Quotes Wrap-up

This installment of the bunker’s verbal mix-tape.

Nothing in particular connects these tidbits, except that they attracted my attention enough to stop what I was doing and write “blog” in the margin.

As mentioned in the last installment’s comments, presence of these quotes indicates neither agreement nor disagreement on the part of the blogger.

===

“

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular, you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.

—James M. Barrie

*

We primarily look for good character and integrity; we can train you on the rest.

—Paul Mullen

*

Two-thirds of the mass-energy density of the universe is made up of dark energy, according to our calculations. We don’t know what dark matter is made of, but we know that it makes up the other third of the density of the universe.

—Joseph Silk

*

For Burnet, the Earth of his time was the shattered ruin of a “perfect” pre-flood creation; the oceans were gaping holes and the mountains upturned fragments of the old Edenic crust. He was particularly offended by mountains: “If you look upon a heap of them together they are the greatest examples of confusion that we know in Nature; no tempest or earthquake puts things into more disorder.”

—R. J. Berry

*

When it was rebuilt, Gay Head [Lighthouse] also received a first-order Fresnel lens, the largest size made and containing eighteen hundred prisms. While many East Coast lighthouses stayed lit during World War II, Gay Head was dimmed. As the daughter of the keeper of the nearby Cuttyhunk Lighthouse put it, “They didn’t want to help the Germans that much.”

—Brenda Horrigan

*

Example. An applicant for life insurance and the insurer were both unaware that the proposed insured died before the policy was issued. The contracting parties thus made a mistake of fact because they were mistaken as to the existence of the proposed insured. As a result of a common mistake of fact, the life insurance contract is void.

—Harriett Jones

*

The 2002 Zimbabwe Census found that 48,223 households were headed by children less than 8 years of age.

—Rodreck Mupedziswa and Mildred Mushunje

*

[[index entry]]

Greene, Olive, 58–59

*

As Paula Harrell has pointed out, “missionaries may have hoped to develop interest in Christian ideas as they taught the elements of English, but for most of the Japanese youth who flocked to the mission schools, English functioned more like the Internet, as a gateway to new knowledge, in this case of technical and organizational systems that fuelled the power of modern Western societies. It was a case of dosho imu [同床異夢] (same bed, different dreams).”

—Hamish Ion

*

According to one visitor, “Most of the[se] agents at the Sandwich Islands divide the 24 hours into three parts, Drinking, Gambling and Sleeping.”

—Jennifer Fish Kashay

*

This man is exactly what he seems: uninteresting.

—Pete Wingard

*

Dr. Benjamin developed another habit that was often discussed. Before surgery Dr. Benjamin soaked his best A and E violin strings in oil gaultheria for twenty-four hours; he then soaked the slippery but highly malleable strings in alcohol or an antiseptic solution until just before he was ready to use the strings to stitch tight a wound or close a patient after an operation.

On December 30, 1943, the Courier-Post ran this headline: “Wives of Cooper Unit Doctors Hear Col. German Broadcast on War Task. Recording from Italy relayed by WCAM; Kin Happy to Learn of Model Army Hospital; Mothers of Four Attend.”

—Margaret Kirk

”

Land on Demand in the News

Indirectly. Click titles for links.

1

The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic, a book by Barbara Gannon, is an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Two books co-won this award for 2012, and Barb’s book nabbed the sole honorable mention. From what I hear (from the author and others), this award is given for books that achieve the pinnacle of Civil War scholarship—and a ton of scholarly Civil War books are printed each year. This is quite the honor, and the book is indeed an amazing piece of research. If I’m remembering right, I think I copyedited, proofed, and indexed this one. Barb’s sister, the czarina, and I all used to work together, and I thank Mary for the reference.

Amazon book description: 

In the years after the Civil War, black and white Union soldiers who survived the horrific struggle joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)—the Union army’s largest veterans’ organization. In this thoroughly researched and groundbreaking study, Barbara Gannon chronicles black and white veterans’ efforts to create and sustain the nation’s first interracial organization. 

According to the conventional view, the freedoms and interests of African American veterans were not defended by white Union veterans after the war, despite the shared tradition of sacrifice among both black and white soldiers. In The Won Cause, however, Gannon challenges this scholarship, arguing that although black veterans still suffered under the contemporary racial mores, the GAR honored its black members in many instances and ascribed them a greater equality than previous studies have shown. Using evidence of integrated posts and veterans’ thoughts on their comradeship and the cause, Gannon reveals that white veterans embraced black veterans because their membership in the GAR demonstrated that their wartime suffering created a transcendent bond—comradeship—that overcame even the most pernicious social barrier—race-based separation. By upholding a more inclusive memory of a war fought for liberty as well as union, the GAR’s “Won Cause” challenged the Lost Cause version of Civil War memory.

