RANT Deliverance! (with apologies to Cornel West)

Oh, the twisted road of word processing.

When I began working as an editor in 1984, only one person out of about 15 or so in my employer's curriculum and examinations department had their own computer. That person, still among my dearest friends, was writing one of the primary moneymaking textbooks for the company, so he rated the special treatment. The rest of us, as far as I remember, either typed or handwrote whatever we were working on and passed it off to the recently rebranded "administrative assistant" to key in the text on an IBM Selectric with an OCR ball so that the product could then be sent along to the data processing department for scanning. And they later became "information processing." The dark days.

Eventually we received our own computers, which were put to best use with the introduction around 1985/6 of interoffice email, which was great for running football pools and writing song lyrics for our house band, including the prophetic "Working at Home," which an enlightened manager allowed his writers and editors to do in the mid-1980s, thus these lyrics, 34 years before COVID:

We're all working at home.
Don't call us on the telephone.
You don't deserve us, so don't disturb us,
While we're working at home. (Paisan/Czar)

That's 1986, folks. Talk about prophesy deliverance (!).

When word processing truly hit, we worked in Lotus AmiPro, and I was still laboring in that program as of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have some invoices from back then I can't access because it's kinda hard to find AmiPro-to-Word conversion software. I guess it existed at some point.

Then came the glorious Word 2003. I still receive files from publishers that have been created in that program. With the updates that came down the pike, it did everything I needed it to do, and I could find all the commands easily. Anyone who thinks Apple/Mac products are intuitive have a different neurological operating system than I do. When mi esposa hands me one of her infernal devices to figure out, I just want to throw up (my hands).

Word 2007 was hardly a step forward. They took all the functionality of Word 2003 with updates and placed it where it didn't belong. So for years I toggled between the two programs as circumstances required.

Everything was fine until sometime in the mid-2010s, when one of my favorite authors, an Aussie who found this blog back before Google developed its ever-evolving algorithms and has used me ever since, roped me into editing the papers and related materials for a conference he was heading up on, I believe, the digital humanities -- the first time that conference was ever held in the southern hemisphere. He was very proud, and should have been. However, it turned into one of the most hellish projects I've ever worked on.

I ended up receiving manuscripts from all over the world, many written by nonnative-English authors, which was bad enough. But because about half of these folks were leading-edge technophiles I also started receiving emails giving me shit for requiring that manuscripts be written in Word. That I didn't use Linux or some other noncommercial program branded me as a Luddite worthy of all the derision they could heap on me. And they did.

My Aussie pal had entrusted much of the project management to one of his colleagues, who was too busy running the conference, so that task also fell to me—as did things like properly positioning art within the Word documents, a job that I'd never even attempted. It was hell times four, at least. My requested rate skyrocketed, though, but no amount of money could have made it worth it, especially given . . . 

That because I was dealing with so many different sources of input, I had my first experience with Office 365, or whatever Microsoft was calling their online suite at the time. So I had to download  this program onto a new laptop I'd purchased in case my old one ever failed. That was after the three days of updates required when I first plugged the machine in, since I'd never even opened the box. To date, in 25 years of freelancing, I'm on just my third computer, as far as I recall.

So, here I am, dealing with a worldwide collection of goddamn malcontents on a laptop with word processing software with which I'm unfamiliar, doing tasks I've never attempted. I finally got the grasp of the whole thing by the time my work was wrapping up. 

My next move, naturally, was to uninstall Office 365, hoping to never see it again.

Big mistake.

Bill Gates might be out to save the world, but his small type ruined my life. Buried in the agreement to install Office 365 was that if it was ever uninstalled, said uninstallation would take with it all updates to previous versions of Word. I could almost handle dealing with an unadulterated Word 2007, for which updates could still be had. But being left with a virgin version of Word 2003, when they'd stopped supporting the product a year or two earlier? That realization caused a pit in my stomach that could very well have been one of the proximate causes of my guts exploding sometime in May 2020: a perforated colon (a semicolon in my vernacular), emergency surgery (positive for COVID on the operating table, which later turned out to be false; no doubt a joy for the surgeons), four months with an ostomy bag, and now a gut with multiple large hernias requiring very complicated surgery to get me looking at all normal again. (Surgery pending, but that's another battle and a major rant.) Imagine the moguls on a freestyle ski slope, and you'll have an idea of what my midsection looks like -- on top of a rather emaciated 152-pound frame. And I struggle to keep that weight.

