Deanna Hoak

My daughter is crushed that she has to go to school on Halloween. This is clearly far too important a holiday for that. She had planned on baking pumpkin pies and playing with Halloween makeup all day. :-)

I had very weird stress dreams about copyediting last night. First, I dreamed that I had taken on way too many projects to complete in time. (I’m very careful not to do that. I actually turn down more projects than I accept because I’ve never missed a deadline and don’t intend to.) Second, some of [...]

I’ve been awful about updating recently, but mainly I’m just busy completing projects before World Fantasy. I finished up the second novel in a trilogy by Kathleen O’Neal Gear that offers a very intense look into mental illness among Native North American tribes and am working on a very exciting SF novel by Josh Conviser, [...]

Regarding my recent copyediting posts, Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote here that she “emphatically” agrees with almost every particular of them (the one exception being query flags, which publishers differ on), and she adds some interesting commentary of her own. I’m busy finishing up projects before the World Fantasy Convention. Who else on my [...]

I posted several months ago on how I decide what to leave alone in a novel I’m copyediting. I’ve been meaning ever since to post an article on exactly what my copyediting process is, but I’ve been putting it off because it seems so difficult to condense and codify the steps I take when I [...]