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Tephra ([personal profile] tephra) wrote2004-09-21 10:39 pm
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Okay, found this through a post by [profile] dewhitton but for this snarky comment you really don't need to hunt down this Amazon.com review by Anne Rice. I'm going to quote the relevant portion here:

And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself.

So the scene in Interview With a Vampire where a black woman is described both as beautiful and as if carved from diorite* is all Anne's fault and I don't get to blame an editor for not catching that horrendous blunder? I literally tossed the book aside and ignored it (more than 300 pages into the book at that point) for three weeks over that one word.

*For the non-geologists, diorite is a coarse-grained, black and white rock. It's speckled. A dalmatian could be carved from diorite, not a beautiful black woman. If she needed a rock to use in the description she could have used basalt or gabbro or obsidian or onyx (to name a few). The first three are all usually black, onyx is actually more often striped but people are used to thinking of it as black due to its use in jewelry.