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Travis ([info]kyuuketsukirui) wrote in [info]fandom_wank,
@ 2003-09-25 11:44:00

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Current mood:mmm...bitter...
Current music:R.E.M. - Strange Currencies

It's Anne Rice, of course she's wanking
Love her or (more likely) hate her, you can't deny that the woman is an insane egomaniac.

Witness this ramble from her website, in which she tells us how great she is, and why she doesn't require an editor. And also, all those pesky "grammar mistakes" and "continuity errors"? She meant to do that.

Here are some of the best excerpts for your enjoyment:

But the point is, I never worked in drafts. I never sat down and wrote a "first draft" of anything. I wrote only through slow and polished and highly edited evolution, discarding as I went along until --- by the very end -- I had a completed and polished and deeply thought out and, above all, deeply felt and executed manuscript. One version of that manuscript existed, and nothing more. There was never a sloppy first draft or second draft or third draft.

Only a sloppy final copy.

And though I am devoted to my editor, I always had mixed feelings about this process of receiving her comments and responding to them.

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In other words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.


Bolding mine for emphasis. She really takes the self-love to the next level here.

Why am I telling you? Perhaps to assure you -- those of you who might want to know -- that the writing you are reading is quite deliberate, that it is informed and it is conscious, as well as being the result of intuition. It is the result of all that I am -- my education, my mystic sensibilities, and the student in me. It is poured out fearlessly, and then edited, and re-edited, and subjected to merciless scrutiny. It represents, and always has, my finest efforts.

If these are her finest efforts...

Before I close, let me add one more note on the evolution of each novel with the publisher. After my editor receives each novel and approves of it, she passes it on to the "copy editor." The job of this person is to proof read the novel for spelling and dropped words and grammar. This person marks any kind of mistake of that sort, also some times catching simple mistakes in agreement -- say a character is six feet tall on one page, and 100 pages later, he is mentioned as shorter -- and sends the manuscript, through my editor, back to me. I then go over the whole manuscript again with a pencil and pen, reviewing all of the "copy editor's corrections." At that time, I not only approve the spelling corrrections, which I often need, and catch cropped words, but I also make corrections of my own. My editing isn't heavy at this point, but it is often very meaningful. I may even add lines or even paragraphs in ink. I read every single solitary word. I re-edit, exhaustively. Then and only then, do I return the manuscript.

Er...then she needs to find a better copy editor. And perhaps, whilst the copy editor is checking for mistakes in agreement within each book, he should try checking to make sure each new book agrees with the previous books, so that we don't end up with characters who are suddenly from a totally different country than previously stated (*cough*Pandora*cough*), or suddenly younger than they should be (*cough*Louis*cough*). If, that is, it's too much for Anne to remember basic facts about her own characters. But, you know, that's probably beneath her.


Oh yes, I'm bitter.

Unfortunately there aren't any wanky comments or anything like that as her official site doesn't have a message board, but I think Anne does a good job of wanking on her own.



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