Deanna Hoak

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

So I have a long post planned on why, again, I so much prefer manuscripts to be set in Courier New rather than in Times Roman. I’ll make it as soon as I can do so without ranting, which might yet be a while. However, let’s start here: In which of these do you think [...]

I think everyone who’s done any writing at all knows how incredibly difficult it is to edit your own work. The problem is particularly vexing for editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders because we damn well know what’s right, but we’re no more immune from making typos or leaving out words or letters than anyone else is. [...]

Alexis Glynn Latner was nice enough to contact me through my website last week to let me know how much she appreciated the job I did on her novel Hurricane Moon (which is wonderful hard SF with a romantic twist): I e-mailed the MSS back today, much improved, thanks to you! I attached a cover [...]

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately (I’ve been neglecting your blogs lately, too, so if you have something you’d like me to know, please by all means drop me a note). I wanted to make up for that by providing some actual content. :-) Thus let’s talk about the Americanization of novels written by UK [...]