2

Excellent New York Times book review of Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens.

Great news for a small publisher. BlueBridge Books produces timeless volumes that are meticulously fashioned. I proofread this one. And it’s especially sweet as the Washington Post unnecessarily hammered another excellent BlueBridge book a few years ago.

Amazon book description:

Taking a fresh and original approach to the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth I, this book tells the incredible story of her great passion for gardens, and how the two most powerful men in England during her reign fought a decade-long duel for their queen’s affections by creating lavish gardens for her. It chronicles how, in their quest to woo the queen and outdo each other, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and William Cecil, Baron of Burghley, competed for Elizabeth’s favor by laying out innovative and extravagant pleasure grounds at their palaces for when she came to visit. As she played one off against the other, they created gorgeous palaces and landscapes that amazed the world. The book also describes how others in England and abroad followed Dudley’s and Cecil’s leads and how the queen’s love of plants made gardeners of courtiers, statesmen, and soldiers. This meticulously researched account reveals how Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for horticulture changed the world, encouraging gardeners and designers to create landscapes inspired by the spirit of the Elizabethan garden.

*

A fine week for the LoD client base. Keep up the good work, folks.

Valentine's Day 2012: We Are Mere Guests in This House

Our somewhat spazzy we-think-it's-a-Shiba Inu,

Zooey (pronounced Zo-ee)

and the true alpha male,

the one that people remember long after they've forgotten us,

the beast who has been mostly an outdoor animal for going on sixteen years and is the color of asphalt,

the one whose vocabulary grows and grows,
the bilocator,

my dancing partner:

Elvis

Doubling Down on "The Making of Americans," or Life Imitates Art

Loyal readers will know that I am attempting to read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Reading two pages per night, that leaves me about another 450 days. I'm up to page 26. Only 900 to go. I should have a little counter.

What comes across my desk today? Nine-hundred-page family history.

Yessss.

For GVB and Moi

This song has helped me immensely through today. I think I've listened to it 30 times via the following link. Don't think I've ever made it through a minute watching the video, although I like the one with her playing it in an LA park with Bon Iver, in which you can watch her and a band. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Rough few days, folks. Don't know what's up here lately.
And I don't even like to dance.
Love this, though.


PS: It's not hard to trace the line from there back to the song below. And, yes, if you're keeping score at home, singing in the following video would be Maureen Tucker (lower right), drummer in perhaps (ahem) the most influential rock band in history as well as future Walmart assistant manager, future Tea Party advocate, and future partial inspiration for a Haiku Monday entry:

New Feature (sorta): Quotes Wrap-Up

I used to post the occasional quote I liked from what crossed my work desk. I'm still going to do so, but compile them rather than present them individually — kind of a mix tape from the bunker.

Nothing in particular connects these tidbits, except that they attracted my attention enough at the time to stop what I was doing and write "blog" in the margin.

===

“

O’Shaughnessy claims that even ordinary, everyday seeing of a fork, say, involves seeing the fork as a fork, although he notes that Wittgenstein himself may not have been prepared to go that far.

—Jonathan Ellis and Daniel Guevara

Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

One successful approach to changing cultural norms is to encourage family planning and delayed marriage through the actions of sympathetic soap opera characters.

—Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer

There is nothing so wise as a circle.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

“But Ed’s quite a talker,” he says. “He can talk a dog off a meat wagon.”

—Tom Dunlop

One person might say, “When I look in your eyes, time stands still,” implying a mesmerizing connection between the two people. Another person might rephrase the message and say, “Your face could stop a clock.”

—Barry Brewster and Eileen Dowse

The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.

—Nicholas Kristof

Believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Believe that you might be that light for someone else.

—Kobi Yamada

”

Some Advice for Authors

Four things that do not make you a better author:

1. Roman numerals. I don't think your readers will consider that your book is more worthy or that you are more scholarly if your part and chapter numbers are rendered in letters.

2. Citations in a book that doesn't need them. Don't use your exhaustive library of photocopied articles from scores or hundreds of different sources amassed over the last thirty years to impress your readers. Most of them -- unless you're writing a scholarly/academic volume or in a topic area where such documentation is the norm -- want to understand your thoughts on the subject, not look at the spines on your bookshelf. The point of most books is to educate your audience, not please your peers. [Note: This section updated based on Paisan's insightful comments, in which he brings up a most salient point that I neglected to address in the initial posting.]

