New Honor Novel?

kzt wrote:I've been told that one of the reasons for the errors and typos is that there isn't enough time to stomp them out.

Plus, the detailed editing that is needed just isn't occurring due to time. For example, AAC needed some serious editing, but I'm told it was either publish it now or wait months and David had other things to do.

The defects in CoG are much more obvious, but there was also not enough time to fix them due to David and Eric's schedule issues prior to the submission deadline.

My email client has a spellchecker. So does my word processor. That may not catch the logic and syntax errors, or substituting the wrong occasional wrong name, but it should at least catch the typos.

On the other hand, if many of those other kinds of errors are obvious to *ME* on my first read-through of the book; and I'm not a proof reader or editor by profession or inclination, one wonders just how difficult - and time consuming - it really would have been for the "professionals" explicitly hired for such a purpose to have actually done their jobs.

Nobody's perfect, but some things are definitely hard to explain and/or justify.

OrlandoNative wrote:

kzt wrote:I've been told that one of the reasons for the errors and typos is that there isn't enough time to stomp them out.

Plus, the detailed editing that is needed just isn't occurring due to time. For example, AAC needed some serious editing, but I'm told it was either publish it now or wait months and David had other things to do.

The defects in CoG are much more obvious, but there was also not enough time to fix them due to David and Eric's schedule issues prior to the submission deadline.

My email client has a spellchecker. So does my word processor. That may not catch the logic and syntax errors, or substituting the wrong occasional wrong name, but it should at least catch the typos.

On the other hand, if many of those other kinds of errors are obvious to *ME* on my first read-through of the book; and I'm not a proof reader or editor by profession or inclination, one wonders just how difficult - and time consuming - it really would have been for the "professionals" explicitly hired for such a purpose to have actually done their jobs.

Nobody's perfect, but some things are definitely hard to explain and/or justify.

Spellcheckers won't catch typos where you have homonyms (to, two, too). And they will report false positives--reporting a spelling error where the word is actually spelled correctly when the word is not in the spell-checker's dictionary (as an example, the spellchecker built-in to the Firefox web browser consistently reports the word manticore as a misspelling, regardless of whether it is capitalized or not).

Other problems include names--both names of places and people, especially where the name is either not common or foreign. The Safehold series has to also deal with the aversion of the Eternal English trope (used in Safehold as My Nyme is ____) and the use of the Gratuitous Foreign Language trope.

As for noticing errors on the first read through, you usually will notice spelling or grammar errors only on the first read through. After the first reading (and to some extent, even on the first reading), your brain starts correcting errors that your eyes are reporting. It is almost impossible for an author to catch these types of errors, which is why proofreader editors exist (although reportedly publishing houses seem to be cutting back on them--$$ issues).

And don't even think about computer grammar checkers.

SWM wrote:The rest of us have been talking about publication schedules. That's the purpose of the thread.

OrlandoNative wrote:I understand that, but the post I quoted seemed to be concerned with time gaps in the *story* time line, rather than in novel publication. Perhaps that wasn't what was meant, but that's how it came across to me.

From what I've seen so far, it would appear that gaps in the story time line are minimal. That makes some sense, since even though the hostilities have lasted about 2 decades, there have been at least 10 books, and each seems to cover somewhere around a year or two, plus or minus a few months.

SWM wrote:No, the message you replied to was about gaps in publication schedule.

And you've never heard of topic drift?

fallsfromtrees wrote:

SWM wrote:The rest of us have been talking about publication schedules. That's the purpose of the thread.

OrlandoNative wrote:I understand that, but the post I quoted seemed to be concerned with time gaps in the *story* time line, rather than in novel publication. Perhaps that wasn't what was meant, but that's how it came across to me.

From what I've seen so far, it would appear that gaps in the story time line are minimal. That makes some sense, since even though the hostilities have lasted about 2 decades, there have been at least 10 books, and each seems to cover somewhere around a year or two, plus or minus a few months.

SWM wrote:No, the message you replied to was about gaps in publication schedule.

And you've never heard of topic drift?

Unfortunately, yes. And there's been quite a bit on this thread so far, though debate about what may slow down publishing is at least somewhat related compared to some other things.