Fast-forward to March 2021, as my life is crumbling on a number of different fronts (although there are the occasional joys over the years, such as sons marrying wonderful women and the onset of grandparenthood). Because I'd been using laptops for years, I'd also been using external keyboards, for both the size of the keys and the number keypad to the right. I've also never used a touchpad. Ever, ever, ever. First thing I do is find out how to disable the fucking thing.

Late March 2021, the keyboard functionality fails, somehow also on the external keyboard, which my laptop will no longer recognize. Story of my life, along with many family members being medical mysteries (unfortunately my medical history is rather obvious) . . . even the Geek Squad is baffled. They asked, "Have you tried an external keyboard?" I'm sure the obvious Do you think I'm a goddamn idiot came through in my voice. They pushed as many buttons as they could and did whatever their geekdom could pull out, but no keyboard response. At least my data was still accessible, not that I need 95 percent of it. After my publishers get my work, I could delete it from my system and no one would care.

So, cheapskate that I am, I wander over to the laptop aisle at Best Buy and purchase the second-cheapest laptop on the shelf, figuring that I do no gaming, I'm not making any videos, I'm not streaming porn. My computer usage is entirely limited to word processing, email, internet searches for work, and YouTube. The greatest gift I've ever received was for Father's Day about four years ago when my sons signed me up with YouTube Premium, which I'd never do on my own. I told them to keep that up and they never needed to buy me another Father's Day present. We've all held to that agreement. All for the music, and plenty that's not available on any other streaming service.

Also, idiot that I am, I didn't realize that I was purchasing a glorified tablet. No storage space for software and certainly not for my 20 years of unnecessary work files. So while I'm still with the external keyboard and an old TV monitor for my screen, which I don't mind at all, I'm thrown into the world of external hard drives and, later, cloud storage. Am I done yet? By no means.

I did buy an external hard drive about 15 years ago, but of course would do backups about once every six years. The only thing worthwhile on there is a bunch of my wife's old recipes, from the days when she could still negotiate a Mac computer. So I had that. A friend who's worked for Oracle for decades sent me a solid state drive that he was no longer using that I now use as my primary storage, which was great until it no longer would recognize my new rig. A six-dollar cable from Amazon fixed that problem. (As he says, "Trust the Buddha and buy good cables.") Then I had to figure out, a state that  comes and goes, how to back that up to my old external hard drive. 

And then comes a new client a month ago that insists that everything be backed up to the cloud, a place I'd never been. Why I all of a sudden wanted to listen to a new client about something they'd have no way to verify is a mystery to me, except that my client base is shriveling up these days and I want to make folks happy. This whole "Land on Demand" thing was out of control years ago. I aim to please.

So, Google One. My Oracle pal assures me that it's easy with good support. Uh-huh. After installation, nothing seems to be working the way it's supposed to, and I spent two hours computer-chatting with Cynthia or Diane or Elmo or someone, with no resolution. Then they start emailing me asking for my opinion on their support. I let them know I was having many troubles and their chatline was worthless. So what do they ask me for? Not only screenshots, but I'm supposed to capture the movements in progress of what's happening on my screen when I do certain things and send that to them. I can do that about as well as I can touch my right hand to my right elbow. I finally cancelled the subscription, which I'd had for less than 24 hours. I asked them what would happen to the 30GB of files or so I'd uploaded. Could I still access them with my free 15GB that comes with my Google account? Yes, of course, but nothing would be updated.

While I was pondering my next step (Dropbox is far, far more expensive, but at least I'd sort of used it before), Google One fixed itself overnight. All of a sudden, icons I didn't see before were where they should have been the previous day, I can do backups, etc. A few mysteries remain, but I'm still in the game . . . for my new client who's now gone silent on me when I have many questions to be answered on a book of Catholic litcrit. I was told years ago by one of my university presses not to even bother with a medium edit on literary criticism, because the authors usually suck and are resistant to editing. 

