Coffee heat rising

Editing biz

Gangbusters!

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The editing business really is going gangbusters! It’s a drought-and-deluge affair, and just now we’re in the middle of Noah’s Flood. Just moved two academic articles off my desk; we’re about to wrap up the current issue of CLS; another Chinese mathematician is in the wings; two indexes are in the offing; and I’m 10,000 words into an 89,000-word fantasy novel.

These bursts of incoming always get me all excited: if I could get this much work coming in all the time, I could make a living on this business!!!!!

But of course, as a practical matter, over the summer all the academics will go into estivation, not to be heard from until about two weeks before Christmas, at which time they’ll show up with a raft of arcane tomes all needing to be indexed by January 5. The Chinese mathematicians presumably spend the summer calculating, once they get their grad students out of their hair. The grad students flew into a frenzy along about April, pleading to get their dissertations in order by the first week of May.

In between times, nothin’ much is up. And of course, that means in-between times, I’m not earning much.

I’d like to get through 10,000 words a day for my current budding novelist. That would move his magnum opus off my desk in about 10 days, after all is said and done.

But lemme tellya, it ain’t easy. I had a slight head start this morning. It’s now 3:30 p.m., I’ve been working nonstop since 7:00 a.m., and I only just arrived at the 98,863rd word. After I finish lunch/dinner, I’ll easily make today’s goal. But…

If anything urgent comes up, this will have to go on the table till whatever new crisis is dealt with. And there breathes nary a Chinese mathematician who is not in a state of crisis….

But truth to tell, the hardest job is working with the wannabe Great Novelists of the Western World. Whereas reading their copy is infinitely more fun, and whereas (bless’em!) they never burden you with the terrors of APA, Chicago, CSE, AIM, or AMA documentation style, and whereas you do not have to ride herd on the batsh!t things they do with their references, NEVERTHELESS…

You do end up having to teach them how to write.

Most fiction writers, when they hire an “editor,” are really hiring a “developmental editor.” That would be something very like a writing coach. They want someone to show them how to write dialogue. How to build a character, how to wrangle point of view, how to set a scene. Oh hell…what a scene is, for hevvinsake! They are amateur writers, and they crave with all their lively being to become professional writers.

Academics, on the other hand, are professional writers, and about 90% of them are pretty good at what they do. They don’t need coaching on how to write. They need to have their documents regularized to fit their publishers’ endlessly complicated requirements. They need to have their references checked. If they’re native speakers of languages of the World at Large, they need to someone to make their golden words sound like English. Sometimes like American English, sometimes like the Queen’s English.

Writing coaching is more like teaching than like editing. Sort of like teaching graduate students, because generally your client will take the lesson and run with it. About a third of the time, the result is far better than anything you could do and better even than you hope your soaring student will accomplish.

But like teaching, it’s one bitch of a lot of work.

Explaining something that you know — that you know so well it’s second nature — is not easy.

I’m thinking I may give creative-writing clients a free copy of the new book, as a kind of lagniappe. It’s ready now in PDF format; it won’t take much to get it into PoD format. And in a few weeks, I expect Wonder-ebook-Builder will have it in Kindle and ePub format. Why not give it to clients as a kind of textbook?

😀

 

 

 

Live and Learn…

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Honestly, sometimes I think the longer I live, the less I learn! Especially in the editorial bidness. Wouldn’t you think by now I would know that whatever Word can do wrong, it will do wrong?

That’s why we call it Wyrd, the Old English cognate for weird.

So I’m about halfway through an abstruse academic paper. It’s actually a pretty interesting abstruse academic paper, reporting on a study of how multinational corporations revive their besmirched reputations after one hijink or another. In China, for example, Walmart got into the…uhm…dog house after it was found to be selling donkey meat as “pork.” Make that donkey meat enriched with fox meat.

Heeeeee! Well, of course all Hell broke loose when that gem of information got out. The flap that ensued was decidedly not good for business. The authors’ research agenda has to do with identifying and assessing the effectiveness of the strategies vast corporations use to cope with fiascos like this.

