Very tired now. Need to go to bed, but need to get a bit more work done. Way, way, way behind schedule on the Kage Baker interview. Should’ve had that one nailed down a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, my interest in interviews runs hot and cold. Sometimes they can become tedious and take away from my fiction writing. I’ve threatened to quit doing them before, but there always seems to be another fascinating author coming around that I just have to sit down with and have Important Discussions for an hour or so.
Today, I’m running pretty cold on interviews, and I know exactly why. I got an email from the University of Nebraska Press, the good folks who are putting out Cosmosis next February. They’ve decided to go without photographs of the interview subjects. Understand, I got myself into this, so it’s mostly my fault. In my initial pitch to Nebraska, I mentioned that I had photos of many of the interview subjects. Not all of them. But when they accepted my proposal, they wanted photos, too. Of everyone. Which I did not have. So I had to contact quite a few of the folks listed in the table of contents, begging for photos. In some cases, I ended up road tripping to take the pictures myself. I shelled out a few bucks to do this, and many hours of effort.
My scanner’s been dying a slow death ever since I unpacked it from the shipping crate however many years ago I bought it. The scans of the author pics that I sent Nebraska on disc were apparently streaked with tiny lines which looked like crap on the mockup pages. So Nebraska asked for all the original photos. Which, again, I didn’t have. Some authors had sent me their photos as email attachments. I sincerely didn’t want to bother them again. Plus--and I have to point out that my experience with Nebraska has been positive on the whole--they had those images on disc for more than four months before they decided they couldn’t use them, and wanted me to FedEx the original prints to them the next day so they could stay on schedule. Which, for the reasons listed above, I was unable to do.
The result of this sob story is that I got The Email. The production/editorial team at Nebraska has decided to drop the photos from the volume. Crap. Having photos of Gene Wolfe and Jack Williamson and Chip Delany and Robin Hobb in there would’ve been very classy, even if I’d not originally planned on it. I get fixated on stuff sometimes, and go into a funk when Change happens. It’s not Nebraska’s fault--I certainly don’t want the release pushed back another month or two, with no guarantee that I ever will be able to collect all the necessary prints. So it’s a good call on their part. Get the book done, get it to the masses. And it’s possible to have photos in a follow-up volume, should one be warranted, since I invariably take my own photos these days. But when I think of all that wasted effort on my part, and the out-of-pocket cost (even if it was incidental) I get grumpy.
Of course, when I get grumpy, there’s always my wife there, ready and willing to pelt me mercilessly with wine corks until the sheer absurdity of the situation overwhelms my self-pity. It’s hard to be properly pouty when under barrage.
Now Playing: Dave Davies Bug
No comments:
Post a Comment