Monday, July 19, 2010

To the Virginia Edition world

My apologies once again for not being a good blogger.
However, here we go with another update.

We are moving along with the next 15, not as fast as I would like
as I do more jobs for Mr. Dula along side the VE.
This last week was spent trying to collect all of the financial
for VE and have it ready to present it to our main funders this
past weekend.

We have an intern for the summer, who is doing work for the Heinlein
Prize Trust and for VE when his brain fries from too much data entry.
He has done proofreads for 2 books so far. I am going to be reviewing
them this week as I need to sign off on them any way.

On another note, if any of you feel you have received volumes not up to the standard
please let me know. We do have extras from each print run, however they are limited
in number. Please keep requests to the most substandard volumes. I have complained
to Transcontinental and so far we have sent out a couple replacement books.

The next set of books I hope will be back up in quality to what we have come to expect
from Trans. The next books are a little rearranged - I believe I mentioned this in an
earlier post. We are moving all of the material for Heinlein century into other volumes.
HC's table of contents included some selected RAH pieces and several tribute articles
from space industry and naval personnel. The RAH pieces are going into corresponding
volumes and the tributes will be placed into an extended version of Requiem.

While doing some inclusion discussion with Bill Patterson and Windhaven our editors,
I was introduced to an RAH letter from 1973 (a letter Heinlein wrote to Niven and
Pournelle about Mote in God's Eye before it came to have that title). Heinlein use FYI :)
This prompted me to try and find the oldest recorded use of the initialism - which
apparently was in 1941 when a radio show aired under that name. I still found it
interesting as my presupposition was dashed about the Internet age being the source
of most acronyms and initialisms, useful or not.

Enjoy your reading, hope to have more information for you soon,
Leah Ott