3. Heavily formatted manuscripts. In my experience, a direct inverse correlation exists -- 95 percent of the time -- between the quality of your writing and the number of different fonts, colors, images, extra spaces, and instances of centered text present within the file. Very few heavily formatted manuscripts are also well written. When it leaves my desk, not only will your book read differently, but all of the time you've spent formatting it will be for naught. I change everything that's not Times 12-point double-spaced to make it so -- unless you've tried to jam so much text in a table that I have to make it smaller to make sense of it and make it appear on my screen in a usable fashion. Yes, believe it or not, I can make more sense of a manuscript that looks like it came from Microsoft Word as opposed to a nine-year-old playing in Microsoft Paint.

4. Ellipses. When you're quoting from someone else, trust that your readers are smart enough to know that another person's entire thought process did not begin and end with the few words you've cited. Also, don't introduce quotes with ellipses, as if you're building anticipation for the reader. A simple comma works.

Two things that might not make you a better author, but they'll make every editorial or production professional  looking at your work praise you:

1. Leave the design to the designers. Treat your computer like a typewriter with memory, except don't hit the Enter key at the end of every line.

2. Understand that the people working on your book after you are trying to make you look better to your readers. Editors, proofreaders, indexers, designers . . . none of these folks' names appear on the cover of your book. We are not in this for the glory or the royalties or the book tours or being known as published authors. We are not trying to insult you by making changes. Trust me, we'd all love to see perfect manuscripts that don't need a mark on them or any intervention other than putting the book into print. I'd rather be paid the same rate for easier work. Who wouldn't? But if we change something or suggest a change, it's not to gratify ourselves; it's to make your work better. We've done this before, folks. Listen to your editors. This might be the eighth book you've written. Fine. It might be the three hundredth book I've edited, not to mention the next in the thousands of books your publisher has printed. Think about it.

One other note: Pick the appropriate tense and stick with it. Unless you're a really good writer, don't attempt to write a book about past events in the present tense. Very few authors can pull this off successfully in English, although I understand it's easier in German. I just finished an absolutely delightful book in which the author managed to write quite nicely in the historical present tense. It's about as rare as a complete day off.

You can file this advice under "Trying to Turn a Foul Mood into Something Productive." I hope I've succeeded.

A Not Infrequent Albeit Frightening Thought in the Bunker

What do you do when you have no confidence that authors have the capability to answer your queries or follow through on requests for information, such as completing bibliographic entries correctly or unpacking confusing passages?

I might eventually expand on this point, but for now the question stands on its own.

The issue, though, is a common one.

An Oldie but Goodie: Proofreading and MLK Day

Quick story:

I went to college in Atlanta (and stayed for another 17 years), and my first job out of college was proofreading airline timetables and lottery tickets at a printing plant. In 1981 or 1982, MLK Day was not yet a federal holiday, but Georgia had made it a state holiday. The powers-that-be at the plant considered shutting down the plant and offices for the holiday, but the pressmen and compositors -- a pretty redneck bunch, quite frankly -- didn't exactly like the idea. By any means. 

So, in fairness to the competing cultures at the plant, it was put to a vote: do we give folks a day off for MLK Day or Confederate Memorial Day? Yes, you read that right.

Thus it ended up that this nice Jewish boy from New York City, whose forebears didn't see US shores until the late 19th century, received a day off with pay for Confederate Memorial Day. Democracy in action.

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, and My Favorite Proofreading Quote

Nope. I never saw the movie I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. This story concerns your humble correspondent and a particular book, beginning back in the days before book reading made the shift in my life from entertainment to commerce.

As an undergraduate, or maybe just after, I liberated a hardback copy of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans from my college library. I don’t think the library or anyone there misses it.

[Blogger confession: I will admit to liberating more than a few books from this library, a couple of small volumes from an Ivy League library in middle New York state almost 36 years ago, and an unknown number of paperbacks and blank cassette tapes from Staten Island Mall back in 1974. That’s about as far as my teenage waywardness went.]

I cannot remember when or why or what I read about The Making of Americans that made me seek it out. The possibility exists that I found it while wandering around the stacks avoiding work . . . something that I am doing even as I type.

This posting isn’t about the book so much, except to say that I’m going to try to commit myself to read it. All 925 oversized pages of it. Here’s an entirely random excerpt from page 7:

Henry Dehning was a grown man and for his day a rich one when his father died away and left them. Truly he had made everything for himself very different; but it is not as a young man making himself rich that we are now to feel him, he is for us an old grown man telling it all over to his children.