Does anything make any sense?

Google Docs: Damn

 Working in a Google Doc now for a national nonprofit.

1. Commenting in auto-notes allowed!

2. For the footnotes, when URL is present, a pop-up appears asking if Google Doc should replace it with the title of the site! Of course, the pop-up is a pain in the ass for my purposes, but damn.

Will AI replace copyeditors and proofreaders? Dunno. Will it replace cockroaches?

Unleashing the Word Horde*

Tired of looking at the old entry, and no time to compose anything coherent. If printed books are dead, no one bothered to tell my publishers.

So, forthwith are posts that I had in waiting. I'm tired of looking at them, too. If they no longer make any sense, well, I've had a few other entries like that as well.

* * *

CreateSpace: Garbage In, Garbage Out

6/2/2012: In full disclosure, I wrote this rather hastily some weeks back. Would someone who actually knows please tell me the story: Does CreateSpace ever typeset copy for a book's pages? Or do they simply print what the author/customer supplies . . . PDF, Word doc, whatever? Is there ever any human contact? Do they provide a good service? I was just ranting here . . . to a degree.


If you're a self-publishing author and you don't know how to format your manuscript properly, your book is going to look like absolute crap when you get it back from Amazon's CreateSpace . . . unless CreateSpace has different levels of service, and one of them actually gives a darn what your book looks like as Amazon taps your bank account.

My two experiences with CreateSpace page proofs show that the folks at CreateSpace set exactly what the customer sent in. Maybe that's all they do. In some circles, that would be called "customer service." In my world, that's called "revenge."

To all self-publishers or ghostwriters working with same: For a very nominal fee, I can clean up a manuscript so that your page proofs will look, well, like a book when it's designed. And I can pretty much guarantee that my charge up front will be a hell of a lot less than what Amazon will charge you for typesetting corrections after the fact -- if they even perform that service.

And it will be worth it. Because unless you know what you're doing, and without that kind of intervention, your labor of love is not going to look like any other book on your shelf -- and I'm not saying that in a good way.

Many writers, frankly, just care about the cover and the spine. Author's name and title and, presto, "I'm an author." But if you care what's between the covers, you really do want it looking as good as possible. You don't want your readers saying -- and I've heard this -- "The book was prepared so sloppily that I put it down."

A self-published book can look as good as any other book in the world. Yes, it can. If you don't know how to make that happen, people can help you.

I'm one of them.

Shameless plug over, but that's what this real estate is all about, folks.

* * *

Two Kinds of Writers

Early in my blogging days, I spoke of Bill Shipp, a man who made his bones in journalism before I learned how to read. When I first worked with him, he had already written for four decades and was a giant of Georgia journalism by any metric. He demanded heavy editing. The rare call I received from him usually dealt with the paucity of my red marks rather than their overuse.

I do some pro bono work for a nonprofit that likes having its work proofed, edited, torn up -- everyone there, except the executive director. She doesn't want a word of hers touched. Doesn't matter if it's a point of grammar. Leave it alone.

--

I returned a manuscript to an author a few weeks ago, and I'll admit -- as I admitted to the author -- that my customer service was not up to par. And I'll state that here, just to be fair to the readership. Mostly dealing with turnaround time and communication. I performed, however, a rather thorough edit.

The author's comments were very nice, including this remark:

Your work on my book was excellent and finding you encourages me to write more and more and more.

Frankly, I can't think of much higher praise for an editor. That one's a keeper. Even better, the author writes about interesting stuff. Pinch me.

* * *

Special Onetime Offer: Legacy Rates

6/2/2012: I actually never got around to the point I wanted to make here, which would have made the headline make sense. Ah, well. It also leaves a blog post in my head. Dammit.


This post is neither a coupon nor an attempt to gather more clients into the LoD fold, although I never mind doing so. I worked long enough in the insurance industry to understand spreading the risk.

Rather I'm looking at a wholesale overhaul of my rate structure for authors -- not publishers -- based on a number of factors, primarily self-publishing and authors writing in their nonnative language. Nothing against such authors personally, but it makes no sense to charge them anywhere close to the same as the publishers' rates. The work is invariably more difficult, requires far more hand-holding, and takes longer . . . and there's little potential for repeat business, where an easier project down the line makes things even out.

