If You're a Press's Managing Editor, Be Glad You Didn't Receive This Email

It's not often that I go off like this, but rarely are rancid pieces of meat dropped in my lap by publishers that should know better.

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Letting you know that I'm about 60 percent through the text, then it's tackling the notes, which will be largely rewritten top to bottom, using whatever resources I can get to. I didn't know that that would be expected of me going into the project -- or more specifically that you'd be doing it if I didn't. That's not your job, or shouldn't be. When the production transmittal said to leave the book alone, I can largely do that with the running text, as it's interesting and well-written, as long as one overlooks this writer's apparent lack of vocabulary for introducing quotes. I'm changing some of that. And it still needed a thorough technical copyedit/scrubbing.

If it were me, and it's not, I'd tell [the copyeditor/typesetter originally signed up for this project] that this job is being sent to someone else for typesetting. She shouldn't be able to pick and choose what aspects of the job are easiest for her. If she bitches about any of my copyediting decisions, she can go straight to hell.

And I'm going to say in my notes to you that most of my publishers, from talking with those acquiring editors to whom I have access, would immediately send back to the author a manuscript that had these kinds of notes to do their own fucking job, or their contract would be void. It's not up to the press to make the book complete; according to style, yes, but filling in a million blanks, no. These notes are a total fucking embarrassment, prepared with the least amount of effort required, and anyone associated with [insert well-known university here] presenting this as sufficient work ought to be hanging their head in shame. I'd love to be one of [her] students and shove this unedited manuscript back in her face. It's a fucking travesty.

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?

insomnia

I've been battling this beast for many years, mostly as the result of a longtime prescription given to me by a doctor who should have known better. Whatever beneficial effects it had for me also seemed to have turned off for a long time the switch in my brain to indicate sleep. At one point, it was five days without a wink: in New York City. We were staying with a friend in a 1.5-room fifth floor walkup on Madison and 82nd in mid-February. The apartment had no real walls so I couldn't really get any privacy even to read, and it was too cold to walk to Washington Square and back, and I'd have felt perfectly safe doing so. But dying of hypothermia is one of my few fears (death itself is not one of them), and I didn't really want to risk it. And I was kinda lazy. But it was the kind of wakefulness like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockword Orange with revulsion therapy. My eyes seemed propped open.

A good thing is that, over time, I've learned or trained myself not to ruminate. I don't lie awake thinking about the mess I've made of my life, or why I didn't ever allow myself to learn to waterski, or what bills remain unpaid, or the debts I owe to an alphabet soup of governmental agencies and financial institutions. I lay mostly in silence, although in the last year I've added Nichiren Buddhist chanting to the mix. Music, darkness, heavy food intake don't help. Nam Yoho Rengo Kyo has passed a lot of hours.

I just went to Sheetz for a footlong meatball sandwich, at 4am, hoping some gut loading would do the trick. Occasionally it does, but tonight I'm not so sure. Antihistamines, even industrial amounts of prescription medications don't often help much.

Side note: one of my readers once inquired where you get a meatball hero at 4 a.m. I explained that when you live within 2 miles of a decent interstate exchange anywhere in the South, you can get just about anything you please. Don't even get me started on Buc-ees, the closest of which is about 240 miles NW of here. As the billboard says, "If you know, you know."

The reports say that insomniacs underestimate the amount they sleep, and that's probably true. But most of my nights, to the extent I sleep at all, it's never a deep sleep, and the only reason I know I've been asleep is that I'll remember fragments of a dream. But still wake up tired. And if I feel like I've only gotten 1.5 hours of sleep and it's really 2.5, well, that ain't helping.

And once 6am hits, forget it, and it's getting perilously close to that now. My options are to take another pill, hope it helps, and maybe my mascot won't wake me too much to cater to her every need. They don't call it "hounding" for nothing.

Used to be, in my younger days, I'd just stay awake all night working. Don't even care to do that anymore, and unfortunately or not, I don't have the four-foot-high stacks of paper to plow through that I used to. They provided some sense of security, anxiety, and something to do all the same time. 

And everyone else whose name is Land, at least those I'll lay claim to, sleeps like a charm. Mi esposa can get her eight hours in, and then a few more during the day, maybe a few times a day. This isn't necessarily a good thing at all, given the overall picture, but it does make for some jealously on my part. And there's nothing like watching a basset sleep. Completely given in to pure bliss.