And from page 907:

Very many who were being living are not being living have come to be a dead one. Not every one has come to be one being an old one. Not every one has come to be one being almost an old one. Not every one has come to be a dead one. Some have come to be an old one and have come to be a dead one. Some have come to be almost an old one and have come to be a dead one. Some have not come to be a dead one, they are being living. Some have come to be a dead one.

         Some are not believing that any other one can really be only doing the thing that the other one is doing. Some are not believing that some one can be coming to be doing every other thing than anything some other one would naturally be doing then. Some then come to be old ones. Some then come to be almost old ones. Any one then comes to be one who is going to be almost any old one. Any one is one not being a dead one. Any one is one coming to be an old one. Any one is one being a dead one. Any one is one being such a one. Any one is one coming to be almost an old one.

Much of the last few hundred pages reads like the second excerpt, and I could pluck out examples far denser than this. Whether it’s good or readable is almost beside the point. Consider the stamina and thought and attention to detail, however bizarre, that went into composing this piece. I’m thinking that if someone can write it, I can read it. If I received this from a publisher I would have to read it.

I was trying to figure how long I would give myself on the LandonDemand schedule to read this if it came in over the transom: I settled on five days. Then again, if it was done as in the old days — where this text would have been read against a typewritten copy of the original — I might have gone crazy. Cold read, yes. Against a typewritten copy, and one perhaps marked up at that? Gertrude, pass the hash pipe.

Anyway, for Christmas, our younger son wanted books. That’s all he said. So he received a wide range, mostly classics in one genre or another. I also found online — and while it’s his, I’m going to borrow it for a few years (like my college library, he won’t miss it) — a newer paperback edition of The Making of Americans. The hardback, I fear, is buried in the permafrost of the dungeon, and I hope it turns up whenever spring cleaning hits. Yes, Aunty, the dungeon is as it was last year.

This edition includes a wide mixture of reviews, none exactly positive. My favorite reads, “The first stunningly original disaster of modernism.” I live in a NASCAR town; I guess I’m just looking for a reliable wreck.

But the edition I purchased also includes a foreword and an introduction that give the book some context. I’m much more familiar with this type of academic discourse than I am with early-twentieth-century modernist American literature. I’ve read the foreword, which is mostly about the linguistics of the work, and read only the beginning and end of the introduction, because I don’t want to know too much about the book before endeavoring to tackle it. The end of the introduction is really what this posting is all about.

For all my stating that I never read new books for pleasure — and I don’t — why in the world would I want to read what has been referred to as “one of the great unread novels of all time”?

I give you the end of the introduction, which brought a tear to my eye.

The present text is a facsimile reprint of the original edition. Aside from the addition of a table of contents—combining the chapter titles of the 1925 edition with, in brackets, the 1934 abridged version’s headings for sections originally left untitled—the text is identical with the one that Stein and Toklas proofread during the summer of 1925; hence it is literally authoritative. Typographical errors that escaped their attention—and in a text of this complexity there were bound to be a good many—have not been corrected. (A typical typo is “stregnth,” which has been corrected in the quotation from page 165 cited on page xxiii of the introduction.) In addition, there are a number of passages that appear in the manuscript and typescript but not in the printed version. A fully corrected and edited text would be immensely desirable but is not feasible at present. . . . In the meantime, one must proofread while one reads, taking comfort in an observation Stein attributed to Alice Toklas in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: “I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it can never do” (emphasis added).

My intent is not to proofread my way through this book, dear readers, nor to catch all those things that Stein and Toklas missed. My intent is to pay homage to an incredible effort on a writer's part. I now have the added motivation of giving thanks that someone out there — even a dead one — has enlivened an aspect of my life that has remained unchanged for almost forty years. 

I love you, Alice B. Toklas. And god knows, it ain't for your looks.

The Difference between Copyediting and Proofreading

A publisher I’ve worked with a little bit in the scholarly field has an interesting acquisitions and distribution method that I won’t get into here, but the manuscripts the publisher accepts are often not in great shape. As far as I can tell, the publisher — let’s call it FN Books — agrees to print the book, then sends it out to an editor for whatever is necessary to make the book publishable. That includes formatting the Word document to precise standards, because the Word document is going to serve as the image for the printed volume. I’ve seen some blog postings about this press from the authors’ perspective, and the reports are about 50/50. One of the issues is that some universities won’t consider books that FN Books publishes when assessing professors for promotions, tenure, and so on. It’s not a vanity press, but the business model is unique, and to describe it would give away the company’s identity . . . for those who are familiar with the field. If you’re just dying to know the company, you can email me. I’ve only worked for one author publishing with FN, and I don’t think my experience was that bad  —  mostly because the work was interesting and the author was friendly and entertaining. But I just finished writing an email to the production editor requesting to be taken off of its recommended vendors list.

