I’m finally over the cold, and taking an inordinately long time to work out the story order for Mad Ancestor.
I’m keeping the short pieces and poems all together after the rest, if only because I don’t want people perusing the table of contents on the Kindle, which has no page numbers, to think they’re getting 19 full-length stories.
At the moment it looks like this (very much as you suggested, Gillian, if you’re reading):
Saving the Gleeful Horse
The Art of Dying
The Love of Beauty
We the Enclosed
Maldoror Abroad
Beach Rubble
The Heart of a Mouse
Alsiso
Between the Covers
The Memorial Page
Vision Splendid
She Mirrors
Poems & short pieces
Vision Splendid and She Mirrors both feature old men in libraries, which makes me want to put them together for a sense of continuity (across different worlds) or space them far apart. I really think they both belong at the end.
On the copyedit front, I need to decide what to do with accents in ‘the aerial balletopétomachia, held every June at the Grand Opera’. (The balletopétomachia would be a ‘farting ballet fight’).
‘Petomania’ — performance-farting, from the French flatulist who called himself Le Pétomane — looks to be spelled without the accent in English. I can’t find it in an English dictionary, but the Internet knows it. So if I keep the accent on ‘peto’ I’m really using the French word, and should probably put accents on ‘ballet’ and ‘opera’ too, which will look at bit odd, as the venue of the farting ballet fight isn’t in France. So I guess I should drop the accent on ‘peto’. But ‘peto’-anything is so uncommonly heard — especially used just as a word-element like that, with no context — that I kind of want to keep it accented to let readers know it isn’t nonsense or a typo (e.g. for poetomachia).
Gonna go do something else now.
So exciting to see these developments unfolding!! And I’m very happy to hear that you have conquered a cold.
It seems sad to me to clump all of the shorter pieces/poetry together, when they could be playing with/off of the rest of the fiction. Could you have a subtitle that’s something like “Short [mad] fictions and poetry,” so that people are informed in advance that it’s not wall-to-wall fiction?
“aerial balletopétomachia”
Only you. I’m imagining people being propelled through the air in squid-like spasms.
I don’t think it’s distractingly inconsistent to have the accent on péto, but not on Opera and so on. It could be one of those things where enough French has been absorbed into the language that much of it has been de-accented, but accents (or imaginarily French mispronunciations, like how English speakers say “lawn-zher-ay” for “lingerie”) show up sporadically as attempted signifiers of exotic high culture.
(P.S. I love, love, love Manti’s hat on the finished cover. It’s like a tea-cozy for his head-point.)
I was going to subtitle it ‘stories and poems’, so maybe that’s good enough. Or ‘stories, poems and oddments’. There’s a bit of a blurred line between the stories and oddments anyway… I’m terribly given to anthropomorphism, so that now you’ve made me think of the poems and oddments as shut out in the cold with nobody to play with, I *have* to put them with the others.
> people being propelled through the air in squid-like spasms
Yes, exactly! Like when you blow up a balloon and let it go…
>attempted signifiers of exotic high culture
That’s exactly how it should look. That settles it, the accent stays — thanks for the reasoning!
Glad you like the hat. In my mind it’s now a knitted hat in chunky wool. :3
Oddments are nice.
The word makes me think of cabinets of curiosities. And those are great. ^^
They are indeed. I’d love to have a cabinet of curiosities, but all I have is a pile of junk on the sofa…