I adore your Foreigner series, but I was often confused with Chernevog, and I can’t help but wonder how much of that was the editor.
There was a lot going on—I had 3 assistants have meltdowns from their own stress combined, probably with mine. I had a string of parental illnesses—I can’t even count all of them, just one thing after another, all life-threatening, about every 3 months for years, though survived; my editor at Ballantine died; my new editors hated anything ‘dark’, which leaves out all my fiction, in their eyes—(I mean, I have a background in archaeology, and the real ancient world had dark spots…but not THAT dark, f’ gosh sakes. I scared the daylights out of them with Dubhain, and they never ‘got’ the sense of humor about being in bad places with things going wrong. I did decide I absolutely never wanted to go camping with those two ladies. They’d be up a tree at the first bump in the night. There’s a reason I could put Heavy Time and Hellburner up as-was, —they were written during a lull in the crises—but I certainly have rewrites in order on others. I fortunately never weave personal crises into the fabric of a book—I generally remember the text very well, but can’t tell you which bout of what was going on at the time, nor do I have any mental record—just an urge to fix these things and make them what I wanted them to be. So it’s pleasure I feel when I get to set these things right, and I hope you can enjoy them all over again.
So excited about Oct. 24, and so eager for “Yvgenie”! And I agree about “grey” and “leapt” — and there you are, my spellchecker just underlined “leapt” in red. Tiresome!
He sweeped up the floor and sleeped the sleep of the just, eh? What a world!
BTW—would one of you do me a favor, and e-mail me the exact copyright citation of Cyteen’s first paperbound edition, the one that’s broken into 3 parts? We need that for a pattern.
That’s cj@cherryh.com
NOTE: got the copyright notice: thank you sooooooooooooo much!
I used to write “gray,” but somehow grew to prefer “grey.” I have seen “bluegray” as one word, or with a hyphen, but for some reason, spellcheckers no longer like bluegray or bluegrey. (Oh, that just gave it a fit!) so I now spell that as “blue-grey.”
Grey seems about equally a cool grey and a warm grey to me, but about all we have for a grey-brown is taupe, or the Inauspiciously rodenty mousy grey.
To me, leapt and leaped are both OK, but leapt has a short E while leaped has a long E. Hmm…but I can’t say when I’d use “leaped.” It doesn’t fit my personal usage or textbook grammatical usage, unless you say it’s merely an alternate spelling. To wit: to leap, leap, leaps, leaping, leapt, had leapt.
However, I would treat burned as the verbal form and burnt as the adjectival form: he burned the food, but the cloth was burnt orange.
I really wish read (present) and read (past) had different spellings. Sure, there are reed and red already, but would rehd or redd be worse than red? Or reade and read, though that drives the phonetics and historic phonetics aspect nuts.
See what happens? I was just getting warmed up.
I will be thrilled to get the new ebooks from CJ and Jane.
Hmm, Gaelic must be the one language (family) with more convoluted spelling/pronunciation that English or French. Between the vowel changes and the consonant changes, I’m surprised sensible Irish and Scots didn’t throw out the old spellings and come up with a new system altogether. At least the dotted consonants are more compact.
You should hear/read Welsh, not that I know the language at all! Completely (AFAICT) unrelated to anything that ought to be nearby on the linguistic family tree.
I think those responsible for coming up with the convoluted orthography for written Gaelic did it to piss off the English. Lord knows, the English tried hard enough to stamp out Gaelic in Scotland. If Gaelic was your first language to speak and you learned to read by reading Gaelic, I can see how you’d adapt to it’s spelling as quickly as English speakers adapt to the vagarities (which word the spell checker doesn’t like, BTW)of English spelling. Then again, Gaelic could be like English and French, where the pronunciation drifted but the orthography was not revised to keep up with it. (“through” versus “thru,” “would” versus “wud,” “neighbor” versus “naybor,” etc. — and whatever possessed whoever it was to put a “w” into “sword?”)
My PhD is in Celtic Languages and Literatures and my speciality is historical Scottish Highland culture, although my Gaelic is not as good as it ought to be. Irish Gaelic actually has modernized the spelling to drop out a fair number of the now-unpronounced consonants, which completely confuses me because Scottish Gaelic, the language I am more familiar with, keeps them. I can recognize derivations of and related words in Scottish Gaelic and in older, Irish spellings but draw blanks when confronted with most contemporary Irish writing. Part of the problem is that I know the languages better as written than spoken languages and the other part is that the pronunciations differ so much amongst all the Irish and Scottish Gaelic dialects that any modernized Irish spelling is going to ignore how half the dialectical pronunciations.
Dubhain in my version of Scottish Gaelic would likely be pronounced “DUHVun” or perhaps “DUHwan.”
I’ve got my (sweetie’s) credit card ready to roll! And actually, after reading the list you provided in the other blog entry, I have read a number of the Alliance-Union novels already; I guess I just never considered them connected for some reason. I very much enjoyed Cyteen in fact, although I don’t remember much about others of that collection. Not that it wasn’t great stuff, it’s just my crappy memory! I am a CJ Cherryh fan thru and thru though, so if I see something by you, I buy it, knowing it will be a great read.
That particular spelling does also cause me to wonder, grey or gray? I never thought about the idea that there was a difference in the actual color of grey or gray. The furthest I ever got was ‘Earl Grey’ tea and the old gray mare. 🙂 Although in the racial unconscious I do see that the alien species is definitely spelled the ‘greys’.
And always I figure if there is some really ridiculous way of spelling something, like sword or doubt, it probably has something to do with the french! But I’m not very educated on all the technicalities of language, and I have to confess, it tends to make my eyes close when I try to learn more, and thus I’ve found one doesn’t in fact learn by osmosis while sleeping! So I suppose I’ll always remain ignorant of such technicalities, but it’s good to see that others really enjoy them. It does make the written word a much better place to be, for sure!
