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Editing biz

Driven?

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So, did I end up driven to drive, drive, drive around the city yesterday afternoon? Did I reserve a space at this afternoon’s writer’s group, where I would like to peddle my services in the guise of seeking feedback on my half-baked unfinished noveloid?

Well. No. And also, no.

Yes, I did climb in the car and turn on the ignition. About the time I got to the end of the driveway, a thought occurred: Why am I doing this???????

Got about 200 feet down the road…and then drove around the block, returned to the Funny Farm, parked the car, and proceeded back inside. Where I’ve been fairly happily ensconced ever since, except for a dog-walk or two.

Yes.

Thought: Hey, estúpida! What do you think you’re doing?

Human: Driving to the credit union and to the grocery store on…uhm…some road over there.

Thought: You’re kidding, right?

Human: Uhm…

Thought: Tell me you’re not serious. You’re REALLY going to drive FORTY MINUTES so as to avoid farting around with the accursed Internet for 10 or 15 minutes to deposit two measly checks?

Human: Well, but…

Thought: And this vaunted grocery store is on…WHAT road?

Human: I think it’s at 43rd and Peoria.

Thought: NO, you moron! That’s an Albertson’s, not a Fry’s. And it’s not even a halfway decent Albertson’s. It is, in a word, a CRUMMY store!

Human: Oh. Yeah. Well…but…

I gave up. It took less than 10 minutes to deposit $2500 worth of client monnaie online. This was good. There was plenty of food in the house: two chops from a rack of lamb; tiny delicious little beets to grill (this worked exceptionally well, BTW); excellent buttered spinach to heat, also on the grill. And half a bottle of wine.

Truly, I hate farting with the computer and the credit union’s website to deposit checks electronically. But…hate it SO MUCH that it’s worth driving 20 minutes to the CU, standing in line, and driving 20 minutes back?

Maybe not.

As for today’s proposed introduction to the midtown writer’s group: they meet weekly. The local Play-Nooz reported that the police and fire department are occupying lovely downtown Phoenix with a mock Emergency Response today…and that chivaree sounds like something to avoid.

So I decided to put that little marketing maneuver off for a week: Next Sunday, thankyouverymuch. This will give me time to schlep the printout of the current installment of Ella’s story down to the UPS store and put them up to making and stapling together 10 or 12 copies, rather than expending my own ink & paper for the purpose.

Hmmmmm… Lookee here: for $30, you can get 50 pens with your bidness name on them. 😀 The MO of these writer’s groups is that you hand out a few pages of your golden words and people critique the stuff. What if in addition to a sheaf of paper, you gave each person a pen with your editing outfit’s name and URL? 😀

Apparently this outfit will deliver in four or five days, which would get said little treat here by the end of the week if I ordered it today.

If ten people show up (that’s how many were signed up for this weekend), one order would last for five weeks. Lots more then 10 show up at the West Valley Writer’s Workshop, but there’d still be enough to hand out gift pens there and still supply one or two of the in-town meeting’s participants.

Putting it off for a week will also give time for me to get off my virtual duff and write a plot outline. One of the reasons (one of several reasons) this story has petered out is that I’ve been writing it like topsy, as it grows. Frankly, I have no idea where it’s going.

Well. I know where Ella’s recollected life on Zaitaf goes. But what happens on Varnis, where her currently lived experience is happening, is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. It’s topsy…I do need to cultivate that garden.

And speaking of uncultivated gardens, now I need to return to the client’s magnum opus…

Networking: Time Is Money?

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So…yesterday I schlepped out to Tolleson, a far-flung suburb of shiny new elbow-to-elbow styrofoam-and-stucco housing tracts, to attend a meeting of the West Valley Writer’s Workshop.

This is a pretty good group, as hobbyist groups go, because its members are not all rank amateurs: Gale Leach, Ellen Buikema, Dharma Kelleher, Laura Kirwan, and this amazing guy whose name I don’t recall but who made himself a national name with his personal narrative/science book on the heart-lung transplant he managed to survive — all of these redoutable people and then some are very bright and competent writers with skills at a professional level.

