CD Covington (author)

“I am homesick for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. What am I supposed to do when the home I miss has been gone for a thousand years, when I’m the only one who remembers how our sunsets shone so bright before dust choked our skies, when no one else alive has swum and splashed and laughed in the oceans I love?” 

The best place to cry over the oceans you miss is thigh deep a different ocean, when the distance in time and space feels like its ready to tear out your heart and so does the longing.

I've been wanting to get into this for awhile, so here we go! First and foremost, I wanna say that "Emmaskies" here is really hitting the nail on the head despite having "no insider info". I don't want this post to be read as me shitting on trad pub editors or authors because that is fundamentally not what's happening.

Second, I want to say that this reply from Aaron Aceves is also spot on:

There are a lot of reviewers who think "I didn't enjoy this" means "no one edited this because if someone edited it, they would have made it something I like". As I talk about nonstop on this account, that is not a legitimate critique. However, as Aaron also mentions, rushed books are a thing that also happens.

As an author with 2 trad pub novels and 2 trad pub anthologies (all with HarperCollins, the 2nd largest trad publisher in the country), let me tell you that if you think books seem less edited lately, you are not making that up! It's true! Obviously, there are still a sizeable number of books that are being edited well, but something I was talking about before is that you can't really know that from picking it up. Unlike where you can generally tell an indie book will be poorly edited if the cover art is unprofessional or there are typoes all over the cover copy, trad is broken up into different departments, so even if editorial was too overworked to get a decent edit letter churned out, that doesn't mean marketing will be weak.

One person said that some publishers put more money into marketing than editorial and that's why this is happening, but I fundamentally disagree because many of these books that are getting rushed out are not getting a whole lot by way of marketing either! And I will say that I think most authors are afraid to admit if their book was rushed out or poorly edited because they don't want to sabotage their books, but guess what? I'm fucking shameless. Café Con Lychee was a rush job! That book was poorly edited! And it shows! Where Meet Cute Diary got 3 drafts from me and my beta readers, another 2 drafts with me and my agent, and then another 2 drafts with me and my editor, Café Con Lychee got a *single* concrete edit round with my editor after I turned in what was essentially a first draft. I had *three weeks* to rewrite the book before we went to copy edits. And the thing is, this wasn't my fault. I knew the book needed more work, but I wasn't allowed more time with it. My editor was so overworked, she was emailing me my edit letter at 1am. The publisher didn't care if the book was good, and then they were upset that its sales weren't as high at MCD's, but bffr. A book that doesn't live up to its potential is not going to sell at the same rate as one that does!

And this may sound like a fluke, but it's not. I'm not naming names because this is a deeply personal thing to share, but I have heard from *many* authors who were not happy with their second books. Not because they didn't love the story but because they felt so rushed either with their initial drafts or their edits that they didn't feel like it lived up to their potential. I also know of authors who demanded extra time because they knew their books weren't there yet only to face big backlash from their publisher or agent.

I literally cannot stress to you enough that publisher's *do not give a fuck* about how good their products are. If they can trick you into buying a poorly edited book with an AI cover that they undercut the author for, that is *better* than wasting time and money paying authors and editors to put together a quality product. And that's before we get into the blatant abuse that happens at these publishers and why there have been mass exoduses from Big 5 publishers lately.

There's also a problem where publishers do not value their experienced staff. They're laying off so many skilled, dedicated, long-term committed editors like their work never meant anything. And as someone who did freelance sensitivity reading for the Big 5, I can tell you that the way they treat freelancers is *also* abysmal. I was almost always given half the time I asked for and paid at less than *half* of my general going rate. Authors publishing out of their own pockets could afford my rate, but apparently multi-billion dollar corporations couldn't. Copy edits and proofreads are often handled by freelancers, meaning these are people who aren't familiar with the author's voice and often give feedback that doesn't account for that, plus they're not people who are gonna be as invested in the book, even before the bad payment and ridiculous timelines.

So, anyway, 1. go easy on authors and editors when you can. Most of us have 0 say in being in this position and authors who are in breech of their contract by refusing to turn in a book on time can face major legal and financial ramifications. 2. Know that this isn't in your head. If you disagree with the choices a book makes, that's probably just a disagreement, but if you feel like it had so much potential but just *didn't reach it*, that's likely because the author didn't have time to revise it or the editor didn't have time to give the sort of thorough edits it needed. 3. READ INDIE!!! Find the indie authors putting in the work the Big 5's won't do and support them! Stop counting on exploitative mega-corporations to do work they have no intention of doing.