And I’m anxious to read the Russian series. I’ll enjoy seeing how you work YOUR magic to bring magic to life in a real believable way since from all that I’ve noticed here, you don’t seem to ascribe to it’s actual existence.
But from my perspective, it is quite real; it’s just that we humans are very limited in our ability to use it aka work with raw energy using our wills, for which you can thank our creators, the greys. 🙂 We kept getting into their very controlled DNA-level growth projects and disrupting weeks of their work, so they blocked our ability to work with raw energy to minimize that problem. Of course we still got into stuff, but at least, it was only at the physical level.
Like most people my belief in magic goes way up when I’m deep in the woods and alone, not afraid, but using a different set of senses that applies very well there—there’s something the ancients knew that describes that situation very well. Respect for such places is part of the cultures I like best.
Being alone in the woods, especially at night is not my favorite thing, thanks to my cult experiences. But I know it does allow a person to feel a lot more, energy-wise, because there aren’t a lot of other people’s energy fields mucking things up.
I am guessing that’s why it’s been so easy for the greedy 1% (who of course weren’t always the greedy 1% but are of a specific ancestral origin who’s been around trying to manipulate and control us for millennia) to convince most of us that magic aka energy manipulation isn’t real. Most of us who are sensitive to such things and might be able to use ‘magic’ are pretty well shut down because we’d be unbearable overloaded by the madhouse energy field in towns or cities.
I think that is why modern times are more bereft of magic. It’s just too hard to get far enough away (and most people are quite uncomfortable to do so) to really connect to that level of awareness, much less learn to use energy which requires that awareness to some degree.
The rituals and forms that the witches use are part of a way to get around the need to be that aware. It’s like making a cake from recipe, versus creating from one from your imagination. Unlike creating a cake from your own skills and awareness, with a cake mix, you don’t need to taste the cake—just follow the recipe, and voila`, an edible cake.
Plus the rituals and ‘spells’ gave a formal way to gather what little shreds of energy working ability one might have and focus it into a usable form, the degree of success depending on how much actual ability one had to be gathered, of course.
English spelling is the untidy result of th Saxons and Normans joining after the Conquest, with French spelling applied to English (Germanic) sounds and a sensible Saxon way to spell them. The Normans couldn’t help themselves. A few of the sounds were odd or were changing, and Norman and Saxon merged into a blend of both in English. A set of major sound changes occurred. Scholarly types added in a slew of Latin and Greek words.by the Renaissabce and then KJV and Shakespeare, there was another ever more drastic vowel shift and loss/change of some consonants. They respelled some words to make them more Latin, and by then, there was the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Exploration. English began adopting (stealing, borrowing) new words from every new people and place they came across. Spelling was standardized, but kept spellings already a few centuries out of date.
We have things like sword and doubt because the w used to be pronounced, and the b was added into a perfectly fine Norman French word because there had once been a b in dubit-, the Latin root. We have things like wr- and kn- because of history, they used to be pronounced. We have ou versus u thanks to the Normans, e/ea/ee and o/oa/oo thanks to what used to make sense in Saxon times, and gh and th because the Normans couldn’t leave well enough alone with Saxon h/yogh and thorn/edh. And on and on. We have an ah-ee sound for long i/y because of vowel shifts, and ou/ow for ah-oo only because the Normans changed Saxon u to fit the French ou (ooh) and u (ew) divide. Imagine if we had u for ow. I think we would’ve come up with some way to respell long I and ou. The w was a smart change. That y for th in ye olde shoppe was because the form of the thorn became like a y, so much so that scribes dotted the real y to distinguish them. There were other odd calligraphy habits too. All very improbable and illogical. Readers would think it’s all too unlikely if it were in a fiction story. It’s now the 21st century, but English spelling is mostly from 1066 to 1611. To top it off, we’re overdue for an “official” change in the language stage, from Modern English to…whatever they call it…. I doubt Jamie, Lizzie, and Willy would recognize current English beyond a part of the written form. At least we got rid of the f-like long s.
Is it the 24th yet? 😉
It will be interesting if they actually do a revision of english spelling. It would be harder nowadays,I think, since english spelling is used in so many places even around the world. And I’d really hate it if it came out looking like “Hooked on Phonics”. 🙁
With America being so dumbed down though, it might be better. It is appalling how badly many people spell these days. Making it spelled like it sounds, while kind of an insult to those of us who aren’t dumbed down, would make it easier.
And almost there! 22th and counting!
Jane, poor thing, is working from 5 am til 12 at night trying to make those conversions look nice in all of our formats—we’re only doing .mobi, .epub, and .pdf, this time, which is lightening the load, but oh, my—she’s getting kinks in her muscles from long, concentrated sitting. Everybody please go over to her blog and wish her whatever mojo will just keep her going. At this point, she’s got the last polish skillz and I don’t. All I can do is feed her and keep the world off her back.
Keeping the world off Jane’s back is all well and good, unless she gets sick from the 19 hour days, and ends up flat on her back in bed with a severe sickness. But I will wish her what mojo I have that she stays healthy, especially for Wednesday.
She can go miles on a good wish, and farther than that for someone who buys her book and can talk to her abour ir—what writer won’t?
Sincerely, she tnanks you.bb
Thanks again, CJ, for the efforts you and Jane go through to provide DRM-free eBooks. A cautionary tale: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm
Sheesh, what a mess! Well, at Closed Circle, we are NOT Amazon, and try not to act like it!—Maybe we should use that as our motto.