This makes for an unusual writer’s group; normally these little clubs are full of people who have no clue what they’re doing, telling other people who do not know what they’re doing what they should do.

I haven’t attended for several months, because — truth to tell — I’ve developed such an aversion to driving in the Valley’s homicidal traffic that I haven’t been able to force myself to make the traipse. It’s an hour’s drive each way, unless you’re willing to drive on the freeway, in which case the drive (one-way) is 40 minutes. But I will no longer drive on the I-10, period: it’s just too damn dangerous. That highway is utterly unpatrolled. The only time you see a cop down there is when he’s cleaning up a wreck. Of which there are a-plenty. I’ve been cruising across that freeway at 80 mph and had people pass me like I was going 45. And half the drivers around here are either yapping on the phone or intoxicated on booze or drugs. Or stupidity: one could come to believe stupidity is itself an intoxicant.

The surface streets aren’t much better: on the way out there yesterday, I missed a wreck by about eight feet. But a crash at 40 miles an hour is a helluva lot more survivable than a crash at 80 miles an hour.

BUT…. But one of my current clients was a direct referral from Gale. This is a guy who did not even blink at my present per-word rate…something for which I was exceptionally grateful when the China Trade collapsed around my ears. I now have two book authors as clients, each of whom is paying enough to keep baby in shoes for awhile. So I figure I should trick out a flyer (done!), print out about 40 of  ’em (done!), staple my business cards to the things (done!), and schlep them over there today to hand out to the eager wannabe writer masses.

Bob, the passionately dedicated guy who runs the thing, has no objection to shameless marketing, so when I arrive, I put a flyer at each seat along the assembled desks. This is good. I guess. Maybe.

But…except…but…

Yeah, but none of the usual suspects are there! Well, except for Bob, who emcees. Not only are none of the named talents present, neither are any of the other budding but highly creditable lights!

In their absence, this get-together devolves into a meeting of a more typical wannabe writer’s club: a lot of folks who have no idea what they’re doing advising other people who have no idea about what to do.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m too cynical? Okay, get this: one guy wanted to know how he could copyright his name, lest someone steal his by-line!

No. I kid you not. That was not a joke.

These meetings go on for three hours: noon to 3:00 p.m. Along about 1:30, I begin to wonder if there’s some way I can slip out unnoticed. Not a chance, of course. There’s not even a bathroom break that I could use to claim I have appendicitis and must away to the emergency room.

Finally, a little early (ten minutes to three), the meeting breaks up, and I fly out the door. Speaking of the which, it takes a full hour door-to-door to get back to the Funny Farm.

Was traipsing across the city to hand out 15 or 20 flyers worth the time and effort? Highly dubious. If you figure my hourly rate at right around $60 — which I think is about right — schlepping out there, sitting around, and schlepping back home cost me three hundred dollars! While it was indeed lovely to meet new people and excellent to see the redoubtable Bob in action again, I very much doubt that the five hours sunk into this effort will return that much in earnings.

What Planet Am I On?

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Surely this isn’t Earth. 😀

So after the computer spent three days in the shop and it took another half-day to fix the mess that sojourn made of DropBox, I was way, way behind on the indexing project. Let the client know it’s gonna be late and then set to work frantically trying to catch up.

After a fashion. First things first, though: in the chore-a-day department, yesterday was dust-the-furniture day. In theory, the plan was also to oil the furniture, something that hasn’t been done in many a moon. Some of the pieces were looking pretty parched.

Was feeling guilty yesterday about suggesting the cleaning lady was less than perfectly bright just because she twisted the vacuum cleaner extension cord like a licorice whip. That was before I discovered the greasy rings in the middle of the living-room’s leather chair, where she put something oily down. Probably, I figure, a can or bottle of some furniture polish she dragged in. Whatever, it wrecked the chair’s seat, thankyouverymuch.