Two problems:

1. Lot of tire-kicking. I don’t mind some of that from individual authors, but a press that sends me three or four people over a few months with faulty instructions and little knowledge is more trouble than it’s worth. The authors don’t know what they’re looking for, and the back-and-forth is nonproductive for all concerned.

2. The aforementioned faulty instructions. I don’t blame the authors. I blame the press.

The typical query from the author is for a “bid on proofreading a manuscript.” As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, manuscripts are for copyediting, and that’s what most authors have in mind when they say “proofread a manuscript.” The authors want someone to perform quality control: grammar, spelling, sentence structure, consistency. . . . I could rattle off another half-dozen things that authors will say “yes” to if I ask them what exactly they want me to do. I explain that what they want is copyediting.

I told the story a few years ago of a screw-up on my part that led to three hours of midnight panic and a run of semi-hostile phone calls and emails with the author. I point to that as about the only situation I can think of where I actually should have proofread a manuscript. The author is severely dyslexic, but a very good writer, and he wanted not a word or comma changed. I did a standard copyedit. He was looking for the most basic of errors that you’d expect from a seriously dyslexic writer working on a book, and he flipped out when he saw what I did (in retrospect, I didn’t understand the author’s desires. Mea culpa). Hence the emails, the calls, and two hours of me backtracking 95 percent of the changes in the Word document. All’s okay between the author and me now. I hope.

The issue is that FN Books gives its authors the instruction that, to have the book published, someone needs to “proofread the manuscript.” FN then sends the authors off into the ether with a list of recommended editors.

Forthwith, I give you the opening paragraph of a sample chapter that an author sent me a few weeks back, looking for a bid on the work and requesting a sample edit. I feel bad reproducing this excerpt on the blog for fear of embarrassing the author, but I also feel that this text will never be published in the following form. If it is, then shame on everyone concerned.

Strap in, folks.

To begin with Western countries that had a gloomy history with Africa thought approaching the post-colonial continent with cautious but also was tactful, international institution in this case used by the former as a mediator or rather they became an ideal platform for powerful countries to pursue their global agendas. Power always instrumentalised and maintained through discursive practice. A practice that proclaimed the blessings of a new era is globalisation under neo liberal market policies, global governance, and multilateralism and new paradigms were set in thorough out the world using these non-economic base. Some joined some did not others watched but those who joined succumbed to governmentality hence the subjectivity.

After picking my jaw off the dungeon floor, I wrote the author. You can file this correspondence under “Not really wanting the job, so putting in a ridiculous bid for it, knowing that even if the author paid my son’s college tuition for a few years, it probably still wouldn’t be worth the headache” [fledgling editors, take note. And you can use the copy below without crediting me]:

While I’ve worked on a number of academic books about African resources, societies, and economies (mostly through XXX Press; also through YYY and ZZZ), they have all come to me after having been through the usual publishing and in-house editorial channels. That is, the books are basically readable and understandable when they come to me. And most of my work is done for academic publishers, so an academic presentation doesn’t faze me. [UPDATE 2/9/2012: Thanks to an eagle-eyed reader for calling me to task on an error that formerly appeared here.]

The chapter you’ve attached would require an entire rewrite to be comprehensible to an English-speaking (-reading) audience. While I’ve worked on numerous occasions with authors for whom English is not their primary language, usually I can make a pretty good stab at discerning what they’re discussing. I’m afraid that the chapter attached doesn’t lend itself to such easy interpretation. Working on this book would entail not only a complete rewrite, but likely much in the way of author/editor contact.

My bid for the editing would be $40 per manuscript page, and let’s define a standardized manuscript page as 265 words, which includes all notes and bibliographies. I would ask for eight weeks turnaround.

Proofreading would be done at an entirely separate stage -- after the book has been edited and formatted according to LN’s directions. Three dollars per page would be the rate there, but understand that it would involve no rewriting, but only reading for typographical errors.

Formatting: I would do that at the same time as the editing, at no additional charge.

Forty dollars per manuscript page. That’s roughly ten times my base rate for editing. And it still wouldn’t have been enough. Guaranteed. 

