Sunday July 18th, 1999
Last week two old manuscripts were up for auction on everyone's favorite outage-prone auction powerhouse, eBay. However, they were taken off the block prematurely. Here's what Ray had to say over the weekend about what was up for auction:
OK, here's the story.
1st, Pete Schneider, the gentleman offering the ms. for sale, is an old friend, going back to the days when he was a publicist at Doubleday and he was flogging Magician above and beyond. He was one of my first allies at Doubleday and is an all around good guy.
The manuscript was one of two I photocopies and sent to Doubleday. I did my originals on an old C. Itoh 410a letter quality printer back then, and I was required by contract to send 2 copies of the ms. (That's a hangover from the days they wanted your original ms. and the carbon paper copy!) The little perforations along the sides where the tractor feed strip gets pulled off jammed their copiers when I sent them Silverthorn, so I went down to the local 'copy it yourself' palace and spend $80 to make two copies to send to them.
One of them went into production, which is the one I eventually got back with copy editors, proof-readers, and editors queries and corrections on it. The other got sent down to publicity. That's the copy Peter has.
Anyway, that's what he means by 'original' in that it's the state prior to copy edit so you can see some of the really dumb stuff I wrote before a very talented copy editor named Elain Chubb got her mitts on it.