Too, once a writer (I'm thinking of one in particular from years ago) knows an editor is going to clean up a particular editorial issue every time, the writer has no real incentive to understand what the hell the editor is doing and write it correctly to begin with -- even a matter of the simplest English composition.

Imagine 2000 pages of this:

"Why did the dog eat the biscuit," Ed asked?

Not a 2000-page manuscript. But five different novels of about 400 pages each. Don't you think after the first one, where I corrected scores of such constructions, the author might have learned something? (And this author is old enough to know better and of such demographics and background that the author is clearly not a stupid individual.)

When I say "old enough to know better," I'm talking about some of the great divides in U.S. education. This author is old enough to have learned the basics of composition very well. At the time the author grew up, I doubt he could have made it out of third grade composing a sentence such as the one above.

(Too, people of a certain age, regardless of native intelligence and barring some mitigating factors, can read aloud without hesitation. Not universally true with people under 30.)

* * *

Word of the Day, and Other Irritants

6/2/2012: I have a longer list on three small pieces of paper. Time to throw them out.


while at the same time

about 38

both (yeah, "both," thanks to a university press managing editor who scrubbed a manuscript of every single one before sending it to me for copyediting)

very unique

coteaching with another teacher

* * *

[no title]

6/2/2012: I have no idea why I saved this. I think I liked the part of the sentence that appears after the second em dash.

It is interesting to note the rather Pelagian character of this soteriology, emphasizing the centrality of human agency over against the initiation of the divine—particularly salvation by moral emulation—and therefore providing no real sense whatsoever of how the divine actually enables the salvation of the nation beyond merely providing the opportunity.

* * *

A Day in the Bunker

I've referred to it many times before, whether on the blog or in conversation. Here's a day at the LandonDemand Intergalactic Corporate HQ:

By the way, I was raised on this show. I think it showed four times a day in NYC when I was growing up. Things haven't changed much, except now there's only one bed in the adults' bedroom.

* * *

And this added bonus, from fall 2009. 

6/2/2012: I forget if I posted this exchange. I emailed Moi some version of it. I'd forgotten most of it, but the whole thing still makes me shake my head. "Per" is the gender-neutral pronoun that an author used. I employed it here for a while to maintain gender anonymity. In this case, per is a dude. Now, I don't say "per." I just change the person's gender. Or not.


I'm going to take a page from one of the most offensive yet most popular Internet sites, the Drudge Report, and break the news here. Anytime someone tries to put out some dirt on Matt Drudge, he immediately posts the article on his own site, as if to say, "I got nothing to hide." This is another way of saying, "The best defense is a good offense."

Yes, indeedy, folks. Far and away my most bizarre client has given me the heave-ho. I'm not going to get into too many details, to preserve per's anonymity (I am fair, after all) and thus to preserve my own hide.

Let's just say this: Per is a Bible-thumping prophet (like an apocalyptic, see-the-future type) and an America-loathing rabble-rouser. Per foresees the end of America as we know it unless we all come to Christ and change our ways. I can go on and on about per, as I have come to know per over the last year or so, but I will let the slightly edited correspondence speak for itself.

===========

Yes Bob I will send the western union today although I am not going to pay you for re-editing your own work in chapter 26. The other day when you ask me, where did I get this copy from. . . I got it from you. That is the reason why I run everything through you before including it in the manuscript, so the entire manuscript will have to be re-edited because it is my opinion you either farmed it out originally or you did not do such a good job that you have found your own work to be problematic with errors. I know you by now (not using any gifts of foresight) that you are not going to re-edit this entire manuscript again, and do it right at no charge, but in my opinion you should because I have already paid you for it, and even if you did go through it, it is further my opinion you would not go through it with a fine tooth comb, so my only option at this point is to hunt for a new editor and wish you the best. I will send you some money but frankly in my opinion, I have wasted about [dollar figure here] and the manuscript is not ready to go to press. Goodbye Bob.

===========

Isn't this fun? Here's the response I wanted to send. Special blog exclusive.