It's not that freelancers aren't invested in authors' books! We are. We're vetted by publishers, we're trained, we're working remotely but we network with lots of other editors who we can reach out to when we have questions, and of course we love books and care about authors and readers. But publishers often hinder us from doing our jobs well. Some examples: A) A Big 5 publisher I work for caps copyedits at 30 hours. If a book needs more than that, the copyeditor has to get special approval, and if a copyeditor asks for special approval too many times, they might be taken off the freelancers' lists. Copyeditors are generally fairly rushed, and I saw an online discussion a few months ago where a bunch of copyeditors agreed that they're basically never given the time to do 2 full rounds of editing. B) If a copyeditor is handling a book that belongs to a series, they should be given a style sheet that helps them keep things uniform and consistent throughout the series, even if they're not personally editing each book in the series (ex: is it Gandalf the Gray or Gandalf the Grey? hobbits, orcs, and elves, or Hobbits, Orcs, and Elves? a style sheet would tell you!). I have never been given a style sheet for series books, even when I've specifically, repeatedly asked for one. The publisher literally just does not give a sh*t. Repeat: The publisher does not care about putting out good products. C) Sometimes there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, some with ridiculous demands, and sometimes the publisher tells the copyeditor to impossibly meet all of these demands. Examples include a French-to-English translator who had translated a book and kept in all the original punctuation, even though French and English punctuation work fairly differently and there was no reason whatsoever to do this. The publisher insisted I punctuate the book strangely/stupidly to meet the translator's ridiclous misconception of what translation is. I'm 99% sure the author wouldn't have wanted this, but they weren't consulted.

I have anecdotal evidence that the role of being a literary agent has changed massively over the last ten years. Literary agents, at their best imo, can act as excellent developmental editors, helping pre-debut authors polish very rough drafts through multiple rounds of editing that a publisher would never have the time or tolerance for. When I assisted a literary agent, this was what she did at the start of her career: Nourish a lot of writers on the basis that she believed in their potential. It paid out hugely well for her, and now she makes many millions of dollars a year, and she mostly works with the same group of authors, who write books full-time. But: All the editing is done on speculation, and as the publishing industry has become less interested in quality, that speculation has become less likely to pay off. So what I'm seeing now are literary agents who are pivoting away from doing big developmental edits. Instead, they want writers to come to them with polished manuscripts and/or an established public platform that guarantees a certain number of books sold. Lit agents who previously repped fiction are also more likely to invest only in nonfiction now. I've done informational interviews with lit agents who've told me that their main job, in terms of finding new author clients, is to just hear about who's already big and offer them a contract. You can read one lit agent's very honest take on the industry in this interview. His words are very similar to what I've heard in private from other agents.

The indie authors I've worked for have put way more care and attention into their revisions than publishers would. Was the final product actually better than trad published work? It really depends. Indie authors might self-publish before they're seasoned writers, and that inexperience will show, but I also see indie authors write book after book and get better with each one, gaining more readers with each one, in a learn-as-you-go way that publishing no longer nurtures. I'm now wondering what the point of publishing is. To be clear: Publishing has a point. But increasingly it seems to shoot itself in the foot by ignoring its own value and acting like a leech instead. Lit agents going from being people who offered free developmental edits to being people who just sit around waiting for the next celebrity memoir to come into their inboxes are a great example.

At a certain point I have to ask: What exactly is the traditional publishing route offering most writers anymore? It doesn't fact check. Its developmental edits are sloppy. It doesn't market. The most experienced publishing employees have just been fired. Right now, the benefits seem to be that you get a free copyedit, a free book cover, and hopefully placement in brick-and-mortar bookstores (although B&N apparently isn't stocking debut authors or something anymore? and bookstores are more open than ever before to putting self-pubbed works on their shelves. it's chaos!). Foreign and subsidiary rights are also a big deal. I'm not saying there aren't substantial benefits to trad publishing, and I'm definitely not saying that indie authors can do everything trad publishing can (selling your translation and audio rights as an indie author, for example, can be difficult or impossible). But: the benefits are dwindling, and I wonder how much lower publishing can go before it might as well not exist.

I think that authors are going to need to do...something. I'm not sure what. I'd love to see more reader- and author-owned small presses that are invested in running the way publishing used to run: well-compensated editors, solid marketing, etc. But I know from experience that starting a publishing company is exhausting and difficult in myriad ways.

Trad publishing is still very much an "ivory tower" industry, and editors will stick around well into their 60's and 70's. From what I've heard/seen, you basically apprentice under one editor for years, handling only the books they give to you, until an Editor "spot" opens up (completely dictated by the C-suite and Finance) and you can hopefully prove that you're good enough to earn the title. Getting to Editor is wildly dependent on both how well the books assigned to you do (so if your managing editor hands you shitty books while they keep the good ones, you're fucked) as well as seniority (I think the fastest in-house rise to "editor" is something like 7 years, maybe 5 if you job hop every 2 years). Meanwhile, the pay at these lower levels is $45,000. People straight out of college can make this work for a year or two, but at least 7, probably closer to 10??? Straight up unworkable for most. The only other option is to have money coming in from somewhere else (parents, spouse, etc.). So you have the promise of many long years of drudgery for very little pay, with just a North Star hope that you can break into the upper echelon.