About the time I reach page 20 — out of 35 — in comes an email from the lead author. Stop the presses! We have a new version!

Holy sh!t.

Mercifully, there weren’t a lot of changes. But there were enough to require me to go through the entire document and manually enter the desired changes. This was time consuming, but one helluva lot less time-consuming than starting all over from the beginning. An academic paper written in Chinglish generates and unholy number of edits, comments, and queries. I’d already spent a day and a half on the thing.

A typical margin of a typical edited page looks like this…except of course the actual time stamps appear, rather than the time of day that this morning’s fiasco occurred. → → → 

Yes. The fiasco of the day:

Normally I enter changes in a clean file, just as though I were rewriting a piece of my own — in plain old Wyrd, not using Wyrd’s squirrely “track changes” function, a tool that will render your Word file wyrd faster than you can say CRASH! Then to make the edits appear, I use Track Changes > Compare Documents, which takes the one I’m working in, compares it with the original, and creates a third document showing all the changes. This I save to disk as “Edits,” and then I save the one I’ve worked on, which contains marginal comments and queries but does not highlight insertions & deletions, as “Clean” copy. Both clean and edited files then go to the client, who can see the mess in one file and the cleaned-up copy with questions and suggestions in the other.

But, with this new development — go back in and make changes in copy that is already changed and does not show edits — I can’t easily do that. So I take the authors’ edited file — fortunately they’ve highlighted their new changes — and manually enter the new stuff into my edited copy. But because in the file I’m working on I can’t see the changes I’ve already made and therefore have no idea WTF, I do this in a file that shows all my edits. In other words, I’m now using Track Changes > Highlight Changes; Show > insertions & deletions; Show > comments; Show > formatting.

The plan, then, is to complete the project in Track Changes, then save a second file, and “Accept All” edits so as to create the “clean” file.

This works, as it always worked before the day it dawned on me that the “Compare Documents” function is far superior to the “Track Changes” function. I create a clean file, review it, make a couple more changes, and save to disk. Then I go back to the edited version to enter those changes and discover…

goddamnit! ALL THE EDITS ARE DISAPPEARED. It’s as though I’ve hit “accept all changes” in this file, which I decidedly have not. Show > insertions & deletions, Show > comments, and Show > formatting are all turned on.

NOTHING that I do will recover the visible edits I’ve entered!!!!!!!!!

Holy sh!t. This is three days’ worth of work that God DAMNED Wyrd has disappeared for me!!!!!!!

After much thrashing around does nothing to rescue the hours and hours of work, I move to Plan B: Take the file with changes accepted and do a Compare Documents with the authors’ original original file.

Ultimately it worked. But not without a moment or three of utter despair.

Thank God for Wyrd’s “Compare Documents” function. Without it, I’d’ve been sh!t outta luck.

So now I have two more academic papers and a novel in house. The work has been pouring in the door. At least two and possibly three indexes are in the wings, so I’ve got to move forward at a fast clip to get through the stuff that’s already on my desk.

And naturally, every time I turn around here’s another interruption.

This afternoon I’m meeting with my financial manager to discuss what we can do to help crash-proof my savings. That will kill the entire damn afternoon.

He is, IMHO, altogether too blithe about the possibility — IMHO again, the near-certainty — of another major economic crash.

I believe we are going to see the Return of the Bush Recession on steroids, in the not-too-distant future. He feels his firm’s investment strategy will stand strong against another recession. I point out that the last crash resulted in my losing my job at a time when I was too old to get another job, in the loss of almost half my investments, and that if my house hadn’t been paid off, I would have lost my home, too.

And if I was too old to get a job then, nine years later I’m ALTOGETHER too effing old.

So we’re meeting this afternoon, so he can try to persuade me that all will be well while I try to persuade him that Armageddon is right around the corner.

Actually, Armageddon is here. We just haven’t seen what it will do when it comes through the front door. But we will.

Rioting in the Rain, and Assorted Frolics

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Totally whipped! What a week!

