This is a question for Harriet. What was it like editing for your husband, and having to tell him, “No…”
Well, I gave him a contract for what proved to be his first published book. It was a historical novel called The Fallon Blood , and Tor Books has reissued it, and it says in huge letters on the front: “Robert Jordan writing as Reagan O’Neill,” and of course it was James Oliver Rigney writing as Robert Jordan writing as… (laughter) It was very good, but he kept delivering it, and the manuscript was getting like this (gesture). It covered the American Revolution in South Carolina. He wanted to do what John Jakes had done for the northern sweep of American history, so it was getting bigger and bigger, and I said, “Well, Jim, couldn’t we cut some battles?” And he said, “Harriet, that’s why I sent Michael Fallon wounded to Georgia to recuperate. I’ve already skipped twenty-five battles. We can’t cut any more.” (laughter)
And I said, “Well, then the only thing is we’ll have to cut three lines a page,” because my distribution agreement—it was my own imprint; this was before Tor came into being—was kind of fierce. So we….well, I’ll tell you, I had a friend who needed a beard. She was seeing a gentleman who wasn’t quite as divorced as he should have been…” (laughter) “…and you all know what a beard is? I would be the third person at their lunch table, so that no one would say, “Oh, she’s having a thing with this guy.” And I said, “I’ll do it, as long as you come help with the snopake.” So we sat around my dinner table, and this was so long ago, great swooping pencil-lines and snopake over the worst. It would be…[?]…It was a mess!”
But we did all of that before we ever went out on a date; we went all the way through publication. And that means the professional relationship was older than the romantic relationship, and it sort of…it worked! Somebody said to me later, “Yeah, well what would you do if he gave you a piece of [expletive].” And I said, “Well you know, he never would!” If he was writing a midlist book, it wouldn’t be [expletive], it would be good midlist, and it wasn’t about games; it was about the book, always. So that’s how we did it, and it worked. (applause)
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