It's been a long time since my last entry. And, as always when I've let it go for so long, I have a lot to catch you all up on. I'll try to split up the information into multiple entries so it's a little easier to read.
We have returned the book to our editor, Joanna. In my grand tradition of getting things done almost on time, we got it to her the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, two business days (four actual days) after our deadline. Most of the edits went fairly quickly; in fact we took the book with us and worked on it on our vacation in Austin, TX last month. I even got a couple of photos of Georg working by the pool at the groovy Austin Motel, which I highly recommend to anyone staying in Austin.
Poolside writing interludes aside, there were some changes that required more work. For example, I had messed up the citation on a couple of quotes. Those required a trip to the library. And there were several places where a whole paragraph needed to be rewritten.
Also, we had gotten the pronouns inconsistent in the "Card in Your Life" section of the court cards. If I recall correctly, we used "We" in the number cards: "We can learn from the ... but we must take care to ..." that sort of thing. But in the Court Cards, we started out with "you," and then after a couple of cards we switched to using the pronoun appropriate to the card. In other words, if we were talking about a Prince or King, we wrote "he," but we wrote "she" for the Princesses and Queens.
I think what happened was, I wrote a couple of those court card interpretations ages ago, for the Comparative Tarot mailing list. I had used a casual writing style, because I was just writing for a few friends (the list wasn't so big back then). When we finally got to writing the book, we were handling the pronouns differently, but in the rush we didn't notice the inconsistency in the earlier material.
This issue was actually our only disagreement with the editing. For the most part it was excellent; all the changes improved our clunky grammar or clarified ideas that weren't expressed well. However, it was requested that we change the pronouns to "s/he", "him or her," etc., in the court card interpretations.
I see what she's getting at, but I think it flows better if the female court cards are referred to as "she" and the male court cards as "he." We did include a paragraph in the introduction explaining that the presence of male and female images on the court cards doesn't imply that only men can experience the energy of Kings and so forth. We even have a woman -- Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse -- on the Prince of Swords.
In any case, we wrote a note explaining why we thought it should stay the way it was. Joanna wrote back yesterday regarding the edits & didn't mention the matter. Which I hope means that we made our case effectively.
OK, I think that's enough for one entry. I'll write more on editing the book later today.
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