Friends over for dinner on Thursday… That turned into something strange. First off, the meat I bought at Costco was SPOILED, something I discovered about an hour before folks were supposed to show up. Fortunately, I’d bought another couple of smaller packages at Safeway, and that product was fine. And equally fortunately, my son came to the party, and he kindly took over the grilling of the burgers. Otherwise I probably would’ve been undone.

Since Thursday is a workday for him, he brought Charley the Golden Retriever over to my house at the lunch hour, so he could come straight here from the office.

CharleyCharley, Cassie the Corgi, and Ruby the (former) Corgi Pup get along swimmingly. There’s never been any problem with these pals.

Now people start to show up for dinner, and of course there’s a great deal of Dog Joy elicited by the arrival of several colorful new humans.

Then my friend Connie arrives…with her dog in tow. This, in theory, should be good. Silver the Weimeraner has been here before and she gets along with the corgis about the same way the retriever gets along with the corgis: no problem.

Cassie-and-verbenaSo this all goes along pretty well…until…

About the time the five of us sit down for dinner, all four dogs start to bark…nonstop. In chorus. Nothing we do interrupts this. I put Cassie in the back room, where her beloved nest resides — this usually is a sure-fire bark-stopper. Not so much, this time. My son puts Charley in the back yard, where he continues to bark frantically. Connie eventually puts Silver in her Jeep, but that doesn’t help because Charley, Cassie, and Ruby keep up the din.

The barkfest is so so loud and so uninterrupted that literally we cannot hold a conversation at the dinner table — because we can’t hear each other talking. NOTHING discourages our doggy friends from holding forth.

I do not know what set off this frenzy…but it pretty much ruined the dinner party.

Oh well.

Saturday I went with five friends down to the State Capitol, there to join the Phoenix sister march to the Women’s March on Washington.

It was awesome! An incredible twenty thousand people showed up! I’ve never seen so many people in one place in my life.

And it was cold. It had rained all day Friday and at 1 in the morning, it was just pouring rain. We got there at nine. A brisk, chilly breeze was blowing, but the clouds were breaking up, so as long as you stood in the sun, it wasn’t too bad. Except we were told to gather on the grassy lawn in front of the Capitol building. Well…that had turned into a swamp. A very COLD swamp. Most people were wearing tennies or fabric hiking boots, and you can be sure their feet got good and wet. I had on a pair of Sanitas, which have inch-thick rubber platform soles. These kept my feet out of the water, but by the time I got home, they were coated in mud all the way up to where the leather last is stitched on.

But as the day went on, the clouds blew away and the morning turned very pleasant.

It was a positive event, very fun and supportive, with many vows to keep on fighting the evil impulses that seem to be overtaking our body politick. We shall see about that. But meanwhile, those women can make a damn hilarious sign. The signs were beyond great.

I don’t have a cell phone and didn’t carry a camera (because I didn’t want to carry a purse) — this being Arizona, the home of the hard-line right wing, I expected trouble and wanted to travel as light as possible. So the upshot of that is I have to rely on friends’ images posted on Facebook. 🙂

This morning was “Switch Sunday,” the one day a month the volunteer choir sings for the 9 a.m. service…meaning we have to show up at 8 a.m. Argh! Five-thirty is just too early to get up on a Sunday morning!!! However… This morning’s dawn was not to be missed:

Glorioski!

Friday, after taking the rotten meat back to Costco, I spent the entire rainy day working on academic copy. And all of Saturday afternoon. And after all of this Sunday afternoon. It’s almost bed-time, and I finally sent the second-to-last of a dozen anthology articles back to the client. {gasp!}

And what should pop up on the e-mail server but…lo! Another assignment from one of the Chinese mathematicians!

I haven’t even looked at the material sent by candidate assistant editors, which has been sitting there for days, weeks, god only knows how long.

Tomorrow. I am beat. I am off to do the ironing and then go to bed.

 

 

 

Crazy-making day…

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editingmessIt’s 12:30 in the freaking afternoon and my wheels are still spinning.