I used to tell a friend that sleep was the highest one could get, which perhaps explains my pursuit of it.  His question, a reasonable one: If you're asleep how would you know? But one fascinating experience with lucid dreaming a few weeks ago convinced me that, in the right moment, sleep could be quite damn exhilarating.

I also used to say that my lack of sleep make up for my excess of it between the ages of 16 and 25. But that karma's been paid back, in spades, many years ago.

I'd love to check into a sleep clinic and just stare at the monitoring people for eight hours.

And I've asked my doctor, whatever happened to sedatives or barbiturates? I guess those are just for the hospitalized these days. I've wished for such action before, with horrid results. But now that I need them, insurance do not allow for it (credit to S. Q. Liquor). 

Anyway, time to determine the next step. I do have a relatively quick book on crosses to get through, and if it wasn't accompanied by one of the most twisted style guides I've ever received, the job might even be easy.

A basic rule: Whenever clients say a project should be easy, most of the time they are lying, I hope unintentionally.

Signing off, if not exactly out.

Response to a Copyediting Query from a Previously Slowing-Down Client

Hi.

If the "better" refers to the cleanup of my iPhone-generated headshots, anything is an improvement over the basic material. They're great.

There's a lot going on in this m/s, which seems to be a diary from 1900, with a lot of formatting to clean up and recipes, which are always a pain in the patootie as far as consistency-making, even when trying to adhere to the original. The end also seems to have placeholders for art, which ideally you or I could strip out before or while editing, as they only get it the way. I could always insert "art goes here." The saving grace is that I'd assume the text should stay untouched as much as possible, although I'd query inconsistencies. 

Since we're moving into a new era with the press, I'd love it if we could use Word's Comments feature instead of in-text queries [QY: like this] as the comments are easily deleted if that's what you and the authors want to do and have very limited possibility of mangling the text, unlike going into the words and deleting that way. Comments are very easy to deal with -- and much faster -- once getting the hang of them, which should only take a few moments of practice. We can do a test run if needed, but I do think they'd make things easier for everyone, except for maybe Kerry, whose typist only creates more work for everyone. Those jobs would take half the time if she (I presume it's a she) didn't use auto lists for what ends up being half his copy.

Anyway, because of all the extenuating circumstances (formatting, recipes, dealing with copy not to be edited [which does create issues of its own]), $5/page * 290 pages = $1450.

And an FYI, if I've not mentioned: I'm dealing with upcoming major surgery, which could take place as early as March 14 in Charlotte (!), if all goes according to (my) plan. Anthem has different ideas, and only the deity knows what his or her plans are, so everything's up in the air and causing ridiculous stress on my end. My primary and valued clients need to know about this. I'm expecting three or four days hospitalized, and thankfully recovery would involve sitting around and not doing much except reading, which is how I spend my days anyway, and getting paid for it. I'd also be bringing a manuscript with me to the hospital, presuming they'd leave me alone long enough to read it. (Right now, it's scheduled to be a book about Joseph Smith and his golden plates, which should be a romp.)

Anyway, keep me posted. Seems like these beach books are usually a go, and early March might be a good time for me to fit this in.

Thanks, K—. The thought of the press cranking up is a great, great thing for me -- and for you too, I presume.

Excelsior,

Bob

As the Late-Night Talk Show Hosts Say, "And We're Back."

My pal at one of my publishers said I seemed like a happier person when I was posting to my blog. (I didn't bother to mention the details in which my life's gone to hell since then.) I'm going to attempt again to do so, but it'll be repurposing my daily emails. All will be scrubbed for personal items and, maybe, too-personal revelations, so apologies for any duplication my readers may encounter. But my voluminous email output, since I eschew social media, are my running diary and journal; God only knows if my longsuffering esposa ever happened upon my email and text messages she'd be horrified, and since she only remembers what happens in the present as long as it involves her resentments against me, she'd have plenty of fodder to keep her mind occupied, when she's not chatting with catfishing randos in Egypt. That was yesterday's joy. 

So, reinstallment one of an attempt to keep my vast readership of maybe half-a-dozen—on a good day—forthwith. You get what you pay for.

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[In reference to a job offer] Sign me up.

