Casperian Books Blog

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 myself and I think it’s a worthwhile effort. The thing that’s confusing me a bit at the moment, though, is a sudden surge in query letters that leave it open to interpretation whether the authors are trying to sell fiction or nonfiction. Is this one a very clever hook into a novel about alien abduction written from the perspective of the abductee or an account of the author’s abduction by aliens? Was that one a smart introduction to a political thriller or the author’s manifesto?

We hope it’s a good one for all our readers and authors!

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 Digital Library. It’s a fairly short read, entertaining in as much as philosophy can be entertaining, and it probably had a greater impact on Western literature and aesthetics than any other critical text or philosophical treatise ever written.

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 of the first things we’ll ask the author for is a detailed timeline for the plot, and possibly, if there are plot points that depend on events that have happened outside the story proper, basic biographical sketches/timelines of the characters.

Obviously everyone writes differently. I, for one, have never in my life managed to outline anything. I just sit down and start writing, linearly, usually with an idea of an end in mind, but never of the middle of a story. When I’m done, I let the whole thing percolate for a while, and start editing from the start now that I know everything that happens (and possibly find myself having to resurrect characters I killed off in the first chapter because I ended up needing them later). I repeat that process several times until I have a final draft of a story. That said, between the first and second draft, I usually compose the Excel spreadsheet from hell that itemizes the entire timeline, so that if someone were to ask me, “When did plot point X occur?” I could answer without hesitation, “April 16th, 1976.” It’s not just helpful for editing a rough draft into something bordering on coherence, the spreadsheet also makes a pretty good cheat sheet, so that if, for instance, I mention a character’s death in the first chapter and later write about the character’s funeral in the eighth chapter, I need only glance at the spreadsheet to determine the date of both and make sure that my story remains internally consistent.

When it comes to editing somebody else’s work, I’m usually looking for a similar reference, especially when there are multiple subplots involved.

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 color casts and bleeding inks. This is obviously a bit annoying, though thankfully most of these books were intended as ARCs, so it won’t affect order fulfillment. Still, Tenant B and I have spent most of this evening taking pictures of or scanning covers as a result, and then forwarded them to the printer with a note requesting that the bad copies be replaced with copies of merchantable quality. We shall see whether their customer service will continue to be as excellent as it has been so far.

Other than that, we’ve been busy reading, editing, and generally working towards our upcoming releases for the next year. I have a slew of e-mails to write to various authors this weekend, and maybe do a tiny bit of prep work for our taxes because things are going to get very busy in that arena come January. Then it’ll be time to wrap up everything that can be wrapped up next week before I embark upon the annual 10,000-mile round trip to visit various relations for vaguely holiday-related carousing and hijinks.

I hope everyone has a great season of merriment and such!

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, you probably shouldn’t access this link from your place of employment.