I’d planned not to go to this morning’s meeting of the Scottsdale Bidness Association. It’s a long drive under the best of circumstances, and today it’s raining. Meanwhile, as usual in my drought-and-flood business model, the flood pours in right at Christmastime, the only time of year when I have a lot of social activities that (for a change) keep me busy. These are social activities that I do not want to give up, most certainly not in favor of plodding through eye-glazing academic ponderosity, much of it infested with cant.

So I slept in until 7:30. Then sat down briefly (heh…) to read the email while waiting for the coffee to brew.

At 11:30 I got up to throw out the forgotten coffee, now stone-cold, and bolt down a piece of cheese and a few grapes. While the new coffee brewed, tossed the dogs’ bed throw into the dryer to shake out the fur, loaded the Swiffer with a Costco microfiber rag, dustmopped the floors to pick up another couple days’ worth of dog hair and dust.

Awhile back, I assigned myself the project of machine-shaking out the dog throw and dust-mopping the floors every morning, having discovered that this easy, almost work-free routine keeps the floors clean and holds off the allergies handsomely.

In the process, the puppy got trapped in the garage. Neither dog will bark to be let out of the garage. They just stand there at the door, apparently figuring their mental telepathy will reach you.

In the “brief” interval between 7:30 and 11:30, what was I doing that I missed breakfast and missed even so much as a swig of hot coffee?

Reviewed The Kid’s herculean effort to untangle the worst excuse for an academic paper I’ve seen this side of freshman comp. She has spent hours on this thing (as I have), and this morning she finally threw up her hands. The anthology’s editor — our client — is going to have to send the magnum opus back to the author for a rewrite. What an UNGODLY mess.

But of course, the process of a) CYA and b) explaining to the client what the problem is takes God only knows how long. A long, long time.

The Kid has fired our formatting lady, for reasons that explain why one of our journal’s co-editors had a kitten over the documentation for an entire issue’s worth of scholarly papers. So now we have to hire someone to take up that slack, and damned fast because we’re both about to drown under the deluge of Incoming.

A new Chinese scientist wants his paper Englished. Haven’t even had time to answer his query. That’s next.

I’ve drafted a couple of skills tests for APA, Chicago notes-&-bibliography, and Chicago author-date styles, but it must be said that because it’s been 15 years since I had to actually teach these methods in the classroom, I don’t have an existing set of quizzes or anything I can plagiarize for the purpose. So this morning after trying to figure out the tangle and then trying to explain it to the client, after updating our copy-flow records, after going back & forth with The Kid, after cleaning out the DropBox folders, after… after… after…, I return to the task of trying to make some sense of the skills-testing project.

Along the way I realize about half of these papers are formatted in Wyrd’s newer default — one-inch margins all the way around — rather than with the old default margins — one inch top and bottom, 1.25 inch left and right. Our page rates are predicated on the old default. Is there SOME REASON Microsoft has to fuck with EVERYTHING?????????

That extra quarter-inch reduces the length of a typical 35- to 40-page paper by three to five pages. So we are getting cheated when we base our fees on the length of a page that has Microsoft’s new margins. That means either we have to raise our rates — which, believe me, will not bring us any new work — or about every second or third page has to be reformatted. And I need a tracking table for that task, showing the number of pages per paper with 1.25-inch margins, the number of pages we’ve edited in total, the number of words per paper and in toto and goddamn it. Talk about your fucking pointless time sucks. Why? Because some moron at Microsoft decides it’s fun to mess with the customers’ heads.

The skies darken with my mood.

At length the clouds split open and a freaking waterfall cascades down into the backyard. A lake rises toward the back door.

It doesn’t get high enough to over-run the concrete threshold — the house’s slab rises four, maybe five inches above grade. Thank God. If the foundation had been any lower, I would’ve had water in the house.

The water has now receded — it’s 2:00 in the afternoon, this writing having been interrupted by a lengthy telephone conversation with another client.

In any event, the good thing is…the good thing is…is…there’s GOTTA be a good thing here somewhere, doesn’t there? The GOOD thing is I’m sure as hell glad I didn’t drive to Scottsdale in this rain. Phoenix’s drivers are homicidal under the best of conditions. In the rain, they’re confused homicidal drivers.

