I have finished incorporating all of my editor’s recommended edits, so the next phase on the novel is intensive proofreading. I’m going through now and hunting down common writing mistakes. After that, I’ll print the whole thing out and read it through with a red pen. Once I’m done with that, it is ready to go to the publisher.
I’m expecting to be done by around Easter.
Anime Outsiders is an interesting website; I first discovered them on Twitter, where they claimed (and whether they were being honest or merely puffing themselves, I have no idea) that they had members who were disaffected former employees of Crunchyroll. Garrulous and highly opinionated, they’re worth keeping an eye on simply because they offer exactly what their name implies—an alternate opinion that’s outside the mainstream groupthink.
Christopher Kinsey has an article up over there entitled, “Magical Girls and What to Do about Them.” Like every author who discusses magical girls, Kinsey feels a strange need to give a history of the genre, but unlike most, he mercifully keeps it brief and gets into the real point he wants to discuss—how the genre has become darker, edgier, and more adult thanks largely to Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In doing so, he also points out a connection between Madoka and Lyrical Nanoha that I had not picked up on (mostly because I admittedly have a hard time remembering Japanese names).
For those among us who know our production houses, Seven Arcs began its life producing adult themed animation, the most notorious of which is known as Night Shift Nurses and the less said about THAT the better. But this was all to build the capitol to make a really honest to goodness TV anime series. As it turns out, they produced Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha which, as mentioned above, was a magical girl anime primarily designed to draw in a male audience.
Kinsey makes the case that the genre, in its recent developments, has ended up excluding the audience it was originally intended for—young girls.
I’ve repeatedly complained on here about the excess darkness in the genre today, with many series like Magical Girl Site trying to duplicate the grimness of Madoka without understanding why Madoka works.
Although I think Kinsey makes the common mistake of interpreting Madoka in light of Gen Urobuchi’s previous work (even though Urobuchi himself has said he was trying to write against his usual tendencies with Madoka), he ultimately turns to the Netflix adaptation of Smile Pretty Cure into Glitter Force and makes what I believe to be a great point:
Could it be translated better and still sold to young girls? Probably, but this is just the thing to remind the anime community that we have to cater to more than just young men with disposable incomes. Everyone deserves a chance at the table, and if Glitter Force can be a gateway to a new fan just as Sailor Moon scooped up many young ladies to the fandom back when I was young, then I think we need to have more series just like it.
I know I’m not posting nearly enough. I’m trying to get my act together over here, but it is my novel that needs to come first. I’m definitely in the I need to get this book out of the house right now oh please oh please phase of the writing process, which is also when my blog posts suffer—more than usual, I mean.
At least my taxes finally got done. Something goes weird with my taxes every year, and this year was no exception. I had the fun new experience of figuring out how to report royalties and expenses to the IRS, and then my taxes were rejected repeatedly when I tried to e-file. I never got an explanation for the rejection, just a message saying it was a system error and I should file again. I tried repeatedly to file over a few weeks, getting the same error each time.
Finally, I printed my forms off, and I’ll drop them in the mail next week. Maybe I really made a big mistake and they’ll get rejected yet again, but I figure if my mailed forms get rejected, the IRS will at least have to tell me the reason why so I can fix it.
Anyway, I’m pondering another issue of grammar, and I wanted to throw this one out to any grammar Nazis who might be with us in the peanut gallery. Here is a sentence from Dead to Rites, the soon-to-be-published next book in the Jake and the Dynamo sequence:
Remember how it was when you saw her for the first time, back when you were a bodybuilding Spanish billionaire and she was an impoverished governess with a physical disability!
My editor thinks there should be a comma after the word and, apparently supposing that she was an impoverished governess with a physical disability is an independent clause. Myself, I think the subordinating conjunction when, which begins the preceding clause, is implied but not repeated, so the sentence is correct (although informal and loose because it’s in dialogue) as written.
On the other hand, I wrote it, so maybe it just sounds better to me without the comma because my ear is used to it.
What do you think?
