Being a one-man shop, I can always look forward to seeing some dumb editing problem in a newly published book. It's due to a sort of word-blindness, where I can look at a phrase, read it, and completely overlook an incongruency. Usually, it involves prepositions on my covers. I'll put one preposition on the title page, and a different one on the cover. Almost put "Sightings and Stories" on the new Boss Snakes cover, when it was "Stories and Sightings." Quickly caught that before I sent it. But, last night, several days after uploading the book to the printer, was going over a few things in my head, and thought, 'I did use Mark Chorvinsky's name, right?' I mention the late Strange Magazine publisher briefly... and a quick check confirmed I had, of course, inserted Mark Opsasnick's name instead. Well, they're both from Maryland. A few choice words, a quick change and re-upload, another $40 down the drain, and the book will be bumped back a few days, but will have the correct name in it.
And, noting some odd little comment elsewhere about the use of a black racer on the cover of Boss Snakes, it's a bit sad to see that cryptids as social (ethnozoological) constructs has taken such a turn in popular culture that we are so certain that they must in fact be strictly based on unknown species. That's one reason I dislike over-generalizations in the attempt to name or describe a mystery animal prior to physical confirmative evidence. (Or rather, the effort to make specific claims about a generalized far-flung topic.) The giant snake phenomena in North America is based on a wide range of folklore: hoaxes, misidentifications, exaggerations, tall tales, as well as credible sightings involving larger than expected specimens of native species, introduced or feral exotics, and maybe (just maybe...) unrecognized variations or species.
Labels: book, cryptozoology, publishing, reptiles