The author didn’t blink, and I admire the hell out of that:

Thank you for your reply. Yet I still need to see your quality of editing by obliging to my request as per my email.  When it comes to rewriting, I will not agree to it and my work had been read accepted to by English speaking community before. So if you wish, I can consider you doing my work, but only if I can see your editing first.

Wow. Sounds like the author might not have minded the $40/page bid. Fledgling editors, take note again: When you’re dealing with an author overseas, sometimes it helps that the dollar sucks. 

My response:

I don’t see how the present manuscript can be published without almost an entire rewrite. If that’s not an option, then I’ll have to pass on the job.

Thanks.

Craziness averted. It’s also called setting boundaries. (Homies, is this the most useful LoD post in history, or what?)

Now, would you believe that while this episode was taking place, I received an email from my dear brother, who — wait for the punch line, folks — is a proofreader working a few different jobs in NYC?

[Brief interlude: What the hell was going on in the Land family that it created two proofreaders? Well, Mom was a special ed. teacher, but not until I was twelve years old — and my brother is five years my senior. Dad was a car dealer who came up just shy of finishing college, although he graduated high school at age sixteen with (he claims) the highest IQ or grades or something as of that time at the school (PS 1 on Staten Island, if you’re keeping score at home). The argument for a genetic element to proofreading is rather strong, but I’d rather not know what genes are involved, or what other damage they cause. I can think of a few things.] 

Anyway, this from my brother:

I had to resort to the outstanding website to be able to quote a rate to someone whom a coworker put me in touch with. The potential client, my coworker told me, was named XXX and needed someone to proofread a manuscript.

I called said Mr. XXX, who informed me that he had prepared with 2 coauthors a 130-page manuscript concerning [a semiscientific topic]. He asked me what my rate would be. Resorting to the LOD website, I told Mr XXX that the usual rate for this type of work was $1.50 per page, but since this was a rate charged to large universities I would only charge him $1.25 per page.

Mr. XXX told me to meet him at his place on 40th Street between [two of the tonier East Side avenues]. For some reason I envisioned a five-floor walk-up, a poorly lit one-bedroom apartment, a manuscript given to me off a table in a dinette where there was a Tupperware container full of some awful-smelling food.

Of course, Mr. XXX is Dr. XXX. His office was on the second floor of a condominium near the corner of XXX Avenue. His office was complete with chandeliers and fountains. I sat in this office for about 8 seconds and realized I probably should have charged $2.00 per page; this feeling was reinforced when he told me he needed quick 48-hour turnaround.

Moral of the story: I could never survive on the open proofreading market and must periodically thank Allah that I have two sponsors willing to pay an hourly wage. . . .

From a dropping jaw to a sinking stomach. My brother, bless his heart . . . Shoulda called me first. Then again, I think the last time my brother picked up the phone and called me was in the summer of 1974. We get along great. Always have. (Well, except for the time he tried to drown me.) But he should have charged three or four times what he did.

So, here’s the deal:

As an author, do you want me to make your manuscript read as nicely as possible while keeping your voice? Fix spelling, grammar, sentence structure, stylistic consistency (numbers, titles, and so forth)? Do that kind of stuff at manuscript stage — while it’s still a Word document? Copyediting.

Or would you rather I take your typeset pages and do a final quality-control check on them for design, layout, treatment of heads, footers, contents, chapter titles, and — of course — reading every single character of the book? Proofreading. Naturally, if something looked drastically wrong, I’d query it — but the proofreader’s job is not to rewrite copy nor do the kind of consistency making expected from the copyeditor.

If you’re a publisher, and you don’t know the difference between copyediting and proofreading, or you don’t know how to tell your authors accurately what they need  —  and you seem puzzled when I call wondering about expectations, and you explain that everything has always seemed clear before  —  please forget about me.

Haiku Monday: New Beginnings

[text, image, and photo expunged, but in honor of the blog homies, comments remain.]

Buh-BYE, 2011

What a year.

No year-end review this time. I'm going to let a fading memory take its course.

I'll spend the next few days wrapping up two loose work ends and then prepare for next year. Moi mentioned the word "resolve." I could use some. "Discipline" has never been a strong suit. Maybe I can win the semantic war.

Because of scheduling issues, January 2012 is already an avalanche in waiting. December 2011 was delays and time away and holidays and such.

The year 2012 I'll start out on a new leaf or leaves. I have a bunch of thoughts in my head. Resolve, resolve. And I'll have two four-hour car rides on the 30th and the 1st to get some thinking done. Sons are back to college next week. And winter will settle in at chez czar, with the czarina on 24-hour call for her theatre tour booking duties. Scheduling an educational touring group in central Appalachia during January through March isn't one of the easier hands to be dealt, and keeping or revising that schedule with snow dates . . . in many backwoods counties where roads are iffy . . . that's wintertime anxiety around here.