Not that the chair and the sofa were in what you might call pristine condition. The leather was dried out and tired, as was the leather on the much better quality chair in the family room, a piece that came from Crate & Barrel. That one was not just dry and tired, it had been scratched up by several dogs and scraped by somebody whapping it against something. Probably a previously unnoticed moving-man attack.

In the freshly cleaned-out and organized garage cupboard, I found a bottle of orange oil, and in the hall closet, a container of mink oil. I’d heard, shortly after I’d bought it, that mink oil is not all that great for reviving tired leather. But not having anything else…

It seems to have worked well: moistened up the parched, dried-out areas and darkened the leather enough to sorta hide the grease rings. Didn’t get rid of them, but made them less noticeable. It really helped on the family-room chair, though: completely hid all the Charley scratches, all the Ruby scratches, and all the Cassie scratches, as well as any number of other nicks, dings, and gouges. That chair looks practically new. The living-room sofa and chair just look…a lot better.

This was quite a job. Then I had on the list to oil the casework. What a difference it makes to massage a decent oil into a Thos. Moser or a Stickley piece! Wow!

My mother’s furniture — two bureau drawers, a dressing table, and a small desk from the late 1950s in what was then the Danish modern style — have a sort of golden finish on them with some kind of shellac over it. Oiling it makes it look prettier but does little, as far as I can tell, for the wood. But the Thos. Moser chairs certainly seemed to like it.

Contemplating those old 1950s pieces, I recalled that the finish is rubbed off the front edge of my mother’s dressing table, where she sat to apply her make-up every day. Literally every day: she wouldn’t go out of the house without being fully made up. I figured if we came back to the States in 1957, when she bought that furniture, and she lived to 1976, then she used that table for 19 years. That means she sat in front of it to paint her face 6,764 times!

Give or take. Some days she probably applied fresh makeup before going out for dinner or some such thing. And the last three months or so of her life, she was too sick to do much else than lay in the bed and die.

Oh well. Don’t smoke, folks!

One of the cleaning lady’s most endearing traits is a passionate sense of orderliness. This woman loves for things to stand in straight lines, just…so. When she puts your tschotskes back on a table or a mantelpiece, she puts them in a tidy, straight row, exactly the same distance apart — as though she measured their positions with a tape measure.

I, on the other hand, prefer to organize things aysmmetrically. So whenever I dust the mantel, I reorganize her meticulous layout to fit my disorderly taste:

{chortle!} Does that or does that not look better?

These chores added up to a bit of a project. So I didn’t get much paying work done.

Come the dawn, I had to sit down with the half-forgotten index and start up the process again. So I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked, hoping to get through about 50 pages of the page proofs. Got almost up to my goal, very tired, when BLINK!

The goddamn computer shut down AGAIN!

Jezus Aitch Keerist! I couldn’t believe it.

It came back up, surprisingly. But of course, the file it brought up was not complete: it had lost upwards of an hour’s worth of work.

So I call AppleCare and get, for the first time in recorded history, a truly unhelpful Apple Support tech. He wanted to get me into iCloud to fool around, but I couldn’t find a password that worked, so he wanted me to change my password. And his instructions did not work. He finally hung up in frustration, about 30 seconds before I was about to do so.

So now I’m in despair, figuring I’m going to have to do all that brain-banging BORING work over again.

Start fiddling around, and lo! Somehow the more recent version of the file pops up!

It’s a miracle. The thing has actually lost nothing.

Nor should it have: Word on the MacBook is set to save every five minutes (in anticipation of just this sort of contingency…), and so there was no reason (in theory) that it should have lost an hour’s worth of data.

Another burst of labor indexed 150 pages, about halfway through the book. At that rate, I should finish the draft of this index in about three days, and then be able to send it off to the client the middle of next week. Not on time, but not so very late.

Then I can start on the next book.

 

Paypal: STAY AWAY from Paypal!