===========

First, when I asked, "Where did this come from?" I'm certain I was referring to a specific piece of text, not an entire chapter, and how it fit into the surrounding text. I'd need to see the context for the statement.

On to larger matters:

You've received all the tracked versions of every document you've sent me (all of which I've kept), so you've seen exactly what I've done along the way -- no portion at all of which has been farmed out. I don't farm out my work any more than you farm out your prophecies.

You've had no complaint about the work until now. You've had scores of opportunities to say that you didn't think my work was up to snuff and to end our relationship based on the quality of the work you were receiving from me. I've never heard a single word from you along those lines -- even though you claim that you've been rereading and rereading the manuscript. If there were really something seriously wrong, you would have noticed it long before now, and you would have terminated the relationship long ago. You obviously felt comfortable enough with my work to continue to send me regular updates for nine months after editing the original manuscript, and to send me emails asking for advice, which have always been answered. Along the way, you'd mentioned at least twice all the money you'd be sending me once the book came out because you treat well those people who treat you right. Those aren't the actions or words of an author who is unhappy with the editing.

I can guess at any number of reasons you now no longer want me to work for you, but I'm not going to try to get into your head.

Every person who is in publishing full time will tell you that copyediting is part of a process, which includes proofreading as well, and proofreaders often catch what a copyeditor has missed, especially in a manuscript that at this point is being slapped together totally haphazardly, with a sentence here and a sentence there out of context going out for editing. If the manuscript overall is now not reading the way you want it to, it's largely because of the process you've undertaken since last November.

I've been getting emails since last November with documents titled things like, "last change before typesetting" and "one last thing." You can attribute it to [ . . . ] or your desire to have this book be its best, but I've worked with any number of folks who also have issues with [ . . . ] and who want the best for their publication, but who also intuitively understand what it takes to make a publication its best and how to work with an editor to bring that about. Your approach to the text of the book at this point is akin to a dog who keeps digging up a bone and looking for somewhere else to bury it. You just can't leave it alone, and confusion is the inevitable result. If you want to blame me for that, that's your decision. The corrections you've been sending my way have resulted from your claims that you had a better way to say something, or you've been adding new material (election, Michael Jackson, new interactions at churches), or you've been qualifying your experiences in [ . . . ] to make sure you don't land in additional legal trouble. Never have you said, "I didn't like the way you did this. Please review." Never. Not once. And that you kept sending me material clearly showed you thought I was doing something right.

According to your own account, you've gone through photographers, web designers, cover designers, and editors before me -- blaming them for all the problems and their inability to do what you want them to do. I'm now added to the list. Without the gift of foresight, I suspect the pattern will continue with typesetters, proofreaders, indexers, printers, distributors, bookstore owners, publicity people, and so on. When I read in your book that you'd been in 20 car wrecks, 19 of which were not your fault, that about summed it up. And when I read repeatedly in your book about your lack of faith in the United States and the American judicial system, yet when I look online and see that you are constantly in court, asking that very same American judicial system to clear up your problems for you, I see that I've been dealing with a bundle of contradictions all the way along.

You are certainly correct that I would not reedit the manuscript again at no charge. And I'd be wary of vendors who give you rock-bottom rates and claim decades of experience. I don't think you'll ultimately be happy with their work either, or you'll find that they'll start charging you for continually making changes and adjustments (as they should), which will make their original low price end up not so low in the long run.

You say that this book will come out on God's time and according to God's plan; if that's the case, then your dealings with me have just been part of a grander scheme in which you claim to have complete trust. Or maybe it's like the judicial system: it's something you fall back on when it suits your purposes.

I wish you the best of luck with the book.

Bob

Note that this book remains unpublished. June 2, 2012.

*Headline: thanks to William S. Burroughs

Tales of Brave Ulysses and Matters Mystic

The title of the post is for the Paisan, but the post is all about me. I mean, this is a work blog, right? My work blog?

And the point of the blog was originally to serve as a site to hawk my wares. Evidence over time shows that the approach has worked. I’m presently editing a nifty and utterly fascinating book on the history of hypertext. The author came referred to me from an Australian professor who found the blog and me and whose book I worked on a few years back. Now he’s spreading the love around the world to his peers. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Occasionally my readers might not be authors but managing editors who have sent work my way. It’s all good.