Anyway, this is a sign-off for the year. Everyone out there, have a great time on New Year's Eve and thereafter, wherever life places you. And if you don't hear from me at HM or on your different blogs so much in 2012, it's not because anything's wrong. Actually, it's probably just the opposite.

But I do hope to be posting more here, and more on topic.

For now, it's . . .

Too Much to Do

Christmas Eve day, and miles to go.

New Dorp Lane, Staten Island, NY;
except for the cars, 
the view hasn't changed in at least 50 years.

Shopping is basically done, although I have to brave the grocery store sometime this morning for tomorrow's feast. Per popular acclamation at chez czar, we're giving the czarina the day off from heavy cooking and doing a far simpler low country boil just for the family. It's the kind of thing we typically only make when there's twenty or so people around, so I'm going to halve the recipe. We'll throw some newspapers on the table and make believe it's summertime. And no dishes to wash.

***

Many interesting projects lately, and I wish I was wrapping up one of them this morning instead of what I'm working on: an index that seems not to want to go away. I've started placing the PDF and the Word doc side by side on the screen rather than looking at paper. Every second counts. Maybe I'll become the Frederick Taylor of the editorial world. Now if I could just keep my fingers out of my mouth while editing or proofreading and keep that red pen close to the paper.

***

When our younger son came home from college last week, I asked him if he'd signed up for any shifts at a local drive-thru he'd been working at for some years. He said no, but I knew that he needed some holiday funds (and I had become used to the intern labor), so I asked him if he wanted to do some word processing for me. I had about nine hundred pages of manuscripts that needed editorial changes keyed in. He did an OK job, but his reactions to the work were interesting. On job one, he pondered, "There wouldn't be so much to do if authors just followed the right style to begin with." On job two, he asked, "How hard is it for them to get the reference style right?" Out of the mouths of nineteen-year-old babes . . .

***

When Colleen (former intern) returns for winter/spring semester, I'll be talking to her about paid work for keying in changes. In the right circumstances, it saves me enough time and is worth the money to have someone input corrections to a Word document. We were speaking about this as a family last week, and we chuckled that, unfortunately, the czarina is not the person to help me in this area -- for a number of reasons. As I put it quite simply to the czarina's laughter, "You won't do what I want you to do when I want you to do it." Working for me is probably only slightly worse than being married to me.

***

The two books that my younger son slaved through were both rather interesting. One was a first-person account of a South Vietnamese army/government official's experiences from the mid-1940s until his escape in the early 1980s after imprisonment by the new regime, although the author began in the Viet Minh. The author knew John Paul Vann and Daniel Ellsberg and people like that from the mid-1950s on. Having come to consciousness during the height of the Vietnam War, I found the information on French and US involvement in SE Asia, and especially the internal Vietnamese happenings, fascinating.

[Great note on this book. As the coauthor, who is my primary contact, told me, "The [Vietnamese] author is 88 and not in great health. We're hoping he holds on until the book is published." So sweet. The book has been in various stages of writing for 24 years. The coauthor, who is concerned about his colleague's age and health, is 85.]

The second book was about the Fed's operations during the credit crisis of 2008. The editor was almost apologetic when sending the book out. "It's about economics, and many copyeditors don't like books with a lot of numbers." After explaining that I used to be the lead editor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, he was relieved and I suspect a little surprised. I suspect, also, that I'll now have an inside track on copyediting any books dealing with banking or economics coming from this press. Fine by me. They pay fast.

What I didn't mention was that I'd probably still be at that job if my boss wasn't one of the most despicable human beings I've ever met in my life. Her name was . . . oh, it's Christmas. Never mind.

***

I've had a few other things going on, it seems, but I have to finish this index NOW. Then to the store(s), then wrapping presents, then back to work on an intense little proofing job that must go out on Monday. At least it's not indexing.

***

The photo above comes from my hometown. Staten Island is part of New York City yet a world of its own. When the czarina was first there in 1985 and we went down New Dorp Lane, she said, "This reminds me of small towns in the South," the point being, "I had no idea that the evil urban Northeast full of you Yankees and Jews was actually like the rest of the world." Staten Island, when it's not acting more like Alabama, can be a very nice place.

***

Happy holidays, folks. Glad you're out there.

Haiku Monday: Spin

Hosted this week at Fleur's Place.

----

My entry


with visuals.

Faster and faster
'Til enlightenment springs forth:
Whirl, dervishes, whirl!