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Wow, what a freaking nightmare with PayPal! Naturally they choose to dump on me while I’m sick as a dog with the flu and can barely find my way to the bathroom, much less figure out how to deal with the mess they’ve created. Truly, I thought for awhile I was going to have to close The Copyeditor’s Desk down, because Paypal seems to have effectively made it impossible for my clients in China to pay. And…around 85% to 90% of my editorial work comes from Chinese academics and scientists.

Look: there are alternatives to Paypal. I’ll explain what they are in a minute. But first, get a load of this tale…

So the Kid and I had a Paypal account that originally had both our credit union accounts linked to it. Because she’s techie and is married to a tech professional, she set it up. So, the admin on account showed as her. This was fine. When I signed in they thought I was her, and…so it goes.

Then one day she got a phishing email that looked alarmingly persuasive. Fortunately, before acting on it, she contacted me and asked if I thought it was real. I said I thought it was a scam. Couple hours later her husband (then fiancé) sees the thing and has a shit-fit. He believes it’s an aggressive attempt to hack in and tells her to remove her bank account from PayPal. This, she does forthwith.

So, now when her clients pay her, I have to download their payment into my checking account and then snail-mail her a check in the correct amount. This is a mild nuisance, but not that big a deal. I keep the PayPal account open because I don’t know of any other way for my Chinese (and Indian, and German, and Japanese…) customers to remit payment to me. In the civilized world, they don’t have backward instruments like checking accounts.

Welp, a few months ago, the Kid had an idea I wish I’d had when I was her age…or maybe half her age. She decided that instead of getting the PhD one of these days, she should go back and get a second master’s degree: a professional degree in a field capable of providing her a decently paying job. The university where she works offers free graduate-school tuition as a perk for full-time faculty, which she happens to be.

Well of course it’s a brilliant idea. She is now fully engaged in this project — she wants to become a psychological counselor, which is perfect for her given her experience, personality, and interests.

Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago, Paypal sends us a notice to the effect that we must jump through a new set of hoops, and if we don’t they will discontinue our account. She suggests — exactly what I was thinking myself — that we should close down that account and then open a new one with only my name on it, thereby getting the thing and whatever hacking risks appertain thereunto out of her hair.

So that is what we do.

I set up a new account, and it looks like it’s going to work. Forthwith I bill a client, who forthwith sends money. And….I am told I cannot have the money.

WTF? Upon inquiry, I am told the customer must state that they’ve received the product to release the payment to me.

Huh? This is a new one on me. No such rule applied to the other account.

Okay…. I contact the client and tell her she needs to go back in to PayPal and acknowledge she received the job and accepts it. She attempts to do this, but it doesn’t work. We cannot dislodge her payment. The option to state that you received the thing you’re buying disappears.

Back to PayPal: The customer disservice rep is amazingly unhelpful, even hostile. I say I sell a service, not a product, and so there’s no way the client can prove she or he has received an object. Well, I’m told, then the person has to testify that they received a service. Ms. Disservice pastes some boilerplate instructions, copied from PP’s website, into the chat window, screwyouverymuch.

At this point I begin to realize that if PayPal will not forward payment from this client, it won’t forward payment from any of my clients. This means fuckin’ Paypal is about to put me out of business!

By now, I’m good and sick with the cold or flu or whatever it is and am in no condition to tear my hair.

That notwithstanding, I look into things and find there are several alternatives.

Probably the best short-term solution — and the easiest for me — is to have the client in China wire payment direct from their bank account to mine.

Except I don’t have a bank account. I have a credit union account. And my credit union is too small to qualify for a SWIFT number. You have to have a SWIFT number to receive money by wire from overseas.

Ducky.

So I traipse down to the midtown Bank of America and open a new business account. This of course requires hoop-jump after hoop-jump after hoop-jump. It’s quite a time-consuming exercise, made all the more difficult by the facts that my ears are so stuffed up I can’t hear and my nose is so stuffed up I can’t breathe and not being able to breathe means I can barely think. But finally all this gets done and I come away with fistfuls of paperwork and…and…

Yes…and now I have to explain to a passel of rocket-powered Chinese scientists that they must physically go to their local bank in China and, following a complicated set of steps replete with a complicated wad of numbers, wire the money to my bank account here. Charming. Won’t they just love that!