Those of you keeping score may remember that I’ve been proofreading since 1974. First for my high school newspaper (perpetual gold-medal winner at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association), and then beginning in 1981 with a now-lengthy series of paying gigs (in addition to and wrapped around editing, etc.). It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that I’ve forgotten more companies that I’ve proofread for than I remember.

The only time in the last 38 years that I’ve not been involved in some way with printing or publishing was during my three-plus years as an English major in college -- time during which I avoided publishing . . . and the classics. Don’t ask why. I can’t say I always make the best or most appropriate decisions.

During those college years, I met a friend with whom I’ve recently reconnected over the last few years. He’s always had one foot firmly planted in matters mystic. In a recent email from him, he warned, “Be careful about what you invite into your life.” I think the point was that if you want a door to open, you’d better be ready to handle whatever’s behind that door. It might be way more than you bargained for.

And a few posts back, I pondered . . . How would I handle it if Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans were to come in over the transom these days? And what if it required a read against the manuscript, which is rarely done anymore? Nine hundred pages of one of the English language’s most unreadable novels . . . that I would have to read under deadline pressure . . . and where mistakes carry consequences.

I thought the 900-page family history that came into my life which I edited, and which I may soon be indexing, was the universe’s little giggle on my behalf.

Be careful what you invite into your life.

Even unknowingly.

I give you a moment from last week’s Land on Demand inbox:

* *

Dear Bob:

[OUR] press is publishing an e-book edition of Ulysses based on [OUR] World Classics print edition. We are going to create this e-book edition by optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of the print book. We need to get it proofread because this kind of technology is, of course, imperfect and we want to avoid the introduction of the kinds of errors one often sees in quickly made e-books.

I am sure I don’t need to tell you that this particular book is going to be a challenge to proofread. Joyce was not a conventional speller or punctuator. There are existing typos and other errors in the book that have to be retained for historical reasons, so this will be a careful check against the original. What you would read are Word files containing the output of the OCR process. Only errors introduced during OCR will be fixed.

Anyway, I thought of you immediately. We should have the files around the 23rd of March and were hoping to have them back a month later. I don’t know exactly how many pages it will be in Word terms, but the print edition is 980 typeset pages.

* *

As an English major, a lifetime proofreader, and one whose business relies on the graces of scholarly presses, I can think of no greater capstone than to be “thought of immediately” when [OUR] Press wants to republish its definitive version of Ulysses in an in-demand format for a new millennium.


Here's lookin' at you, kid.

 

E-Publishing, Journals, Page Citations (or Lack Thereof): Yay or Meh?

Working on a book about Latino/a theology. One of the chapter authors quotes a journal that used to be in printed form, but now publishes only electronically. The citation is author, article title, journal name, and month/year. No page number, but a note from the chapter author indicates that no page number appears because the citation is from an electronic journal.

Hmm.

Different takes:

I suppose that if I'm looking up a quote from a journal article online, then I can just search for the term in the article. Good in theory, but half the time when I search for something on a Web page (using, for example, the "find on this page" feature), the search term doesn't appear. One is at the mercy of any number of things that I don't claim to understand. If I suspect that the search feature is not working properly, then I'll search for "the" or "and," and if the computer tells me "Search term not found," then I know that the search engine for that page is not working properly.

And what if it's not a direct quote, but the author is referring to a concept, though not necessarily by the exact name that the cited author uses? Then how is one to find it electronically among what might be thousands of words?

And why would it be so hard for a electronic book/page designer to put in faux numbers somehow so that a researcher could indeed look on a particular page for a concept? I think some forward-thinking designers do this.

Compared to Gutenberg, we're still pretty early in this e-publishing game. There are some quirks to be ironed out. But as a reader, I'd be a whole lot happier if I saw a citation that read something like:

Jim James, "Latinos/as and the Liberation Motif," Hispanic Theology Journal 4, no. 3 (December 2002): 36.

Yeah, I'd have to locate the issue, but I'd feel a whole lot more confident knowing that -- once I did -- I'd pretty quickly be able to find what I was looking for.