Wintertime Jewtop
Reminds, "They tried to kill us,
We won. Now let's eat."

A Most Unlikely Result -- Intern '11, 1

An intern from a local college worked with me during this last school semester — a coed, as the vernacular goes, or went. This intern, we’ll call her “Colleen,” wanted to find out about the world of editing, and she’d receive two hours of college credit for doing so: 10 to 14 hours per week for about 12 weeks, soaking up the heady Land on Demand corporate atmosphere.

Colleen is the third intern who’s worked with me over the last six or so years. What’s made this hosting-of-intern slightly different is that Nicole is between my sons’ ages. Spending this amount of time over the last few months with someone in college — while my two are as well — was interesting. I think I was well prepared.

I'll discuss the internship in more detail later. Colleen and I both were required to write summaries of the experience to complete the process (and I needed to provide a number/letter grade), so maybe I’ll mine those writings for some future postings. My contribution was more of a strengths-and-weaknesses assessment.

Another intent of a perhaps future arc (ugh) on the internship would be to try to move back to where this blog mostly started: discussions of work-desk issues. Way too much miscellania these days.

Before the internship was over, I asked Colleen to write a blog posting on her experience, which follows:

===

I have done the impossible (improbable at the very least) and completed an English major in two years. On top of all my regular work, I chose to register for an internship to experience the life of an editor. Along the way I have gained a huge respect for copyeditors and proofreaders. Someday I hope to call the work mine.

This semester just happened to also be the time when I am working on my senior project, a mini-thesis, if you will. Working as an editorial intern for roughly 14 hours a week added to my 18-credit-hour class load has definitely taught me how to organize my time. I will say that the organization skills for my project have been spurred forward by my work with Bob. I’ve been exposed to countless styles of writing and formatting, and have found strengths and flaws in all of them. I would like to think that these observations have shown through in my own writing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I were stuck in my own ways as a writer—I am an 82-year-old woman stuck in a 21-year-old body, fifty cats and all.

It would be nice to be able to apply everything that I have learned to each of my assignments for class, but who am I kidding? Switching from MLA to Chicago is a challenge in itself, let alone having the added stress of Bob follow my work with his own. In the beginning, I assumed that I would get faster the more comfortable I became with the work of an editor. I stand corrected. . . . He has me always double-checking my work, and I’m right most of the time, but sometimes I remain lodged in my old ways. I will say that one of my proudest moments was when Bob commented, “I passed the ‘Colleen inspection.’” Yes. I have an inspection named after me.

Coming into this internship I knew that I wanted to do something along the same lines that Bob does, but I wasn’t quite sure yet. My first week here, I was proofing the index for a religious book. The entire index was made of biblical references and had to be re-alphabetized by hand, not with the automatic word-by-word alphabetization that Word does. Considering that the index was probably close to forty pages at this point, I thought I’d hate working here the moment the stack of papers plopped onto my table. As I got into the work, the time flew by and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was enjoying myself. Later on in the semester, I worked on a few different indexes and enjoyed each one better than the last. Call me crazy, but I think I found my destiny: indexing.

I’ve always had an eye for mistakes or confusing wording, and have enjoyed helping other people with their writing, so I chose this career path as the obvious option. While I dabble in creative writing and poetry, I really enjoy editing and indexing; I want my career to be my passion. Bob has shown me that it is possible and that I can enjoy what I do with my life. This lesson negates all else that I have learned this semester—not on my internship evaluation, of course.

In my final week of interning with Bob, I hope to keep learning and experiencing the life of an editor. Or indexer in my case.

Haiku Monday: Time

Hosted this week at the magnificent Karl's Korner.

Deadlines, mortgages:

Accordion-like squeezes,

But like trolley cars . . .

Tomorrow — flexing

Like a whore — and tomorrow.

Shakespeared; lad insane.

===

I don't usually do videos or any visuals for Haiku Monday or post the haiku here, but I found this -- an interesting, unbroadcast live version of a song from one of my favorite albums -- so I figured I might as well post the video. Sorry you had to sit through the haiku.

In school, we just called him "Eye Chart"

Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe, 147

Haiku Monday: New Host

If you're looking for Haiku Monday for November 28, the host is last week's winner Serendipity, and the hosting is here. Topic is energy/energized.

Have fun.

I'm Really Not Trying to Turn This into Facebook or Twitter

But I'm drinking a Coke from a white and silver can. That's just wrong.

 Happy Thanksgiving all.

UPDATE, December 1:

Coke to Drop Snow-White Holiday Can