Deanna Hoak

Blaine had a friend sleep over last night, so I made the kids a special treat for breakfast. I whipped some eggs together with turbinado sugar (for crunch), cinnamon, half-and-half, and vanilla, then took same stale French bread, sliced on a long diagonal, and soaked the pieces in the mixture until they were soft. Fried [...]

I realized when I attempted to start that “Style Sheet Meme” that a lot of people don’t know what a style sheet is. I’ll talk about them today.
A style sheet is a document the copyeditor prepares that lists the grammatical conventions, characters, places, unusual or made-up words, and the distinctive treatment of words (capitalization, hyphenation, [...]

Steven Barnes has posted some really fascinating thoughts about sex and consciousness on his journal, Dar Kush. You should go check them out.

Well, I had a MySpace account for all of a day. I friended a few nice SF/F folks, and it seemed okay until the weirdo e-mails started to hit. I got about one message an hour (and yes, I had clicked that I was married and not looking for dates), and about three-fourths of them [...]

I was contacted this week by Josh Conviser, whose novel Echelon I copyedited. He said he hoped Del Rey had told me how happy he was with the copyedit, and he passed along a note I’d actually never received:
Deanna,
I wanted to thank you for all your work on Echelon. Your notes were fantastic, really helping [...]

Anna Louise Genoese has posted an absolutely fantastic article about the business of publishing. If you haven’t checked it out already, you should absolutely do so. The information she gives about production departments is particularly spot-on.

I’ve had to write two letters of complaint in the last two days, which hasn’t been fun. I then opened up a file to start writing the post on style sheets I’ve been promising everyone, but I decided to start a new story instead. This is the beginning:
God, he was a lousy fuck. No foreplay, [...]

I got nice notes from Liz Gorinsky and Cherie Priest this week about my copyedit of Cherie’s book Wings to the Kingdom. Cherie (who had to review copyedits the week before her wedding!) had these complimentary things to say:
Thank you–in a big and loud way–for handling Wings to the Kingdom with such panache. I loved [...]