Negotiations with my editor(s)

I haven’t made too many blog posts recently. I used to post a lot more. About the writing process and about what I read in my spare time and about all the things that get in the way of [...]

Last week I finished reading The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, by Ralph Keyes. As you can guess from the title, Keyes talks a lot about fear. Fear, he suggests, leads to turgid, [...]

And the edits continue… I wrote, “In a fierce, epically bloody battle, the Korean soldiers surrounded and decimated the Chinese troops.” My editor writes, “Decimated, as [...]

I’m trying to get the History of the Medieval World into final shape by the end of February; my editor at Norton has been sending MS back to me in chunks with his notes, and I’m going [...]

I’ve finally faced up the reality of my History of the Medieval World deadline, May 1. Which means I’ve now admitted that there’s very little chance I’m going to have a [...]

The contract from Princeton University Press has been negotiated, issued, signed, and returned. So now I have a question for you: what should the book be called? Important details: The book [...]

News on the book front! The editorial board of Anonymous Prestigious University Press has approved publication of my academic study of public confession. Which means that I am now going to unmask [...]

On various fronts, it has been a bothering sort of week. Those of you who are VERY alert may notice that the publication date on the History of the Ancient World has changed, on the various [...]

Reading your editor’s handwriting. Hmm. At least everyone is done throwing up. (How’s that for inviting the universe to smack you one?) If I can get these revisions done by tonight, I [...]

I’m twenty chapters or so into the edited manuscript, making changes and printing out a clean copy as I go. So far, there hasn’t been any mind-bending revision, just various chunks of [...]

Here it is. The edited manuscript, waiting for me to go through every page. By February 4. That’s my table of contents, pinned on the board to the left, for my reference. And taped up in [...]