And now…I have to get some work done.

 

Overworked & Underpaid

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This morning I sat down to the computer at 7 a.m. (having overslept an hour or two). Edited difficult, convoluted, doctrinaire copy for two and a half hours. Stood up around 8:30, staggered into the kitchen, fed the dogs, tossed a couple pieces of bread into the toaster, bolted them down with a pot of coffee, went back to work.

Many mind-numbing hours later, shipped the edits off to CED’s associate editor for back-up checking and to be passed along to our documentation formatter (AKA the Dray Horse). Received.

AE is, in passing (I sincerely hope), irked with Dray Horse, who is not performing up to par (read: is not producing glow-in-the-dark perfection). She’s talking about canning Dray.

Argh.

I have nothing to say about this, because Dray Horse is her underling, not mine. But Dray does a great deal of dreary work that I do not want to have to do on top of mine own fvcking dreary work. Oh well.

Moving on: Returned to the Augean job of proofreading and formatting 445 pages of book copy — a new iteration, lhudly sing goddamn — running “compare documents” on it and the now-outdated version, and highlighting everything of interest to our e-book formatter. On and on and on and on and…you think reading scholarly research and cant is mind-numbing? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This exercise revealed a number of fairly technical issues blighting the copy formatted for print. Yes. Four. Hundred. and. Forty-five. Pages of supposedly formatted copy. Beat these back, in the process creating several PDF iterations, which themselves revealed a new technicality.

WTF?

Fixed that.

Finished, entered endless data, proofread, and formatted the index. Thrill a minute.

Every time I look at this sh!t, I find something ELSE wrong with it!

What is the answer?

Why…never to look at it again, of course…

Reached that conclusion about 5:15. By then I’d been glued to the computer a good 10 hours nonstop.

Fed the dogs again, whilst considering…

If Dray Horse goes, who is going to do the scutwork? I’ve already quietly tested two potential replacements. Not. A. Chance.

Who in her (or, if especially craven, his) right mind would do this kind of scutwork? Who indeed, for what we can afford to pay? Yea verily, who for any amount of money on this earth?

What would it be like to work for the sheer joy of whatever you do, never worrying about mere money?

If I’d been born 30 years later, I could’ve become a priest. An Episcopal priest. Think of that! Imagine doing good works with your time and by and large not having to worry very much about where your next meal is coming from? Imagine believing you’re doing God’s Work? How beautiful is that, anyway?

Reminder to self: do not do not do not look at the news, online or otherwise.

God help us all. If She’s listening.

And while we’re considering existential questions: why has the wine run out?

I am going to iron the pillowcases and go to bed.

Good night, m’dears.

Ditz

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medusa-500px-vincenzo_gemito_medusa_1911_02
Art Nouveau plaque depicting Medusa…1911, the very year my mother was born. Must be talismanic.

God i hate it when i sit down to the computer and it won’t come on and then i have to fiddle with it to make it work. It’s just another manifestation of the DITZ that is my life.

I am so tired of ditz I could barf. Wonder-Accountant laughs when she reviews my labors, and then she remarks that what I do is the English-major’s answer to bookkeeping. Mind-numbing.

Have spent the last…what? Two weeks? Three weeks, off and on?…reformatting the forthcoming book on writing & publishing.

Formatting a manuscript for print publication is ditz on steroids. I labored and labored and labored and finally got the thing into the template for a 7-x-10-inch paperback. This, because the standard paperback trade-book trim size, about 5.5 x 8.5 inches, produces an ungodly length of 445 pages.

Printing costs for a 445-page paperback are, shall we say, bracing. There is NO effing way I can sell this thing for a profit. So I ordered up a larger template, which yields a mere 316 pages.

Unfortunately, I neglected one small detail before I sent away for that template and before I formatted 77,351 words in the fvcker. I failed to ask the PoD supplier just what he would charge to print  a 7-x-10-inch book.

You wanna talk “ungodly”? Lemme tell you about “ungodly.”

