What It Is (posts below left; rate sheet, client list, other stuff below right)

My name is Bob Land. I am a full-time freelance editor and proofreader, and occasional indexer. This blog is my website.

You'll find my rate sheet and client list here, as well as musings on the life of a freelancer; editing, proofreading, and indexing concerns and issues; my ongoing battles with books and production; and the occasional personal revelation.

Feel free to contact me directly with additional questions: landondemand@gmail.com.

Thanks for visiting. Leave me a comment. Come back often.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Apropos of nothing

Needing to kill 25 minutes before heading up to the theater where my wife works, and I don't feel like diving into something work-related for that amount of time. Some short notes.

> The Feedjit gadget always fascinates. A little traffic coming to this blog lately from someone who searched the text of a fortune cookie I received some weeks back. My blog posting ended up with an update about how the two fortune cookies opened came true, and in relation to each other. Now a link to that blog posting is on someone's Facebook page, and a few people have come here following that link. Since I'm not on Facebook, I have no idea whose page this is on or why. Maybe someone has a Facebook page devoted to different fortune cookie messages? I think of the old Alan King bit/book title, Help! I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery! which is what his father used to say whenever he opened a fortune cookie. I suspect that was often. As the old joke goes,

The Jewish calendar is now year 5771. The Chinese calendar is year 4708. So what did Jews do for 1063 years without Chinese food?

> Working lately for a number of individual authors, and hoping the word continues to spread, for a number of reasons. One of the authors is part of a small publishing group that appears to handle the work of only a handful of authors, but has its own periodical as well. Very interesting. Naturally, I hope that the present author is enamored enough of my work to disseminate my name among her fellow writers.

> I've lured a dear longtime friend into the compulsion that is Haiku Monday. Welcome, Fleur.

> My older son is in London today (not center city) while the royal nuptials are taking place. I simply consider it a good development that the lad has been out of the United States since January 5 and I've had no calls from embassies or COINTELPRO, and that (knock on wood) he still has his passport. The future queen is a fabulous babe, and the future king looks well on his way to having less hair than I do.

> I've been added to the list of a rather well-known university press as a proofreader. No work just yet, but hopefully some will come soon, at which time I'll add the press to the ever-fluctuating client list. Which press? Well, Prince William -- keeping on the royals theme -- was just made Duke of Cambridge. Well, it ain't that one, but the other one.

> Other son will be matriculating at University of Virginia this fall; parents and offspring are most pleased, although dealing with a university that size is already proving a new experience. The incoming freshman class at UVA is bigger than his brother's college and both their high schools combined.

> Getting an index on Jewish architecture after Auschwitz. 440-page book, probably oversized. I think they've left me about 10 pages for the index. All I can hope for is plenty of pages with pictures.

> Finishing up some work over the next few days for my Kuwaiti professor pal. I'm proofreading a book I'd copyedited a couple of months ago, which doesn't happen often. As I told my wife yesterday, every once in a while I'll forget that and think to myself while proofing the pages, Gee, I like the way this copyeditor worked. I'd have done it the same way. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

haiku monday: chicken

Go to chickory.blogspot.com for details. Most excellent prize available this week.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Quote of the Day

From a book on the study of happiness:

“Data” is not the plural of “anecdote."

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Back to the Roots

Where this blog began . . . and from where it's been distracted of late. Travails in the editing world. Some quick notes on a recent project. Then it's back to work finishing a job for my old employer, which, after my moaning about it for years, still cannot manage to print out a decent set of page proofs.

--

Working on a project that’s taking days longer than it should. Problems, about which the publisher did not inform me:

British punctuation and spelling throughout — all must be fixed; but can’t do globally because of quoted material and extracts.

Foreign editor of a multiple-foreign-author book, meaning that the same non-US idiomatic phrases appear in every author’s pieces: “Hypermarket,” rather than supermarket. "Right across": Took me awhile to figure this one out. It means “throughout.”

Hundreds of footnotes needing to be composed from a poorly written and horribly inconsistent bibliography. The footnotes were along the lines of Smith 2010, which doesn’t work as a footnote for this publisher. Publisher requires either author, date style in the text, or traditional notes, but since many of the footnotes weren’t really quoted material and incorporated more discursive stuff, author date wouldn’t have worked.

Some chapters included many notes that didn’t match up with biblio information, resulting in queries.

Heads typed in all caps, requiring rekeying.



Ridiculous overuse of scare quotes: a spending “spree.” And italics for emphasis.

Because the changes are being tracked, must be very careful that open quotes being replaced don’t end up facing in the wrong direction -- and because of the UK-US shift in punctuation, a ton of quote marks require replacement.

I could go on.

And what's the book about? At this point, it doesn't even matter.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Is the Internet a Great Place or What?

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