Category Archives: random babble
Miscellaneous News
For a limited time only, Harper Collins has made the entirety of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods available for free online. Now, we here at Casperian Books have been fans of Mr. Gaiman since he was a fanboy himself, but if … Continue reading
Queries
A lot of people spend many hours agonizing over the perfect query letter, crafting a hook that is certain to draw the reader in and make them want to read the sample, if not the entire manuscript. I’ve done this … Continue reading
Happy New Year from London, England!
We hope it’s a good one for all our readers and authors!
Reading Recommendation
For the writers out there: if you somehow made it through high school and college without a close brush with Aristotle’s Poetics, I highly recommend that you read it now. There’s even a full digital version over at the Perseus … Continue reading
Timelines
One of the things I am pretty OCD about when editing is the timeline; specifically, sniffing out broken timelines and internal and external inconsistencies. For about half the manuscripts we select for publication (or at least seriously consider publishing), one … Continue reading
Behind the Scenes
Well, after 1 1/2 years, we have the first issue with our printer on our hands (at least as far as we know), in that we were sent a box of books that had serious print quality issues, such as … Continue reading
Not for the Faint-hearted
The Guardian’s book section currently has the passages shortlisted for the 2007 Literary Review Bad Sex Award up on its website. I’m not sure what to say other than that it’s given me an entirely new perspective on things. Also, … Continue reading
Happy Feasting!
Technically, I’m on vacation this week, though nobody has noticed so far, since I haven’t actually pried my fingers off the keyboard long enough. Mindful of the fact that I am theoretically not working, I did take some time off … Continue reading
Random conversations with various authors
One of the side effects of having an author writing in a fairly scary-but-almost-real universe like Manna Francis’ Administration is that, occasionally, I have edits like this: Really, really important question: are you terribly attached to that [unusual in the … Continue reading
A while ago, a prospective author got upset because while he got a reply from us within the time specified on our website, it wasn’t a yes or no, but some questions/clarifications for the query. As a result, we upped … Continue reading
Fun for writers
Or at least I’ve had countless hours of fun with the Gender Genie, which invariably guesses my gender wrong. Try it out on some of your stories!
Public Service Announcement
Today is National Coming Out Day and the twentieth anniversary of the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and the first public display of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. We here at Casperian Books are … Continue reading