So…after I’d done all the formatting and went to upload the PDF to the PoD guy’s site, that’s when I noticed that the cost of one book, though the larger trim size was more than 100 pages shorter, would pass beyond prohibitive.

The upshot of that was, I realized, that I would have to redo the entire book, again, in the smaller size.

This entails a staggering amount of mind-numbing, brain-banging, head-slamming ditzy layout work, because when you reduce the size you change the page breaks. When you change the page breaks, you change the chapter lengths. When you change the chapter lengths you screw up the opening pages. When you reset the opening pages, you screw up every single page and every goddamn image that comes afterward. When you manage, finally, to get all those things fixed (and it takes hour after hour after hour after hour after hour of horrible ditzy frustrating hateful work to make them right and you have to do quite a lot of it over and over and OVER), when you finally have all those things fixed, then you have to rebuild the table of contents (upon which you stupidly did a custom job) and the index (nine pages of double columns).

Meanwhile, I’d sent the MS over to the e-book formatter, where it was to be converted to Kindle and ePub versions. Pretty quick he starts e-mailing: did you really mean to write?… is this what you intended?… is this an error?…

Wayyyy too many queries are coming over from this guy, whose job is not to proofread. So I get into the file and start reading and realize HOLY SH!T. The thing is swimming in typos and bêtises.

Now I realize I need to go through the entire thing from beginning to end a-fvcking-gain, once I get it poured back into its original 5.5 x 8.5 size and formatted sorta right.

I run Word’s spell-checker on the content, and I fvckin’ cannot believe it. Wyrd finds dozens of errors, many of them very obvious. How the HELL did this stuff get through?

I have no idea. All I know is that I now have to go through 445 pages, after entering Wyrd’s corrects, and proofread line by line by ditzy line, searching out the remaining errors.

There are, it develops, a lot of them. I’ve lost track of how much time it’s taken to plod through this thing.

Meanwhile, mind you: I have paying work. The stupid-stuff has to get done around that.

And I’ll tellya: the stupid-stuff gives me serious pause. If I’m making this many errors in my own golden words, how many errors am I making in my clients’ dross?

I certainly seem to be instilling a lot of stupid mistakes in these blog posts of late. So…it’s reasonable to suspect the same high quality of perfection applies to my customers’ work.

Shee-ut.

All of this fun is on the side, of course.

Just now we have 475 pages of academic educationese flowing in-house. It will take all three of us working full-out to get this thing ready to go to the designer by the deadline, January 15.

As a practical matter, we have about a snowball’s chance. That won’t stop us from trying, though.

This thing is a compendium of contributions from a couple dozen authors. Though (as usual), they’ve been told to use a specific style manual, some have submitted their stuff in APA style, some in Chicago, and some even in (incredibly) MLA. Some, probably, have engaged their own idea of what oughta look nice on the printed page.

Untangling this incredible mess entails…? You got it: DITZ.

Oh, god is it a ditzy job.

I’ve done two of the four articles that came in and could have handled another one today. But we have a whole weekend and two other people working on the damn things, so I thought…what th’hell…I’ll try to make some more progress on the book layout.

Made progress, all right: toward pulling all my hair out.

Sometimes I ask myself why am i doing this? I hate this sh!t.

But then there’s the question of what else would I be doing?

Stocking shelves at WalMart? Yeah: I’d get paid better. Probably put my back out, though.

Walking the dogs? How many hours per day can you walk the dogs?

So far I’ve made no money on this enterprise. But hope springs eternal: with the current project, I’m hoping I can sell my services to continuing ed programs and community colleges to advise similarly deluded souls on how to become Writers with a Capital W. To whatever seminars, classes, and online hoo-ha’s I can wangle, I will bring these books. And thereby I hope, at last, to sell a few of my self-published efforts.

Sounds almost like a viable idea, doesn’t it? We must bear in mind, though, that if an idea is viable, I can kill it with a glance. I’m like Medusa. All the idea has to do is look at my head and it keels over in its tracks.

 Really. I should be spending my son’s patrimony driving around the country in an RV.

Image: I, Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11814743