I'm scheduled for surgery on March 14, but Anthem Healthkeepers is fucking me over in astoundingly creative and infuriating ways, so I doubt that date's gonna hold, if it takes place at all, at least with my preferred provider. All Anthem cares about is that my "ventral hernia repair with possible component separation" is done in Virginia, even if that means it's done by a team of snake handlers, barbers, and meth freaks with switchblades and their filed-down vampire teeth, as long as they are in-network. 
But if by some divine intervention (your most unexpected words, given that "it's all fiction") it takes place, I am motivated to have the decks cleared by March 12, since I have to make my way down to Charlotte by myself on March 13 and am horrified to find out that Greyhound doesn't deliver. I guess the days are over when they'll take you anywhere. I was hoping for some interesting adventure. So it'll be a one-way plane ticket arranged by my elder issue, since online booking of air travel might as well be trying to negotiate a Sanskrit-to-Koine-Greek translation for me. Last time I tried to book a plane flight online I think I bought six round-trip tickets, only two of which were necessary. I wrote the other ones off as probably taking too much time and effort to unravel them.

My early March is kinda thin right now anyway, and a 150-page scriptural index shouldn't present much of a problem.  If there's any way you can unearth it from your designer in late February so that I can get it in by the end of the month and not wait 66 days for payment I'd be most appreciative, but I understand if not.

Hope all's well with you. I sure could use me some Bagel Bitch right now. Some of mi esposa's friends claim to be coming up from Atlanta in mid-March for an early prebirthday visit with her, and her Christmas-celebrating Jewish friend will be bringing deli, but it ain't the same. I eagerly await our move to northern Virginia, which may take place sometime this year, when I'll be only 4.5 hours from real NYC bagels and a decent slice of thin and greasy pizza. First stop, though: Dorothy Day's gravesite on Staten Island, at Our Lady of Perpetual Sadomasochism convent, or whatever it's called. Funny if you look it up on Wikipedia. Notables buried there are St. Dorothy-in-waiting and a passel of Staten Island mobsters, which is par for the course. Ah, home.

So, these emails, for as long as I keep it up, will be written with an unidentified third-party reader in the background -- and since you and maybe my other managing editor pal and my brother are the only ones who ever seemed to read the damn thing, I guess you'll find a few things new. But I might post everything, inshallah.

Peace and love,
bl

Haven't Been Here in a While

In the words of Warren Zevon in his own version of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "I don't wanna talk about it." I will say that things are a whole lot different now than they were just prior to my 59th birthday, the dateline of the prior post. Yow.

The hands-down best part of the changes is that I recently became a first-time grandfather, so wonderful things do happen. Our son and daughter-in-law have decided that once our granddaughter has a recognizable face, she will also have no social media presence. They won't be posting pictures for public viewing, and I'm sure it'll be a long time before their child does. And my kids are not Luddites by any means, DIL included. Nor do they particularly put themselves out there, at least via the only medium that I very, very occasionally access: the much-dreaded Rat's Nest; both sons have abandoned it, and our daughter-in-law might post twice or thrice a year. I think they do Instagram stuff, but I don't really know (or know what that is) nor do I care. All three can stare into their phones for hours with the best of them, although the new parents now have a better way to spend their time.

And no photo of my most brilliant and beautiful granddaughter will appear here, because it wouldn't last long anyway. Scroll down a little and you'll see that Blogger has scrubbed the picture of the mascot and me, for godsake. I'm not sure which of us triggered the facial recognition bots. Google years ago wiped out from this blog the photo of the czarina and me with John Cale . . . and also wiped out, at least on my side, the same photo as an attachment to an email to an author in Israel, for whom I was writing an index. Thankfully the author did receive the email and the photo deletion didn't until occur until sometime down the line. But it still makes you go hmmm, as some long-forgotten sort-of comic would say.

Just got through the leanest month in the modern history of LandonDemand. September's already looking better, which isn't saying much, unless folks bail on me. It's happened before. Or something is moved to next season. Or a well-known university press gets a job back three weeks early—a true sign of my lack of stuff to do—but the Holy Grail known as the Purchase Order Number has not yet been assigned. And I start what becomes a string of worldwide emails to get one. I mean, talk about no good deed goes unpunished.

On the other hand, with this same press, I once filed an invoice on Thursday morning and was paid late that afternoon, direct depozick [sic]. So I can't really complain.

I just realized that the insomnia I've been battling for much of this year could have been spent right here. Anyone out there reading this is very, very lucky that I've not happened upon that notion before now. I've been unleashing the word horde (thanks, Wm. S. Burroughs) upon any poor soul who'll stand still long enough. (See paragraph 1.)

