Sheila's Guests and Reviews

 The journal's progressing and soon we'll get to that scary copy-editing stage; not just is everything spelled right, but did we use the same conventions throughout. Ellipses made of three dots in the middle of a sentence and four at the end. Italics for internal dialog. Double quotes with the right sort of quote marks at beginning and end. Mom with a small m for a character, large for a name. Period after Mr. or not, but at least make them all the same.... What else can I think of? Luckily I'll have some brave allies from the group helping with the job. We'll have to look for logical inconsistencies too, not because the writing might have made them, but because I'm scared I may have edited out the odd line by accident while trying to edit out double spaces at the ends of sentences and random numbers of spaces prefacing paragraphs. Ah, compiling an anthology is such fun! So maybe it's time for some book reviews instead, where someone else has done all the hard...

Our local writers' group is producing its third anthology soon, and yesterday I downloaded all the stories, poems and pictures from the dropbox, ready to start. Getting them all into the same format, clearing stray tabs and double-spaces, empty lines etc wasn't hard. But getting them all into the right order, to create a semblance of a whole, that's a much more difficult job. I've split the pieces into sections, titled each one "in" or "on" something, cheated with "independence," and done my best to tie the end of each section to the start of the one following. Which is fine, but where do I start? Where do I end? If it's true that I need to put the strongest entries at the start and end, how on earth would I be qualified to choose which ones are best? Which kind of begs the question, how on earth am I qualified to write book reviews too. I'm definitely not qualified to rate books, hence the coffee ratings. And remember, coffee is ...