10.04.06
Posted in helping, violence, writing at 8:07 am by Hanne Blank
I have learned that the elders of the Old Order Amish community in Barts Township, Pennsylvania, have set up two funds in the wake of this week’s tragedy in Nickel Mines. the Nickel Mines Children’s Fund, and the Roberts Family Fund, for the Children of the Roberts Family.
The Roberts Family are the children of the gunman, who have been left without a father and with a horrible and confusing legacy; I think that the fact that the Amish elders have established this fund in their name speaks volumes.
My sense of what the Nickel Mines Childrens’ Fund will do is to help defray hospital, rehabilitation, and burial expenses for the child victims. Amish do not purchase health insurance, nor do they accept government assistance, which means no state or federal health care coverage either. A number of children from this community are being treated in state-of-the-art pediatric trauma centers and hospitals. While certain corporate organizations are reported to be contributing funds for their medical treatment, other assistance will certainly be needed.
Contributions to either or both funds should be sent to
Nickel Mines Children’s Fund or The Roberts Family Fund
Coatesville Savings Bank
1082 Georgetown Road
Paradise, PA 17562
For those wishing to send non-monetary gifts or condolences to the community, these may be mailed to the Georgetown United Methodist Church, 1070 Georgetown Road, Paradise, PA, 17562. Amish elders will pick up mail and items there and distribute them to the families. (Note: If you’re wondering why this was not set up at an Amish church, it is because Amish do not build churches, they hold worship in the homes of community members on a rotating basis.)
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Donations of a different sort are being accepted in memory of the brilliant and much-missed author of speculative fiction John M. “Mike” Ford, who passed away on September 25. A long-time friend of the Minneapolis Public Library, friends and family have worked with the Library to set up the John M. Ford Endowment Fund.
Click here for information on donating to the John M. Ford Endowment Fund of the Minneapolis Public Library.
Mike was the longtime partner of a very dear friend of mine, who has been much cheered to know that the man she loved for well over a decade is being honored by something that would have meant so much to him. If you care about reading and books and libraries and learning and public access to information, I encourage you to donate. (Even if you have no idea who Mike Ford was and have never read his books. Slide them a few bucks. Then go poke alibris.com and find a couple copies of Mike’s books. You won’t regret it.)
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10.01.06
Posted in art nun, writing at 8:09 am by Hanne Blank
It’s been in the works for a while: I’m an Art Nun this month. Supposed to be getting a draft of a book done by Halloween, basically. I’ve got 6 pages so far, plus some sketches and some notes.
Wish me luck, in other words.
And for those of you who will be observing Yom Kippur: may you have an easy fast and may you be inscribed in the Book of Life in indelible ink.
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09.28.06
Posted in interviews, writing at 4:11 pm by Hanne Blank
Recently, NaughtyWords approached me for an interview about being an editor of erotica anthologies. Since the interview, which is really interviews, plural, with several folks including Susie Bright and Rachel Kramer Bussell, woven together so that our viewpoints on the various questions are compared, has begun to run on the site, I thought I’d first point to it and then mention something that isn’t anywhere in the interview.
So. Pointer given. Which means that now I want to talk about Sir Not Appearing In That Interview, namely, the fact that I’m actually a retired editor of erotica anthologies. This is something I’ve been letting people know gradually over the past few years, and the reactions have been fascinating. A few people, like my mother, have seemed relieved. A few more people have nodded understandingly and said something along the lines of “good on ya, I’m glad to see you doing what you need to do.” But many people have reacted with a certain amount of shock, and demanded an explanation. The NaughtyWords editor did that, in fact, when I agreed to the interview with the caveat that I was no longer working in the genre: I’m stunned! “Severine” is one of my all time favorite erotic stories! Why would you of all authors quit?!
The answer is pretty simple: I said what I came to say and I did what I came to do. I did not set out to climb to the peak of Mount Smutverest, drive my flag into its summit, and survey the world from its eminence. I certainly didn’t sent out to do erotica as my one and only literary pursuit.