And no more comments. Sorry. The spammers are getting past the meager defense that Blogger provides. I'm always available via landondemand@gmail.com, often too much so. Write me, especially if I don't know you.

The Never-Ending Episode

Nothing wrong with the book, but you can piece together the like quotes and understand that this project has been on my mind way too long -- an index scheduled before the partial indexing ban was instituted, although I'll likely take indexes from this publisher as long as they offer them because there's just something to be said about being nice in this world:

Francis Harper and Arthur Leeds’s archival research in Philadelphia coupled with that conducted in London by Francis Pennell and Professor Ernest Earnest of Temple University during the course of Pennell’s literary and biographical research had identified Bartramian manuscripts and copies that had received little previous study.

Let it also be known that the headmaster of my rightfully much-maligned high school had the name of William Magavern Williams. And he graduated Williams College.

To Be a Christian in Much of the United States

Means that you must take this statement as scientific proof that the Noahic flood occurred right on time about 6,000 years ago. If that ain't your thinking, better get you to Amazon and find you a set of fireproof britches:

The great Apalachian Mountains, which run from York [Hudson] River back of these Colonies to the Bay of Mexico, show in many Places near the highest Parts of them, Strata Sea Shells, in some Places the marks of them are in the solid Rocks. ’Tis certainly the Wreck of a World we live on! We have Specimens of those Sea shell Rocks broken off near the Tops of those Mountains, brought and deposited in our Library [the Library Company of Philadelphia] as Curiosities. If you have not seen the like, I'll send you a Piece.

—Benj. Franklin

We All Look Alike, Too

A light moment amid a bit of a crisis. My dear wife is in the ICU with double pneumonia and sepsis. A young woman comes in today to take her breakfast and lunch orders for the next day. She looks at the three of us and says, "Where are you from?"

Our very good friend sitting with us is from Greenville, TN. Certainly in summer 1954, when he was born, it was pretty much country, and our friend can tell you tales for hours about it and makes a living at doing exactly that. My wife, three months older, is from Montgomery, AL, and Atlanta, GA. You don't get more southern than these two. The Virginia/Tennessee state line is the farthest north my wife has ever lived.

But hospital girl heard my voice, and that was all it took.

"Well, I've lived in the South for more than 40 years, but I grew up in New York and that'll never go away."

Her response: "I met people from Maryland once. They were mean."

Yeah, Maryland. Boy, what Yankees they are—that slave state during the War of Northern Aggression. That far-off land that happens to share a border with Virginia. For all I know, though, except for the part of Bristol over the state line (the hospital is in Tennessee, god help us), the young woman may never have ventured any deeper into the Commonwealth.

Back when mi esposa and I were dating, we were visiting my homeplace: the Mississippi of the Northeast. My father was a car dealer, and one time we needed to board a flight to return to Atlanta but my father was pressed for time to get us to the airport. Since I grew up on Staten Island, we'd fly out of Newark, NJ. My father corraled one of the young porters or mechanics to give us a ride--about 15 minutes. The young man averred that it was his first time off Staten Island. At the time, and still, I find that hard to believe, but after living in this part of the world for the last 19 years, it's far more plausible than it used to be.

American Education and Publishing: Some Things Never Change

“It is lamentable that many of our children,” he wrote, “leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket.”

And later from the same volume:

"One editor warned would-be poets that there was 'postage to pay, paper to waste, and patience to weary' with the piles of submissions he received" (emphasis added).

Technology Update

It's a twisted string of events, but I am now the owner of two smartphones, desiring two fewer. At least this latest one has the benefit of providing me telephone and internet service, something the former model seemed to find troublesome more often than not.

Six Steps to Enjoying Your Editorial Work Environment

1. For a variety of reasons, have the thermostat set at 57 degrees through about four or five winters in one's home.

2. Develop Reynaud's Syndrome, so that the longer digits on one's right hand turn a deathly, pasty, waxy white while sitting in one's office, which is surrounded on three sides by brick and drafty ninety-year-old windows, with no insulation above and garage below.

3. Go into hock to get the damn heat pump replaced.

4. Turn thermostat to 68 degrees.

5. Puzzle through about half an hour of not knowing how to respond to the climate change without weeping.

6. Get over it, and get back to the production line. Too bad the line is suffering temporary difficulties because the current project is a complete nightmare.

