Editing Sense&Sensibility / Edition de Raison & sentiment

We've barely started working on the first edition of Sense and Sensibility, but we discovered that there were many things that were different in the first 1811 version.

It can be "just" punctuation, but it can also be full sentences that disappeared or changed in later versions.

Being researchers, we pointed out the differences in footnotes, but it makes for a dry reading.

We briefly considered printing the differences in a different colours, but this might not suit all our readers.

Then... we thought about underlining the differences. It wouldn't interfere with reading, but it would signal the differences.

We could have a Notes section after the novel, in order to point out the differences in later versions.

What do you think? Do you think underlining would work, or should we use bold characters as well - or just bold characters?  

Do we keep the footnote numbers in the text to point out the differences signalled in the Notes?

Nous avons à peine commencé à travailler sur les premières pages de la première édition de Raison et sentiment, mais nous avons ainsi découvert qu'il existe de nombreuses différences dans la première version de 1811.

Il s'agit le plus souvent simplement de ponctuation différente, mais il y a aussi des phrases entières qui ont disparu des versions suivantes ou ont changé.

En tant que chercheuses, nous avons naturellement utilisé des notes de bas de page, mais cela rend la lecture ennuyeuse.

Nous avons évoqué la possibilité d'utiliser une autre couleur pour les différences, mais il est possible que cela ne convienne pas à tous nos lecteurs.

Nous avons ensuite pensé souligner les différences. Cela n'interférerait pas avec la lecture, mais signalerait quand même les différences.

Nous pourrions avoir un chapitre de Notes à la fin de l'ouvrage afin de signaler les différences dans les versions ultérireures.

Qu'en pensez-vous ? Pensez-vous que souligner les différences serait suffisant ou devrions-nous les signaler en gras également - ou utiliser seulement des caractères en gras ?

Gardons-nous les numéros des notes de bas de page dans les texte afin de faire référence aux différences signalées dans les notes finales ?

Second Portrait on Canvas

I do know that I still need a lot of training, but I'm having fun, and, even though portraiture is an art from hell, it's quite addictive.

So... here's my latest painting:

Censorship in the 21st Century

Long time no post, but the summer's properly demented, and some of us have Internet woes (and Usagi's still in Kyoto). Basically, reduced team is no fun...

We've made a choice about Racine's Phedre et Hyppolyte: we'll have the original spelling and typography, and a modern version (just the old one could be fun, but it'd be really tough without a more modern one on the right page).

We're still working on Wilde's Salomé, but we're taking our time to make sure that we'll give you a nice translation - and a bilingual introduction.

When I have some free time, I work on the fourth novel in my Sci-Fi universe (the current news are feeding the plot bunny in a rather dark way).

Then... bank news to be able to launch our website.

So... we've found a bank, but because of an annoying technicality, we can only open the account in September (sometime in September).

But what's utterly frustrating is that Cousin Chris had managed to open an account for us at her main bank. She'd had to go through artificial hoops to please the arrogant plonkers, but we had an account... until we asked for the reference that would allow us to buy an e-commerce plugin so that we could safely link our website to our account.

The female that called my cousin at my aunt's (even though my cousin never gives any phone number because she does business at 2 am by e-mail - because she gets some written proof) was a proper nightmare. 

First, she claimed that she didn't have access to our file (then, how did she get my aunt's phone number, um?), and she demanded to be given the names, addresses, and e-mails of the website provider and webmaster; to quote my cousin: 'No way in friggin' Hell!!!!!'.

My cousin's plan was to get the reference, give it to the plugin company, buy the plugin, install it, buy the website, migrate our site that's on Xampp, test everything, and launch the ship.

That wasn't possible, as the phoning biped demanded to be allowed to see our website first because she wanted... to censor it!

She literally said that she had to "check our website for references to religion, sex, and drug".

Well, 95% of our books are LGBTQ-friendly (though there's nothing graphic, but with "Miss Censorship-Sunshine", we'd have ended up with an empty catalogue). And Shakespeare's potentially controversial. And Wilde's play was already censored on religious grounds - from the late 19th century, up to the 1930s!

What we miss is stuff about drugs (thanks for the plot bunny, arrogant bank biped!).

So the account was closed, because none of us (not even our accountant, who growled with us, editors and authors) were ready to accept censorship in the 21st century.

Do you know what the other bank only asked us? That the website had an SSL certificate, which we will have. Internet security is their only concern.

Right now, we're plotting all together to report the censoring biped to someone much higher than her in the food chain.

I'll have some painting to show you soon, maybe a video, and we're planning to take pictures of our paper babies to add them to the website (we'll share some with you then).

See you soon (hopefully)!

Book News & Other Nuttiness

We're still working on launching our publishing company. Everything's slow, but things are taking shape - we think (and hope!).

