Deanna Hoak

We returned from Pennsylvania the other day; we had a very nice trip, though we learned that the eight-hour drive really needs to be taken in two stretches with a a baby in the car.

I had a dreadful nightmare about copyediting the other day! In it, I had taken a copyedit of a textbook (I started out in publishing by editing college textbooks but haven’t accepted any for years because fiction is so much more enjoyable), and I had to “batch” it back. (Big nonfiction books are very commonly sent back to the publisher a few chapters at a time because of the production schedules.)

Anyway, in the dream, I had sent back the first three chapters, and when I went to send back the second batch, I realized I was missing chapter four. I couldn’t find it, though I was sure I’d seen it, and by the time I got the whole mess ironed out, I only had one day to finish the whole book and was going to have to get my deadline extended! I hate dreams like that!

In my normal stress dreams of copyediting, I accept multiple projects and then completely forget about one of them until the day before it’s due. I guess this was a variation on that. I apparently have a fixation on deadlines and quality. :-)

I’m one of those people who always had bad dreams about college, too: I’d enroll in a class, go once, and then somehow forget about it until finals; it would be too late to drop the class, but I’d never read any of the materials or anything. Ugh.

And I had a really bad nightmare once when I was in the midst of my first line edit for Del Rey. That’s a story for another time, though. :-)