Editorial Headhunting: How Not to Do It . . . and a Statement on Our Times

Years ago, I landed on an editorial headhunters' list. I have no idea how. A few times a year, I receive an email wondering if I know anyone who would qualify for a particular position. 

1. That person is never me.
2. The jobs are always on-site, none of them within 300 miles of the Land on Demand Intergalactic HQ.

Today I received the following email. The rampant editorial errors usually don't appear in these emails, as another person at this firm usually sends them to me.

But ponder this: 80K, with no health insurance.

+++

I hope all is well with you and best wishes for the holiday season.

I wanted to check with you regarding a position I'm recruiting for at the B2B training company Acme Education.  Acme Education provides how-to training to thousands of healthcare and scientific professionals nationwide.  The company needs a provien editorial leader to manage an existing group of editors and devleop and maximize the value and usability of Acme Education content.

The mission of the Managing Editor will be to assist AE's profiessional audence to be more successful and profitable by breaking down complex and confusing government, legal and regulatory requirements.  Then, with the hlp of industry experts, present the information in an easy-to-use, understandable format.

The ideal candidate has experience not just writing content, but producing how-to, usable information.  You'll be expected to stay at the forefront of government reguilatory changes,  manage a productive editorial team, and have the ability to identify and develop new products.

The compensation for this position is up to $80K salary contingent on past history.  No 401(K)).  No health benefits.

The full job description can be found on our site.

If you know anyone who would be a good candidate please let me know or have him or her contact me.

Thanks very much--I'm grateful for your help.

Best,

Today I Give Thanks

For a client that admittedly has given me some fits in the past. It's a university with a crucial piece of punctuation named after it.

How nice of them to think that I could copyedit a book of Sanskrit linguistics. And how nice of them, after I saw their feedback on my sample chapter, to thank me for telling them that this one was way out of my wheelhouse, and please find someone else to do it.

Fifty-eight years old and admitting limitations. Damn, what a concept.

The Tubez, the News, the Blues

The suggestion has come forth that if I'm not finding enjoyment on the Internet, it's my own damn fault. Well, one way or another, everything in my life is my own damn fault, so I guess I can own up to it.

I grew up with five newspapers under my arm: New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and the Staten Island (NY) Advance. News and sports junkie from early on, and I learned a lot about music from the Voice and a little about life from reading its personals columns, back in the pre-AIDS days. Each publication served its purpose.

So that's my frame for entertainment or information of the visual variety. But now . . .

* The news is intolerable.
* Moving slowly down the sports food chain as far as major markets as I've aged, I've lost all interest in keeping up with sports, and it's been that way for about 20 years (accompanied by a lifetime aversion to college athletics). Bobby Thompson and I went from Staten Island to Bristol. Eventually he made it back to New York.
* Musically, I don't keep up either. Silence is preferred. Most of what I listen to, when I listen, are ad-free albums on YouTube that suit my need for background sound that's not white noise. No lyrics. And I'm finding that I no longer want to hear a lot of the music I grew up on. Just so tired of it.
* Other entertainment? If there's a hint of violence or tension, I really don't want to be there.

[We have Amazon Alexa in the house. My main request for her is, "Alexa, white noise." That, and the occasional multiplication problem when I'm not close enough to a calculator.]

On the other hand, I was at a local bakery that occasionally has live music. It usually is awful. You can't imagine that every song played by a bluegrass band sounds like "I'll Fly Away." (I've got a rant-worthy history with that tune. Someday.) But last week, the bakery had a very good bluegrass band with a delightful selection of songs (except for America, "Horse with No Name." "The heat was hot"?). One was Norman Blake's "Ginseng Sullivan," an old favorite that I'd not heard in a long time. Upon hearing that, I dropped a $2 bill in the jar.

Then I went home and listened to the original version. The result? Catharsis. The salty taste of lost youth. And now I can't get the song out of my head, but far worse songs have held that position. But the ear bug, or whatever it's called, is heavy laden.

The suggestion has also come forth that there's something wrong with me. Good lord, has there ever been a doubt?

Gotta get to work. Signed an NDA, so no specifics. Yet.

Where's That 3D Printer When I Need It?

Because I'd like to take this author's attitude, copy it, and embed it in the mind of all the authors out there who think they know what belongs in an index, all the evidence to the contrary.