Editors don't just read and edit manuscripts, they're also project managers for their books. They coordinate between multiple departments including design, marketing, and the actual production of printing and shipping the book. This means they're doing a FUCK TON of admin shit in addition to actually reading and editing. When the editor wants to pick up an author/manuscript, they have to pitch it to the Senior Editors as to why it's a worthwhile book to publish, which affects a lot of what books actually get published. When you have 2-6 books all scheduled to be released around the same time of year, multiplied by the multiple release "bursts" within a year, that leads to an insane workload and none of the books getting the care they deserve. The upper echelons do not care; you just won't be promoted, while your colleague who works nights and weekends will.

Trad publishing is focusing on trying to financially stay afloat, which affects the entire viewpoint and direction of the industry. COVID skyrocketed shipping costs, which the ripple effects are still being felt. Actual printers are shutting down, meaning that competitive pricing for producing the books is going away. The rise of Amazon, who really underprices books because there are other areas of the company that can support them financially, and the shuttering of traditional bookstores means that consumers have an idea of what the price of a book should be that is rapidly approaching the cost to actually make the book, nevermind pay the staff that goes into producing the book, or even pay the author. Most books never sell enough to meet the author advance; usually only surprise bestsellers generate royalties for the author. Most trad publishers are eating that cost right now by trying to churn out "guaranteed seller" books of authors that already have a huge fanbase that is likely to buy it, like big TikTokers or YouTubers. It's a downward spiral of only chasing the quick easy money, because it feels like there's no time to invest in products that are actually good.

John Wiswell: Submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the asexual succubus Wiswell: it's about a succubus who's different from the stereotypical succubus Wiswell: it makes you think about what if you were an individual in a society

Wiswell: so this succubus, you see, is ace Barker: oh come the fuck on Barker: come on!!! Barker: you can't have an asexual succubus! Barker: how would that even work?! Wiswell: well, CLIVE Wiswell: i'm about to explain that

Wiswell: this ace succubus expresses love in other ways Wiswell: like holding hands Wiswell: or parallel play Wiswell: that's when you sit next to each other on the couch playing stardew valley on the krobus the monster merchant roommate route Barker: what

Bram Stoker: interesting! i, for one, am glad to finally hear a succubus story without all that sex Barker: you can't just have an asexual succubus! Barker: that's like having a straight vampire! Stoker: Stoker: NOW SEE HERE YOU LITTLE-!!

Stoker: vampires aren't gay, how dare you!? Anne Rice: um yeah of course vampires are gay Stoker: no they're not! Rice: yes they are! Barker: fight! fight! fight! Poe: stop it! stop it! everyone, settle down! Mary Shelley: [flipping switchblade] finally, some action!

Poe: mary! who's side are you even on in this fight? Shelley: [stabbing Stoker] the winning side! Shelley: [stabbing Rice] as always Poe: Poe: yeah i guess that's usually try Shelley: [stabbing Poe] ALWAYS true Shelley: [stabbing Barker] try and stop me, nerds!

Barker: this is ridiculous, how can you have a succubus who's not horny?? Barker: i am offended by the very idea! King: actually, my boy joe dropped the take of the century on me earlier, he said that some aces actually DO get horny Barker: i am not getting into a discourse steve

The one where a tank attends a convention

The one where a lonely haunted house finds the right family to live there

The one with the succubus that turns into a couch

The one where a person trapped in thrall to a vampire finds a way out

The one where a disabled guy makes his own wizard school because the wizard university won't take him

The Coward who Stole God's Name (sorry, no pithy summary for this one; you gotta read it)

The one where the subway train is a dragon

The essay that makes me wish I weren't too prone to nightmares to enjoy horror (nonfiction)

The rest of his stories are listed on his webpage here.

Little Cherokee Seeds is a program where mothers and babies spend all day with first language Cherokee speakers, speaking nothing but Cherokee, so that the babies become a new generation of native speakers. They're also teaching traditional skills and mothering practices to the mothers to pass on.

This is so so important for the survival of the language. These babies are on track to being fluent first language speakers, and they will be able to keep the language going for another lifetime.

@dragabond

You're in luck, the summer semester of free online Cherokee classes with first language speaker Ed Fields starts on Monday

Every character should have something they need to say but refuse to say out loud.