First off, I describe to the client whose payment I’ve just made Paypal return how to go about wiring the money to me. She becomes confused and, not understanding what on earth all this could possibly be about, simply re-sends payment through fuckin’ Paypal.

Ohhkay. Now I have to refund her payment a second time. When all I want to do is be sure they actually have sent her money back to her so I can CLOSE the damn Paypal account. Then I have to re-issue — again — a statement with the complicated instructions for how to remit payment by wire.

Will I get paid by the four clients who owe me money? I do not know. The Chinese government, in response to our asinine President’s stupid trade policies, has slapped a limit of $500/month on the amount its citizens can wire to the U.S. So if a client has a kid in college here in the U.S. to whom she’s sending money regularly — which is very likely with high-voltage academics — then she probably won’t be able to wire money to me. In any event, it will create a hassle for them: instead of clicking a few buttons on a computer, they will have to traipse to their bank and jump through a set of hoops there.

Will it put me out of business? Remains to be seen. So far no one has said they won’t do this. But…heh…I haven’t asked everyone.

Y’know, I’ve seen the endless litany of consumer complaints about Paypal. So can’t say I didn’t know they could turn on you. But up until now, all my experiences have been simple, straightforward, and clean. There’s a number you can call and reach a human being, which I did. She seemed to understand the issue, and she agreed to fix the problem. And then she did…nothing. No action was forthcoming from PayPal. Chatline people hang up on you when you repeat, for the 87 gerjillionth time, that you do not sell a product, you sell a service and your client has already certified that she received the service.

Clearly, Paypal is in business to hold onto people’s money. The longer they can keep a payment due to a customer in their coffers, the longer they can collect interest on those funds. Consider: if ten customers each have $100 in their various little accounts, that’s a thousand dollars. A hundred customers with $100 embargoed for whatever half-assed excuse Paypal can imagine would give them $10,000 with which to crank interest. A thousand such customers would provide $100,000, which would generate a substantial amount of interest. In Q4 2018, Paypal had 267 million accounts. So you can see the potential.

Paypal has persuaded US regulators and legislators that it’s not a bank, allowing it to get away with a whole slew of questionable shenanigans like this. And therein lies the reason you should NEVER do business with PayPal. PayPal is not your friend.

So how do you get your microbusiness or small business paid?

There are several alternatives. One is Stripe, a platform that allows you to accept a wide variety of credit cards at a very reasonable price. It’s active in Asia, Europe, and other venues. Stripe is extremely cool: it will issue an invoice to your client containing a link they can click on to charge up payment, easy as breathing. This would be my choice. Problem is, getting it up and running requires some very serious programming skills. They will advise, when you speak to a rep, that you should hire a developer. Okay. First, good luck finding such a person. Second, to hire someone to set this up would cost approximately the full amount of money that resides in The Copyeditor’s Desk’s checking account.

Another is Square, the one that allows a seller to swipe your card on a cute little doodad attached to a cell phone or an iPad. I do have a friend who knows how to work Square and probably can be bamboozled into helping install it. And I do have an iPad. But…oh, there’s always that damn but, isn’t there? But my iPad is very old and I very much doubt that current hardware and software will work with it. And once again: we’re looking at another wheelbarrow-load of techno-hassle that I do not especially welcome. Especially not when my head already hurts.

Transferwise allows you to make international money transfers for a reasonable fee, cheaper than Paypal. You do have to make a money transfer, which can be problematic in some circumstances.

If you don’t mind paying $25 a month, is said to be an effective platform for small businesses. It allows you to make transactions over a variety platforms, including ApplePay, PayPal, and several credit cards.