I'd also like to send him flowers, even though the first line of his email scared the living hell out of me.

+++++

Hi Bob,

I hired you because I figured you know how to do an index. The last one I did took too much time.

So I am just going with the index you produced.

Scott

New Blog Approach

It’s what you might call multipurposing of related content. Scholars do it all the time. If I had a dollar every time I saw an author with a virtually identically titled article published the same year in a different journal, and it was a book chapter somewhere else and a presentation at a conference, I’d be able to make the next payment on my Lamborghini.

And this way, I’m sorta always on topic. Unless I need to throw down for an hour on the therapist’s couch.

I gotta buncha killer emails to India to post. Good lord. Being that angry all morning, from the time your eyes have barely cleared, is no fun.

Reminded of a line from Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, as I often am. The players had been asked to report for batting practice at 10am in advance of a 12:30pm start because of a nationally televised game. One of the players said, “Ten o’clock? I'm not even done throwing up by then.”

+++

By the way, on this note from your email—and not apropos to this project—

Endnotes no longer need to be provided as separate document as InDesign has a new feature available in its latest edition of the platform.

First, that’s great news. Second, one day I’d like to sit down with all the designers and typesetters and managing editors I work with and say, “OK, Just what the hell can InDesign do?” Because, as far as I know, all my folks use InDesign but they all tell me different things. And I don’t know what designers are doing on their ends that I should probably be doing, or what I’m doing that I don’t need to be doing (such as HTML coding if InDesign can pick up a bulleted list). 

I’ve heard different things for years about notes and lists and tables and style sheets (thank you, [name of press here]) and so much else. There’s one press I work for, and the designer absolutely refuses to learn how to do style sheets. They’re in InDesign, of course, right? You match up the style sheet in Word with the style sheet in InDesign and voila? The jobs are basically novels and memoirs, very little formatting, and my life would be so much easier if I could just use style sheets—which very, very few presses use, I’m sorry to say. The two times I tried style sheets, he wrote the publisher like the world was going to end. I tried to explain it to him up front. He was agreeable. Then no way. Not gonna do it. 

I've Been in a Mood

I'd say it started about two weeks ago. The czarina had gone off to Atlanta to stay with friends in their recently rebuilt home in what used to be a fear zone close to downtown. When our friend moved there 25 years ago, Domino's wouldn't deliver. Now, it's great. The czarina left essentially to lay eyes on our older son, who was there to be in a wedding of some people he'd met while acting. We hadn't seen him since, uh, July, and before that it was way back in, uh, June. Yeah, well, whatever. 

A hurricane was moving through Atlanta, so the wedding was moved across the street. It was supposed to be where the czarina and I were hitched, oddly enough. Our son was going to be a groosman at the same place. They still dressed there, and the restaurant, now under a different name, had at least one Thornton Dial on the wall, as well as some other cool stuff. Mitchell had everyone talking about the art.

I was here in Bristol, baby, with the shedding menagerie. My father's eighty-fifth birthday would have been the seventh of the month; my work game has been off; the electronic gig had backed up two weeks of work into about four days, on top of the usual Lucy and the chocolates; mid-October was coming; eating, sleeping, basic maintenance, all shot to hell . . . I'm down to 177, and the last time I saw that, I was on my way to 145. Couple years after my mother died. "Lotta ins and outs. Lotta what-have-yous."

So—how much you getting paid for this?—I just sent off an index for a book to a company that has certainly in some way affected your life in a significant way (this readership's life) with ramifications, published by a university you know, by some coeditors who are or were the equivalent of C-suite gentlemen in this particular field. "Not exactly lightweights," judging from their bios. 

I'm feeling a little better having accomplished something, and I guess I was feeling my oats. This was after asking the receiver of the invoice if I could send and he could process speedy delivery. I've never worked with the guy or any of these people before, except the press, which won't be involved until I send the index to them author-approved.

Nine hours after the fact, I'm rereading the email I sent them. I guess it's professional enough. The letter is verbatim from Gmail. I love it because I can use it again and again. Absolutely generic, except I did take out the name of the university. It's somewhere east of the Mississippi, I'm pretty certain.

A peek behind the curtain. The underlying tone is, "I really hope you leave this thing alone." I'm almost scared to send off an index anymore. It's also coming up on the one-year anniversary of that experience. I'm not sure I ever addressed that incident in this space. Lordy. Pathetic. Talk about some horseshit scholarship. 

