And the pond is really, really frozen. Yesterday our two scoundrel fish-raiding cats (because of whom we have had to net the pond) were out there near the pond heater hole in the ice, and the ice was cracking under them—I watched them the entire time, really not wanting to have to run out there and rescue an ungrateful and very wet and cold cat who’d be tangled in our pond netting, but they managed not to fall in.<\/p>\n
We have left the side garage door open because we have problems with a winter mouse infestation out there that has cost us a lot of work and nastiness, but I think as temperatures head for the single digits Wednesday, we should close that door to protect stuff in the garage, not to mention the cars.<\/p>\n
Still a few lingering effects of the crud.<\/p>\n
And I got half the copyediting checked last night while watching telly.<\/p>\n
There is one copyediting tendency that drives me bananas. Say you create a name. Now, the first creation may be unstable. Second or third time you write it, you figure how it should REALLY be spelled, and you use it that way 300 times during a book. The copyeditor will, very reliably, take the first spelling and ‘correct’ all 299 correct forms into the initial ‘wrong’ form, so you have to, patiently, change them all back. Why didn’t YOU correct the first form? Because you couldn’t find the damn thing. There’s one instance that was earlier than you thought.<\/p>\n
The copyeditor decided to use Shishoji instead of the proper form, Shishogi. God only knows what form the c\/e used in the prior book, because there were so many other<\/em> copyeditor-produced errors that that one could have gotten past me. I don’t give a damn (Lord, my language goes downhill when I’m doing c\/e correction) what was in the prior book: the name is Shishogi, with a hard -g-. and accent on the second syllable. Aarrgh!<\/p>\n I also capitalize Earth as the name of the planet, with ‘earth’ in the normal other or proverbial uses, and the c\/e ‘corrected’ all of those. And the East (capital) is Ilisidi’s province. The cardinal directions are not capitalized. The c\/e ‘fixed’ all of those.<\/p>\n I tell them time and time and time again. I create style sheets for them. I add notes to the c\/e on the title page. I advise them not to tamper with things in quotes because we are dealing with people who do not speak perfectly. I advise them stet all forms of earth or Earth and trust me. Does this make a difference? Only sometimes. By the time I get through fixing all this, the word STET has become STET PASSIM and then STET, DAMMIT! and sometimes one form beyond that, and my blood pressure is through the roof.<\/p>\n But as c\/e goes, this is a good job and it is going fast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And the pond is really, really frozen. Yesterday our two scoundrel fish-raiding cats (because of whom we have had to net the pond) were out there near the pond heater hole in the ice, and the ice was cracking under them—I watched them the entire time, really not wanting to have to run out there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}