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09.22.06
Posted in arrrrgh, making book, writing at 4:52 pm by Hanne Blank
Proofreading galleys is one of the more miserable parts of being a writer. You spend as much time as you can stand, for days on end, sitting there with a stack of paper in your lap and a pencil in your hand, looking for things you screwed up. There are typos and punctuation errors, orthographic brainfarts, dangling prepositions, misplaced modifiers, number errors, and those weird places where you went in and removed some text but forgot to make the grammar of the resulting Frankensentence functional. You find that you have usage problems that make you consider looking for a methadone clinic, and tense shifts so completely crap that you figure you must’ve blown your clutch ’round about paragraph two. If you’re really lucky you’ll have written a book with a bibliography at the end, because it’s like having gravel soaked in engine oil for dessert: the nitpickiest, most form-dependent, least context-driven, and easiest-to-bollix bit for last, all its colons and semicolons and alphabetical orderings and italics and endless authors’ names that must be checked for correctness.
Proofreading galleys nearly always gives me headaches. I would blame them on simple eyestrain if I thought I could get away with it, but what’s really going on is that it’s an intensively self-critical process, stressful and trying. One learns from it–one had better–but the mounting evidence of one’s variegated pockets of ignorance and illiteracy is humbling, sometimes humiliating. There are a few mistakes, such as my evident inability to spell the word “foreign” correctly on the first try, or my penchant for using “which” when I should’ve used “that” and vice versa, that I’ve been making since the eighth grade, when Mr. Scott tried and failed to teach me better. It tends to make me feel puny and ineffective, and sort of stupid, like everyone else gets the joke but I have to have it explained to me. It also makes me distrust the people who tell me I turn in remarkably clean copy, a compliment I’ve gotten from more than a few editors: if this is clean, I shudder to think what they consider dirty.
The worst part of proofreading galleys, though, is seeing all the things you would’ve done differently and not being able to change them. By the time a book is in galleys, you’re not supposed to be rewriting. If you absolutely must change a word here or there, or reorganize a sentence that’s technically grammatical but has been puffing at the Dickensian hookah to a point that it takes even you two readings to parse it, you can do that. But altering much more than that means risking the wrath of your managing editor, and believe you me, given that this is the person who is responsible for making sure your book looks good when it hits the streets, this is not someone you want to have mad at you.
So instead you have to sift through countless infelicities. You realize your lamentable tendency to lean upon the progressive tense rather than grabbing the best and most active verbs you can find. Adjectives a thousand times more apposite than the ones you used leap to mind when you are proofreading just to torment you. The yearning for a machete with which to chop out modifiers and adverbs is so strong you can taste it. Just give me one more chance! you cry, womanfully resisting the temptation to stab yourself with your Bad Badtz Maru mechanical pencil, One more editing pass! I can make it all better!
But you don’t have one more editing pass. This is it. You have already crossed the auctorial Rubicon; the fact that you have your dirty little digits curled around the pages of your galleys is, in a very real way, hardly more than a courtesy on the part of your managing editor. You don’t get the luxury of making a whole book’s worth of cosmetic fixes. You only get to fix what is really truly broken.
During the galleys more than at any other time of the process of creating a book, I am aware that (as Elizabeth Bear so often says) every book is a broken book. It is the time when I get to see what I’ve learned about writing since I finished the draft, and, if I’m really lucky, I can think back to other books and compare my mistakes in this one to the mistakes I made with those. The goal isn’t to get to a point where I never make mistakes. The goal is to always make more interesting mistakes, a better class of errors… and to always make the next book a better book. But to get there, you have to know what kinds of crap happened this time. And there’s just no other way to get that awareness, or that perspective on your own writing, than sifting through the book sentence by sentence, clause by clause, verb by verb.
I did my best, and I finished combing through the galleys today, just in time for Rosh Hashanah to start. I timed it this way intentionally. Maybe it’s superstitious of me, but I want to be able to send this book back to New York as soon after the start of the New Year as I can, and whisper to it as I box it up: L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem, may you be inscribed and sealed for a sweet and prosperous New Year.
And so may all of you! Good Yom Tov!
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