When is part 2 of "A Rising Thunder" (March 2012) going to be published and what is that title. Mr. Weber finished the book but only publish one half. He then stated that "Cauldron of Ghosts" (March 2014) needed to be published in order to get the story line right for part 2.

So it has been three years (so far) to get a book that is all ready written.

Lee Bickley wrote:When is part 2 of "A Rising Thunder" (March 2012) going to be published and what is that title. Mr. Weber finished the book but only publish one half. He then stated that "Cauldron of Ghosts" (March 2014) needed to be published in order to get the story line right for part 2.

So it has been three years (so far) to get a book that is all ready written.

Shadow of Freedom is the other part. It was published in March 2013, a year after A Rising Thunder. Originally, A Rising Thunder was going to merge the Manticore/Haven plotline with the Talbott Cluster plotline. When he had to split ART, he separated the Talbott Cluster part.

Lee Bickley wrote:When is part 2 of "A Rising Thunder" (March 2012) going to be published and what is that title. Mr. Weber finished the book but only publish one half. He then stated that "Cauldron of Ghosts" (March 2014) needed to be published in order to get the story line right for part 2.

So it has been three years (so far) to get a book that is all ready written.

I think you were confused about the relationship with Cauldron of Ghosts. David didn't need Cauldron of Ghosts published first; he only needed Cauldron of Ghosts to be far enough along to know how it would interact with the events in "ART Part 2", which became Shadow of Freedom. The timelines in Cauldron of Ghosts and Shadow of Freedom overlap almost completely, and nearly intersect. David needed to know how Cauldron of Ghosts would end before finishing Shadow of Freedom. In the end, Shadow of Freedom was published exactly one year after A Rising Thunder, and Cauldron of Ghosts exactly one year after that.

OrlandoNative wrote:

SWM wrote:Um, you do know that David has also said that there will only be 1 or 2 more Safehold novels in the current generation, and then it will skip forward 20 years to the Angelic Return? With none of the intervening years narrated?

He may have to re-think that too. Unless, of course, the Temple's Jihad totally collapses.

Given the fact that he's so far devoted 2 and a fraction books *just* basically to the situation in Siddarmark, it doesn't seem like he could do justice to Desnair, Dohlar, Harchong, and the Temple Lands, not to mention Zion itself, in just 2 more books. Unless, again, they're about 10,000 pages each. Not if he wants to keep his readership happy. I don't think *anyone* reading the series would like that. Looks what's happened in just the 5 or so years since Merlin "awoke". That's taken 7 (soon 8) books to cover. You really think that the next 20 years aren't going to be memorable or important to the complete story?

For that matter, there are times I'm not all that happy about him skipping over most of the War Against the Fallen. It might have made more sense (from readership perspective) to have taken the first couple of chapters of OAR about the Terran Federation and the beginning colonization of Safehold, added coverage of the WAF, and then made OAR start with Nimue's PICA awakening as the SECOND book in the series.

Of course, Khody's journal in HFQ will probably give us *some* insight into the WAF period, but it's not like the "blow by blow" we've gotten for everything else.

The problem with that stance is the narrative. Safehold has *always* been the Story of Nimue. It begins with her flesh and blood self and continues with the awakening of the PICA. Inserting the War against the Fallen wouldn't have made thematic sense. We've discovered Safehold as it appears through her experience, and now we're discovering Safehold as it really was, again through her experience, and it's a great trip. I can see current narrative going another 1 or 2 books then hitting a static point where he can skip ahead 20 years, as the current situation simply isn't sustainable (IMHO) for many more books than that. The pressures on the Go4 will be too intense. It won't end with an invasion of Zion or anything like that... it'll likely end with a revolution in Harchong, followed by most or all of the Go4 getting deposed and the next leadership group acknowledging the schism and calling off the holy war. This will give the narrative 20 years of peace and rebuilding, but with a lot of tension between people on both sides.

I don't see the current situation in the Honorverse being as amenable to a time gap. Things are accelerating toward a dramatic galactic collapse, not grinding toward a stalemate. Perhaps if Darius is destroyed in the current timeline but the RF's connection to the MA stays hidden could we have a jump, as a previous poster commented. But that's still 2-3 books of dramatic galaxy-wide conflict, which should make for great reading.