I'm slowly working on editing the text of the first publication of Sense and Sensibility. It's fascinating to see what was changed in the following publication.

I'm trying to find the best way to show the differences between the two versions; I "fear" it's between classical footnotes and a different colour to show what changed. Basically I'll have to print tests...

I'm also working on checking my translation of Salomé, but I'm not going to rush because I want to be proud of that work, and poor Wilde deserves a decent translation of his work (I could hire a necromancer to have a lil' chat with both Douglas and Ross to tell them what I think of their "work" - Wilde must have been heartbroken to allow Douglas's translation to be printed... with whatever amount of correction Wilde did to the "text").

Speaking of Wilde, Cousin Chris is writing the bilingual introduction for our edition of Salomé (no massive discoveries like for our Shakespeare, but interesting facts...).

We're working on Racine's Phedre et Hippolyte. This time, we don't know if we want the original fonts and spelling and a more modern one, or just the version from 1677.

I'm also working on a comedy (Merlin, that's *hard*!!!). 

I know I mentioned this somewhere in my blog, but I need the title to work on my stories, and the one I have for this play is a tad nutty. I keep thinking, 'It's for a comedy, why not have a barmy title?'...

I've just read quite a weird "review", as a reader was telling one of our authors to not portray old people in "bed". There's nothing graphic in the story, but the person was disgusted by the idea of an old man, and an old woman making love.

Merlin! That happens in real life, and I fail to understand why that person thinks that it's more disgusting to picture old people making love than younger bipeds doing it. 

Good grief! Having fun in bed happens - and if it happens after 70... Lucky bipeds!

It was demented to read something almost ordering the author to not do that again in the future. Of course, it was an anonymous review, so the author could not answer and kindly tell that person that:

A) No one is forcing "it" to read any story, and closing a browser, or a book, is always an option.

B) Writers will write whatever they want. You can read it, or not.

[Once upon a time, drunk on positive feedback, I added a chapter to a short story I had written, and... I still regret adding that chapter. The story is still good, but not as good as in its first form. That was quite a lesson.]

Am I a Goddess?

I know that I'm the empress of Mars {still a long story*}, but it seems that I'm a goddess, too.

I mean, if relatives and bipeds I work with expect me to know things I was never told about or do things I was never instructed to do,...... then, I must be a goddess if they think I'm this omniscient. Right. Right?

I won't give any example from my very own Dursleys, but the work-bipeds are fair game.

The latest incident has me needing to transfer something, but... no one told me where to transfer it - or how to do it. And yet, I'm expected to do it. Oh! And no one told me I was supposed to do the transfer; I discovered that *completely* by chance.

To conclude, I've got to be a very good omniscient goddess - otherwise bipeds would actually tell me what they expect from me, and I wouldn't have to rely on sheer luck, or a crystal ball.

Perhaps I should add "gifted Terran goddess" to my bio (I'm only half-joking)...

*: It's not, but it looks good in my bio, and it sounds mysterious... *mwaha*

La SNCF, c'est (vraiment) [pas] possible

Si vous n'avez besoin de rien vous serez tout de suite servi.

Mon dernier voyage en train ?

Je me lève à l'aube (littéralement), arrive à la gare bien en avance et mon premier train part... A la moitié du voyage, une erreur d'aiguillage (ben voyons !) nous fait prendre un retard de 25 minutes - dommage, je n'ai que 20 minutes de battement pour attraper mon second train.
Que va-t-il se passer ?
Le contrôleur nous annonce que la correspondance sera assurée quand même cinq minutes avant l'arrivée en gare (merci pour le stress, les gars !).
Une fois sur le quai, ben t'as intérêt à battre le record de vitesse avec ta valise si tu veux l'avoir le TGV (quelques palpitations plus tard et un poignet abîmé à cause de ma valise super lourde, la porte s'est carrément refermée sur mes fesses - on courrait tous sur le quai, mais le chef de gare était pressé pour l'autre TGV... Ben mon gars, t'as qu'à apprendre à tes collègues à aiguiller les trains correctement).

L'année dernière, la SNCF m'avait laissée en rade à pas d'heure dans un gare dangereuse (Mère avait payé ce billet-là).
Je râle et le médiateur me donne raison (en bons de voyage, mais c'est déjà ça). La SNCF ne conteste pas, mais ne fait rien.
Depuis plus de quinze jours, après être passée en agence où on m'a dit de téléphoner au SAV, je tente de joindre ce service, mais le choix d'option ne marche tout simplement pas (avec deux téléphones !).
Je demande de l'aide à la SNCF sur Twitter et de fil en aiguille, on me demande les références du problème pour nous aider, puis nom, prénom, adresse, courriel, numéro de téléphone (l'âge du capitaine et mon mot de passe Twitter, aussi, peut-être ?!!!).
On me promet la relance du service hier...
... ce matin ? Ah, bah, "contactez un autre service, nous, on ne peut rien faire".
Conclusion : ils se payent nos tronches, bossent comme des "plonkers" (ouaip, de l'anglais, je sais, mais 1 - je suis bilingue et 2 - c'est le mot parfait pour les décrire !) et refusent de payer ce qu'ils doivent.
A en juger par les messages d'autres personnes sur les forums de la SNCF, le SAV est souvent en rade et ils bossent quand ils ont le temps.

