March 29, 2007
New website home
Unless you got to my blog directly, you noticed that I have a new "improved" website design that displays both book covers. For those who asked, the woman on MIRIAM is from "Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi" (a lady in the Medici court) by Agnolo Bonzino of Florence. The original is at the Ufitzi Museum in Florence, next to the portrait of her husband. Of course, JOHEVED is Leonardo DaVinci's "Lady with an Ermine." Both lovely Renaissance paintings.
Some folks ask why we didn't use medieval art, and the short answer is that the women in them are not very attractive, and the whole point of cover art is to attract the potential reader. The great thing about using Renaissance artists, besides that they're great artists, is that they're dead - so they don't charge for using their work and they don't complain if we change it. For example, JOHEVED has blue eyes (as the story requires) but "the lady with the ermine" doesn't, and MIRIAM is a brunet, while Lucreazia is a redhead.
March 09, 2007
Happy Purim 2007
Happy Purim - better late than never. For those who need a dose of cuteness, here's a picture of my 5-week-old grandson, Nathan, in his Purim costume. No, we don't know if he's a cow or a dalmation puppy. Most folks vote for cow.
The galleys for MIRIAM are ready. So if you know any commerical fiction authors (or are one) who want to read it and write a nice blurb, just let me know.
March 01, 2007
page proofs are here
Yesterday FedEx delivered the page proofs for Book Two - MIRIAM, all
475 pages of them. Actually MIRIAM is only about 12000 words longer
than JOHEVED, but the new books will be 5.5" x 8.5", while the first
one was 6" x 9". It's so exciting to see the page proofs. Unlike the
manuscript I saw last month - this is what the inside of the book will
really look like. Now it's starting to be real.
I have a bit more than a week to check the proofs and correct any
errors (or make any other changes). Of course the copyeditors are also
looking to fix spelling and grammar mistakes, so my main tasks are to
make sure that the Talmud extracts are set out properly, that the
different scenes are separated by an empty line or dingbat (that's the
little design printers use when a scene ends at the bottom or top of a
page), and things like that. Since I already proofread the computer
manuscript file (last month), I don't expect to change much content at
this point. Although I did read the first chapter aloud to a book
group and one of them (a retired English teacher) noticed that
Benjamin got a cut above his right eye and later has a bandage above
his left eye.