Friday, November 5, 2010

Galley-ho!

I received the galleys for "Clockworks" this evening. Like their contracts, Asimov's now sends these as PDFs; though I had to print out (in order to sign) and mail back the contract, the story itself will remain in e-form. I've been reading it aloud, certainly the best way to catch mistakes or simply moments that might be improved. All I've noted in the first five pages is my using the word "before" in two sentences in a row, which I'll fix.

I'm quite enjoying this tale. It's been long enough since I wrote it that I remember almost nothing.

In the next entry, I'll talk about what I've been reading.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Galleys are always a hoot to receive. Looking forward to reading the latest story.

By the way, my good friend read "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and said it brought a smile to his face along with lots of pulpy memories.

William Preston said...

Like having orange juice dashed in his face!

I'm glad he liked it; thanks for passing that on. Galleys are a hoot to receive, but reading something at the 14K-word length is tiring. I went through once simply reading it aloud; I caught some things. Now I'm comparing it to my original, word by word, to see what might have been changed. I've had to put it on hold to do my grades-n-comments for this quarter.

The April/May issue is when it's arriving, less that three months from now (I've had the January issue for two weeks; goofy magazine dating . . . ).

Julien said...

Suggestion for comparing: can't you use an automatic free tool such as diff or winmerge (http://winmerge.org/)? Of course, it works on text-only, but a quick googling for "diff pdf" seems to indicate some software are out there. It has saved me hours, times and again, when spotting changes made by co-authors.

William Preston said...

Julien, thanks for suggesting this. I'd never considered it or known there was anything like this. Winmerge is a Windows-only tool (I'm on a Mac), but I'll investigate this further.

Bill

Julien said...

With 3 months delay in the answer (sorry, forgot to check the "email follow up comments" box...): on Mac, you may want to have a look at http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091116055842805