Bloody plonkers!

Editing News

Now that we've sent our edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint to be officially registered, and that our work on editing Oscar Wilde's Salomé (the original French edition, and a new translation in English by yours truly - the introduction is being written by Cousin Editor-in-chief) is nearing completion, we've made a discovery: we love editing the books that we loved reading.

We're still working on our own stories or works, but it's properly exhilarating and possibly addictive to go back to the original texts, edit and dust them off (or even make discoveries), and then share them with you, dear Readers.

The day we had the idea to publish our favourite works, we came up with this list:

William Shakespeare: Sonnets - Much Ado About Nothing

Oscar Wilde: Salomé (we decided to translate it into proper English when we read how it's been treated by Douglas)

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

Jean Racine: Phèdre

Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol

We have now added:

The Forme of Cury

Edmond Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac (a request from my aunt)

Even if it was a lot of work, editing Shakespeare gave us access to fonts that can mimic the ligatures used in the early years of printing.

Last night, in order to do something soothing after dealing with the infuriating banker, we had a look at the first edition of Racine's Phèdre et Hippolyte, and we discovered that he wrote an introduction, and that the text of the royal privilege allowing him to print the play was printed there, as well.

We're not planning to make a facsimile of it, but we started thinking that it'd be different, unusual, original to publish a version of the text as it was first printed. Perhaps it's quite a niche, but we really think it could be a different kind of edition.

De is plotting more short stories (focussing on friendship this time).

Chris is still formatting her PhD.

I've got two Muff&Sherly stories ready to be edited (and the next novel is whispering in my ear). I've been thinking about my Sordid Fairy Tales, and my Victorian spy plot, too.

We're quite busy.

Now, if only we could find a banker with a brain and get this e-bookstore started... 

PS: if there are books that you'd like us to edit, you're more than welcome to make suggestions.

Silent Banker

Hello, dear Readers!

We've got a slight case of "We are not amused" going on.

Our Editor-in-chief, my (usually patient and sweet) cousin, sent the links about the (local equivalent of the) Senate and Home Office stating that she is right to our new contact at our bank (over a decade with them for both of us, and not a single problem!), and... nothing.

We do not know if he's angry about the Law lesson, if he's asking his superior what to do with the mean gal who's sending him official texts showing that the bank is ignoring the Law, or if he's doing his job and opening us an account so we can start our online activity.

Not a clue...

Since none of us is a fan of silence... I contacted another bank in the night, got an answer this morning, and handed the baby to Cousin Editor-in-chief. Now... we wait.

I'd like to officially declare here that it is exhausting to deal with people who aren't even competent at their jobs. The number of arrogant cavepeople trying to bully their way through life is quite tiring.

I'll keep you posted on our launch.

Love,

Dru

Nul n'est censé ignorer la loi

The title of this post, which basically says that all citizens are supposed to know the Law, is just a saying, as only specialists and Law professionals may know most of it - not all of it (only a Vulcan could do that!).

If people cannot know all the laws of their country of residence, it's no reason to wilfully ignore most of the laws (people should know the rights that protect them, and the limits they've got to abide by).

Why this legal post now?

Well... I've got Cousin Chris fuming, right next to me. You see, her main form of ID is a bit old, and she knows that she can't use it to leave the country, for example, but... the Sénat and the Ministère de l'Intérieur both declare that it is still valid to prove her identity as long as the photo looks like her (and it bloody does!). So what's the problem? Well, the bank she contacted (her bank - and mine, too! - the bank that can see everything we buy and pay, and where our money comes from) just told her that her ID's no longer valid, which is, according to the Sénat and the Ministère de l'Intérieur, not legal, as they're not above the Sénat and the Ministère de l'Intérieur.

So... banks can play with our money as if it were Monopoly money, and ignore the Law?
How delightful!

We all agree that we must NOT cave and bow to them, because that bank is ignoring the Law - and we know it, and we're going to remind them because we're looking for business partners who trust us (and those know they can trust us), not bullies who can treat us like crooks, liars, and potential thieves!

Even if we do have to go look elsewhere, and it postpones the opening of our e-bookstore, we're not going to do as the bank bullies want, and we're not going to potentially subject our lovely patrons to arrogant ignoramuses who think someone died and made them kings.

Now... I'd better go find something soothing for the team, the five of us are currently fuming like a volcano in a weird mood.