Intuit has a tool that integrates with Quickbooks and lets you accept ACH transfers. It also provides invoices and a Pay Now button for your website.

Western Union operates in most countries worldwide.

And you can arrange an international bank-to-bank wire transfer. To accomplish this, your client will need to have access to a bank that does wire transfers, and will need your name and address, your bank’s name, your bank account number, and your bank’s SWIFT number.

So, we’re going to try the wire transfer method. It remains to be seen whether this will work. If it doesn’t, two options remain: one is to try Square. The other is to close the business down.

Cold, Colds, and SNOW IN SCOTTSDALE

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Credit: Scottsdale Parks & Recreation

It is passing crisp here in Sunny Arizona. Yesterday it snowed in Scottsdale — a lot. And in Fountain Hills. Forty inches fell in Flagstaff, richly needed. That much snow in the high country will go a long way toward breaking the decades-long drought. KJG posted a slew of photos and videos of The Fireman and the Greyhound in the white fields of Payson…wow! VickyC and I are supposed to go up there in another ten days or so…hope it’s calmed down a bit by then.

It has been a shade on the chill side here in lovely uptown Phoenix and, as soon as the clouds clear, it’ll be bloody cold. It’s only supposed to get into the mid-30s tonight, but you may be sure that when there’s no clouds to hold the ground temps in, we’ll get a fine hard frost.

Meanwhile, it has rained and rained and rained and rained in our part of town. Two full days and nights of pouring rain, and then light sprinkles off and on (mostly on) all day today. Took Ruby the Corgi for a doggy-walk in it this morning…beside herself with corgi joy. Something there is about drizzling rain and soggy grass that a Welsh shepherd dog loves! 😀

Finished one of the Chinese engineering papers. Another awaits. Uploaded the stuff I’d finished to the Latina journal, but my system is running SO slow on Cox that a passel of errors occurred. When I have a chance, I’ll have to upload each and every goddamn paper in two iterations to the journal’s editor, by email. One email message at a time. Won’t SHE be thrilled.

What looked like a hacking attempt — with evidence that someone had access to my bank account — turned out to be User Error. How, exactly, escapes me: apparently when I sent the monthly e-payment to Cox, the system decided to pay the credit union, not the phone company. You couldn’t have persuaded me that it was even possible to set up a payment that way, much less that I would have introduced such a bizarre error into a routine transaction that I repeat month after month after mind-numbing month. Oh well.

Meanwhile, PayPal is shafting me and I haven’t even started to do business with them. They refuse to give me the money my client deposited to the new account I had to create. So it looks like I’m just going to have to write off a hundred bucks and change.

Charged today’s client considerably more than that for a considerably more difficult paper, and asked him to hold payment until I could figure out another way to remit money from China. There’s always Western Union, of course, but they’ll probably charge as much as my bill to the guy. There is, however, a service called Stripe, revealed to me by our wonderful Web guru, Grayson Bell. Transaction costs are modest — $2.90, which for a hefty bill will work out to less than PayPal’s gouge. Grayson has been pleased with it. This outfit will generate an invoice for you containing a link that the client can click to pay the bill, via a variety of credit cards. And they do operate in Asia.

So tomorrow’s first project of the day will be to open an account there and try to make that work.

To make everything perfect, I picked up a cold at Young Dr. Kildare’s office. (True, the scenery was worth it…and he did something that somehow made the back pain almost disappear. What, I do not understand, but since he enjoys lots of back pain himself, I suspect it’s something chiropractic that he’s learned on the black market…). I’m pretty sure it’s not the flu — so far no very noticeable fever. But Helle’s Belles.

I do everything I can to avoid colds or flu, because my body does NOT throw off those viruses the way normal people do. This is why I refuse to take Communion and quietly practice all sorts of other avoidance gymnastics that you would think radically neurotic if you know what I was up to. The last time I had a cold — no, not the flu, just a mild cold — the cough hung miserably and exhaustingly on for SIX MONTHS! The last time I had a real, verifiable case of the flu, I developed a depressive episode that went on for three months. La Maya picked up a real, full-out case of the flu at her doctor’s office, from front office staff who were sitting there sniffling and snorking while they were handing people paperwork and pens. Doesn’t that piss you off, when people do that? So she is one sick chickadee just now.