+++

Hi, all. First, thanks again for your patience, and apologies for the earlier bait-and-switch.

I've attached the index manuscript as well as a marked-up PDF noting some things I saw along the way. You've probably already caught most of these issues while reviewing the page proofs.

From looking at your distinguished bios, I'm guessing y'all have been to this rodeo before, but a few notes:

* Multiauthor books present a challenge in that different chapters, especially if they've been printed elsewhere before, might refer to the same concepts using slightly different language. I've tried to consolidate different terminology here, so please keep an eye out for where I may have misinterpreted. I've also presented a lot of cross-references but may have missed opportunities for additional ones. Feel free to add.

* Another challenge with this type of book is avoiding the rabbit hole of trying to present data in the index in addition to the conceptual items. Of course, with an index, a guide to the book's data is not desired. The index would become unwieldy very quickly, and it's also against standard indexing practices, as XXUP's guidelines aver.

* If you want to make or handle any changes on your side, please do so, although track the changes so that I can see what you've done, to ensure that the index still adheres to standard protocols.

The deadline for the press is Monday, 10/23. Hopefully you'll find the index to your liking and any back-and-forth will be brief (although, of course, the index needs to satisfy the authors, within reasonable constraints). I do have a few very minor queries in the index. If you could address to those, I'd appreciate it. They may result in no changes at all.

If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks for an interesting read.

When Catastrophic Risk Seems Like a Good Alternative

Gray matter’s getting a little frayed here. I just sent this to a UK-based managing editor. The bolded phrase is the book's topic:

Got it. Thanks, J—. No promises, but you might have this back well in advance of the deadline. I’ve been dealing with some absolutely brutal indexing jobs from a variety of sources, and I need something to calm my nerves. And when living in a country in which mastering catastrophic risk seems like another way of saying, “waking up in the morning,” I wouldn’t mind feeling like something’s—anything’s—in control.

Happy Birthday to Me

Well, I turn 57 years old today, and given the physical events of the last few days, I think my best bet for not waking up dead in the morning is to stay up all night reading an easy book on a difficult subject.

"Why is this night different from all other nights?" It's somewhere near Passover, right?

(Looks like even the rats' nest is hedging its bets. Zuckerberg hasn't posted greetings on my timeline yet. Maybe he still thinks I'm dead from some Facebook glitch last year.)

I recall an interview with Annie Liebovitz (no relation, that I know of [Land was changed from Liebovitz back in the '40s]) in which the photographer gave one-word answers to every question. My favorite:

"What do you like least about your family?"

"Passover."

Many of my fellow tribespeople can likely relate.

I remember Passover every year on the 23rd floor of my maternal grandparents' apartment building on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn -- greatest view ever, overlooking the lights of every neighborhood in Brooklyn with the Manhattan skyline as a backdrop (although the view from the other side of the building was the entrance to New York harbor; not too shabby either). You'd get out of the elevator, and the odors of Jewfood lured you down the hallway.

We'd begin the seder with my 4-foot-11 great-grandfather chanting and davening in the old style. Family would pay attention for about 10 minutes. Then the kids got involved hiding the matzoh and asking the Four Questions, and my two great aunts would start in on the bickering. They despised each other: my grandfather's spinster sister and her other brother's wife. About the latter came one of the great putdowns I've heard and remember to this day: "Your aunt was blind as a bat, but she could spot a flaw in a diamond a mile away." About the former, she had an opinion on everything, offered loudly and with a voice that the word "raspy" doesn't begin to cover. And my poor little Grandpa Isaac, trying his best to maintain decorum.

Passover was hell. Not exactly a culinarily enticing holiday, either. All I wanted was a hunk of pizza, or to go to Nathan's -- about a mile walk.

Sooner or later, this blog might return to the editorial world. Maybe. In the meantime, I'm pretty darn certain this was the building:

And if you've ever seen the bizarre and horrific Requiem for a Dream, I'm also pretty certain that some of the street scenes were filmed on or very near this block -- although much of this part of Brooklyn was, or is, pretty interchangeable with whatever's on the next street.

Good times? Hell, not really. Although, speaking of childhood, I came to a strange epiphany last night that relates to a much earlier part of my life: my next Basset hound will be named Rosebud.

I mean . . . just in case I do indeed wake up dead and anyone tries to make any sense of . . . anything.