Deanna Hoak

Polite and charming fantasy author Peter V. Brett, whom I hung out with quite a bit at World Fantasy and who has a three-book deal with Del Rey right now (any authors putting off writing for any reason have to read his post about writing his first novel on his cell phone, with his thumbs), [...]

The nominee list for the Hugos is out. Grats to everyone on it! I’m partial to Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, myself, since I got to copyedit it and enjoyed it a lot. If you’re interested in a rollicking, stylistic ride of a read, I’d urge you to check it out. :-)
I’m off to the IAFA con [...]

All right. I was told by an acquaintance today that my site is “cobwebby” (which I knew). I’ve had more than 100 hits in the last hour to that frosting recipe I posted, and while I don’t mind the traffic, I’d rather be getting hits for my publishing information. I know I’ve been awful about [...]

David Louis Edelman has posted (with my permission) an IM conversation he and I had this morning, as I was copyediting his novel MultiReal. I love it when I get to communicate with an author in real time during the copyediting process, because I think the back-and-forth helps clarify matters better than a simple query.

Brenda Coulter has an interesting post over at Romancing the Blog about mistakes authors make when their characters are addressing British peerage. A lot of fantasy uses the same titles, so I think many here will find it enlightening.

I got the funniest e-mail ever through my contact page today:
Hi Deanna,
Hope you are doing great.
This is [name redacted] from Delhi, representing a company, which provides publishing service to Education and magazine publishers, including Sage, Pearson,
Elsevier, Taylor and Francis.
May I propose you to outsource your all work so that we can work for each [...]

I said a long while back that I’d talk about my preference for “copyeditor” over “copy editor,” and now seems as good a time as any to do so.
For my field, “copy editor” as two words has never made much sense to me, for a number of reasons. First, nothing I edit is referred [...]

I’ve made the World Fantasy Award short list for my copyediting. Wow. I think I’m the first copyeditor ever to be nominated in the “Special Award: Professional” category. I’m massively happy and touched.
A huge thank-you to Paul Cornell for organizing the campaign to get me nominated, and to all those who voted for me and [...]

Someone wrote to ask me what I meant in the last post about the budgets being kept artificially low by having books set in Times New Roman rather than Courier.
Here’s what happens at many publishers (big publishers are worse about this than small ones, generally, simply because they’ve been doing things the same way [...]

There have been quite a few posts commenting on the best fonts for manuscripts lately. Jay Lake posted in favor of 12-point Courier New (which, by the way, I have talked him into), and then C. E. Petit posted that there is no universally “correct” way of formatting, and then Cheryl Klein praised and linked [...]