Corgis, however, are immune…

 

 

 

Rain, Cold, and…A Cold???

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El Niño has arrived, bringing with it a large, wet weather system: inches of rain in the desert and feet of snow in the high country. This is good, since the region has been enjoying a decades-long drought. A whole LOT of rain is in order.

SDXB had planned to drive into town from lovely Sun City but changed his mind upon peering out the window into the gloom. His decision was clinched when I remarked that I may have a cold. But am not sure. I’ve thought it was the usual allergies — pollen-laden plants are starting to grow, what with the rain we’ve already had this winter. That was why I was camped out at the Albertson’s yesterday, trying to extract a dozen Sudafed pills from the pharmacists. I’d already discovered that a Claritin just about disappeared the runny nose and the scratchy throat, indicating the issue was more allergic than viral. Today we’ll find out how true that is, since I just dropped half of a Sudafed. Much more than that and I’ll be awake for the rest of the year…but if the issue is actually an allergy, a small amount of pseudoephedrine will send it packing.

It is unusually cold here. Enough so that, for the first time in many years, windshields on cars left outside overnight are icing up.

A-n-n-n-d lest you think I exaggerate about Arizona’s legions of driving morons….

No kidding. One of them hopped in his car and charged off down the road, surprised and confused because he couldn’t see through his iced-up windshield. NOT surprisingly, he ran into a traffic-control box and put out all the stoplights for a mile or two around him.

It is impossible to exaggerate the number of morons who infest Arizona’s fine roads. 😀

So at any rate, with SDXB out of my hair today, the next 12 or 15 hours are cleared for work. We’re almost done with the Latina feminist journal — everything is finished except for one long article I farmed out to our new intern, who promises to turn the thing around soon. It’s a long and complicated thing, but I’ve already given it a read. I’ll merge her edits with mine, which will allow me to spot any changes she’s made that are different from mine, collate them, and come up with clean copy. Then it’s off to the editors with that magnum opus!

Two new works of Chinese science came in, both by urban infrastructure engineers. The articles are strangely interesting — the one in hand has to do with the dynamics of plumbing water all the way to the top of a tall high-rise, problem-free. Both are written in fairly dense Chinglish. To the natural difficulty of the subject matter, this feature adds the authors’ wrestling match with the weirdness of an alien language. And make no mistake about it: English is a weird language!

One of the Latina scholars has written an extraordinary story whose quality and interest are so high that, IMHO, she should be proposing a version (of the literary nonfiction variety) to The New Yorker. Most academics are not, when you come right down to it, very good writers. But this lady? She can write her way out of a paper bag. I intend to suggest to our editor that she encourage the woman to send a proposal to that august magazine and also to The Atlantic. Editors at either one, I suspect, would fall all over themselves to get a version of this story written in the mode of John McPhee. Which, we might add, this writer is fully capable of producing.

Ruby is lobbying for food. A clap of thunder rolled through. We must have food to soothe our doggy nerves. Water is falling out of the sky. We must mark that with food. We got wet running outside in the rain. We must dry off with food. The Human says we are a good and a cute and a wonderful dog. Clearly that must be celebrated with food.

Hm. Here’s some spam from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. This particular amusing website was the only market that sold the Racy Books we put out through the now defunct Camptown Races Press. It far outpaced Amazon. Occasionally, it even broke even. You have to pay to get your books up there. You’re certainly not likely to make a profit (unless you know a lot of somethings I don’t know). But if an ego trip is what you’re after (which, far as I can tell, is what most self-publishing authors ultimately come away with), there it is.

Speaking of authors…{sigh}…I suppose I’m going to be reduced to actually working, by way of making a few of them publishable.