People in general don’t tend to lay all their baggage out in the first few conversations they have with someone (unless they’re talking to a therapist). We all have truths/feelings/trauma that we’d rather bury deep down and never acknowledge. Some of it is stuff we aren’t even aware of. Give each of your characters at least 1 deep seated realisation that they need to come to, and that’s a solid foundation for an arc. Things like “I lash out at people because I was abused as a child” or “I push others away and don’t ask for help because I hurt someone by being a burden” and “I’m neurotic because feeling in control helps me cope with my grief.”

Your husband has been at war for thirty years. You married when you were teenagers. The man who returns bearing his name looks... plausible, you don't remember his eyes being quite so blue, but it's been thirty years and it's not like you could ever afford to have a portrait painted. He knows your name and the names of your children and your parents, but there are curious gaps in what he remembers. But war does things to the mind. And if he's kinder than you remember? Kind enough that, maybe, you let yourself believe...

No one has ever looked twice at you, since you're just the maid, until the day a revolutionary bomb goes off, blowing a crater in the summer palace. The famously reclusive duchess and the rest of her household lie dead in the rubble. You know that you and she were the same dress size. You know where her jewels are kept. Most importantly, you know the location of the secret tunnel that leads down to the docks, and to a life overseas that would be torturously hard going for a poor maid, especially one suspected as a thief, but a lot more comfortable for a royal in exile...

The old king's most faithful retainer swears this is the heir to the throne, raised in secret and trained to one day step into his father's shoes. As the usurper as dragged off the throne, she screams that the old king's children are all dead, she made sure of it; no one pays her any heed. (Maybe they should have...)

The man in the tavern is buying drinks for the whole bar before he sets sail tomorrow for the far side of the world. He's got it all figured out - a ship of his own, retirement to a tropical paradise when he gets sick of the pirating life. His lip curls as he talks about the stultifying boredom of the aristocratic world he's already left behind. You find out that his parents recently died, and the estate is in the care of his younger sister, who was only six when her brother first left home two decades since. Between the lines, they sound like a good family; they sound like they love him, the way your family never did. Your heart aches. He shows you portraits, letters, before shoving them carelessly back in his coat pocket. They would be so easy to lift...

It's a surprisingly common concept and I just love it. It's The Return of Martin Guerre; it's multiple 90s romcoms; Agatha Christie pulls it half a dozen times. Sooner or later, it crops up in fanfic for just about any fandom with a royal or aristocratic main character.

And I can see why, because there's so much richness to it. From the outside, it can be anything from a horror story to an unlikely love story; from the perspective of the person pulling off the con, a heist movie or a tragedy or a heartwarming tale of found family. And then there are the longer-term implications: What happens if you wear a mask so long that it becomes who you are? What happens if you come to love the "replacement" to the point where you don't want to find out the truth? What is it like to uncover such a deception a century down the line, to find out that your great-grandfather... wasn't?

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

I bet this person is of an era with the man named Don who unlocked the stylistic use of ellipsis for me in Because Internet and I wish I'd known about this other example to cite it as well! But here's the section where I talk about other examples I found, for the sake of having them in the same place:

And yes it is Welsh. Jesus Christ. As with most fantasy authors who do this, he took words and names from Welsh and Irish because they sounded a bit Elvish, rammed them together, and called it a day.

This may shock you, but him being Polish doesn't magically mean this was okay.

This may shock you even more, but the TV show and games not bothering to look up the correct pronunciations for these is in fact incredibly disrespectful, as it is a continuation of the way Welsh is always treated in real life.

And you might need to really sit down for this one, but your personal in-universe Watsonian headcanon doesn't somehow mean it's not the real life endangered language of Welsh that's been taken and butchered for the aesthetique, causing real life harm.

I am sorry that you don't like your fave author being criticised, and feel like it's an attack on you personally. But that is unfortunately your issue to deal with, and trying to hand wave and justify it all away as you've done here is Bad, Actually.

Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn't need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it's interesting or worthy of respect.

Read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Lingthusiasm episode 'Tracing languages back before recorded history'

'My Big Fat Greek Wedding- Give me any word and I show you the Greek root' on YouTube

Glottolog entry for 'classical'

Wikipedia entry for 'Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir'

Wikipedia entry for 'Bath curse tablets'

Wikipedia entry for 'Cuneiform'

Wikipedia entry for 'Mesopotamian writing systems'

Wikipedia entry for 'Home Sign'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou'

Wikipedia entry for 'Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language'

Wikipedia entry for 'Kata Kolok' (also known as Benkala Sign Language)

True Biz by Sara Nović on Goodreads

Gretchen's thread about reading True Biz

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.