Deanna Hoak

Do any of you remember Atlanta Nights, the intentionally awful book written by a group of SF/F pros to prove that PublishAmerica would accept anything? Some wonderful soul has done a complete dramatic reading of it, with each chapter posted to YouTube. Go listen to my so-horrid-it’s-hilarious chapter, and be sure to browse through Manwithoutabody’s [...]

Paul Goat Allen has released his list of the best science fiction and fantasy novels of 2009, which you should all check out. I had the pleasure of copyediting two of the books on the list–Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and Ken Scholes’ Canticle. I loved them both. I just finished copyediting Antiphon, the most recent book [...]

Please go read Cory Doctorow’s post regarding the arrest and beating of Peter Watts by US border crossing guards. Peter’s a friend of mine, and I’ve contributed to his defense. I hope some of you are able to do so, too. Edit: Peter’s account of what happened to him is at his blog: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=932.

Facebook is going to make it really easy to come back to blogging rather than hanging around on their site. There are a number of things I particularly hate about the changes, and they all have to do with less control on my part. (I had the items listed below hidden as of a few [...]

I’m really liking LibraryThing, though I’ve realized that it will only load three widgets full of books at once. You have to refresh the widget to get more books, or just click the title to go to the full list. One feature I just found this morning is that it will tell you what awards [...]

I’ve put about a hundred of the novels I’ve copyedited into a wonderful widget (though the widget doesn’t seem to show them all. :-/). I particularly love it, though, because so many of my authors request me for multiple books, and it’s nice to be able to call those out in such a pretty manner. [...]

I copyedited or am slated to copyedit almost a third of the books listed on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist as the most anticipated SFF titles of 2010. Yes, I do get to work on some great stuff. :-D

Wow, two posts in a day! I told you I was going to pick it up. :-) I came across this post in praise of copyeditors while Twittering “copyediting” and had to share with you. I particularly love the author’s description of how authors feel when they get a copyedited manuscript back: It was like [...]

I found a video called “The Copy Editor’s Lament” on YouTube today. It’s aimed at the newspaper industry (fiction copyeditors don’t go about killing adjectives :-)), but the lyrics are pretty amusing. Freelancers can’t be laid off, obviously, but publishers are finding ways to cut back on copyediting costs regardless. I read a wonderful post [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much I miss my blog. I post a lot of short updates to Facebook, and I Twitter, but I rarely take the time to come up with a thoughtful blog topic. There are several reasons for that, but I think the primary one is that I just [...]