Zen Master: Blog

It's no big deal when your proofreaders notice some mis-spelled words, or a place you screwed up the grammar or punctuation. However, when they point out some plot holes you have to stop and think about it.
Okay, that's long enough. I've fixed everything they said and we'll try again.

SOL has a new story "My Concrete Spaceship" by a new author "Pi". Now, it turns out to be a lot better than I expected from the title, history, and the teaser, but there _are_ a few things that he could use some help with. He needs a proofreader, to start with. I know several.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like he has any feedback method set up. Maybe he can reply to this.

-ZM

Somewhere in the Bible, don't remember where, there's an instruction to not piss off those who help you. The King James version has it as "Do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread your grain", meaning that if you have oxen driving your gristmill, don't cover their mouths to keep them from eating any of your grain. They really don't eat that much compared to how much grain you can grind in a mill that's large enough to need two oxen to run it, and you will get a lot more work done with less hassle if they think of your gristmill as a good place to go walk around for awhile.
Those managers who cheat their employees at every possible chance will eventually only have employees who are okay with being cheated. Because, you know, they are even better at cheating the company than their boss is. It's better to have happy employees who will do whatever they can to make their boss look good.
What am I talking about here? Well, my proofreader, who shows me every time he looks at my work that I'm not quite as good a writer as I think I am. If you see my stuff here on SOL and like it, a large part of that is just because I'm such a wonderful writer, right?
I wouldn't look anywhere near as good if I didn't have a really good proofreader backing me up. Tomken rips my work apart even better than I do to the other authors on the Swarm Cycle author's list. So, since I was in such a hurry to post "Fat Chicks" once I had worked through his errata list that I didn't even stop to tip my hat to him at the end of the file, I have to publicly admit here that I'm a jerk who doesn't give credit where credit is due.
Until I get back to that with an update that thanks him for his services, please just imagine that "Fat Chicks" ends with a thank-you note to my proofreader TomKen.

-ZM

The "Mike & Shirley" series are about a relationship I had when I was younger. Some of it is true, some of it is close, and some of it is completely made-up. The "Wedding Vows" short is exactly what the preface says, something we talked about and pretended but never did since we couldn't find an ordained minister who would go along with it.
The problem is, all of these were written long ago before I decided to publish them, and I used different names for me and my girlfriend. One of my best friends just pointed out that I didn't do a very good job of making sure that I used "Mike" for references to me in Vows; when I wrote that short I was using "Steve" as a pseudonym and that story flopped back and forth between 'Mike' and 'Steve' and is pretty confusing. So, I apologize for not having a good proofreader back in 2012 when I posted that story. I have one now, I have fixed that story so it makes sense, and I will upload it as a revision as soon as I figure out how.

-ZM

My Swarm Cycle novel "The First Command" has been turned over to the Swarm Authors' Mailing List to be ripped apart, uh, checked for canon problems, plot errors, and typos. As everyone knows, I don't make mistakes so I'm sure I'll get back several emails saying "That was great. Don't change a thing!"
We'll see what really happens.

-ZM