Well, I'm All Better

 What a difference a year makes, in lots of ways.

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.

+++

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.

"Are You Jewish, or Are You Just Here?"

Well, right now I just feel like posting something. We have a dear friend staying with us who's enduring their own struggles but getting through them with a whole lot more equanimity than I've ever exhibited. 

Not the point.

These days, the Census box I check is Taoist-leaning Jewish agnostic heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching, which doesn't mean much to anyone -- but it wouldn't surprise me if a few others out there are like me. JuBus, with a heavy dose of reading from the right kind of clients. A former, and late, client of mine was an inspirational speaker named Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. I had the good fortune of meeting him once when my wife and I were making one of our many descents south. His publishing house was a few rooms stocked floor to ceiling and wall to wall with about every motivational book ever printed. He was known for his saying, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read." I really can't argue with that.

Also not the point.

Some years back, I decided to attend the only real Jewish synagogue around here, in Blountville, TN. (The area has a few messianic Jewish congregations. Don't get me started. The "rabbi" may be Jewish, but the congregations are Pentecostals looking for another day in church. IMHO.) The temple in Blountville has been around since the late 1800s, but there ain't many Jews around here, so they don't have a full-time rabbi, or haven't for most of the 23 years I've been living in Bristol. Every few weeks, as I remember, a rabbinical student would come down from the seminary in Cincinnati to do whatever needed to be done. 

On one of my visits there, I ended up next to a gentleman who was the husband of the president of the Sisterhood -- in other words, the woman who runs the show. He was or is a retired professor from the East Tennessee State University School of Medicine, which probably isn't too bad a joint, despite the name if you're an ignorant displaced Yankee like me. But he was clearly heavily into his medications that night. We were separated by a seat, and he leaned over to me and asked, "So, are you Jewish, or are you just here?" 

I answered, "Both."

Once he found out what this nice young Jewish man did (shanda fur de goyim, I am not a doctor or lawyer), he lit up. 

"Would you edit my CV for me?" Sure thing, I said. No charge.

He emailed me a forty-page, single-spaced resume, most of which seemed impressive enough. At some point in his life, he probably had his shit together. Every damn thing he'd ever done was in these forty pages, but the show-stopper came on about page 38.

"Read most books: 3rd grade." 

Well, now, all I remember from my third-grade year at Staten Island Academy was playing hangman in what passed for the English/verbal part of the curriculum. Supposed to be a spelling exercise, I guess. I stumped everyone, including Mrs. Bartlett, with the word "rhubarb." After getting the puzzled looks I would grow accustomed to later in life, I explained to the best of my seven-year-old ability, "It's a fight in baseball." I'm certain I didn't associate the word with anything to do with nature. Like "the tools of ignorance," I figured the term was common knowledge. And if you don't know what that term means, as Professor Yogi Berra once said, "You can look it up." Click the link.

But Professor Prescription's capper came when I asked him why there were so many people listed with birthdays in the temple's weekly program (maybe five or six for each day of the week), but every time I went to shul there, the congregation had about 15 people in it. His answer was a classic.

"You ever hear of the 82nd Airborne?"

"Yes."

"How about the 101st Airborne?"

"Yes, of course."

"Did you ever wonder what happened to the rest of them? We're the same way. We just keep counting them until they tell us not to."

Sh'ma Yisrael adonai elohaynu adonai echod.
Baruch shem kivod malchuso lay'olam vaed.

Some things never leave you.

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?

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.

+++

[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

Copyediting query boilerplate

For copyediting that type of volume, presuming no complicating factors, my rate is $4.75/page, with a page defined as 265 words. The project rate based on that word count, then, would be 128 pages (34000/265) @ $4.75/page = $608.

Complicating factors would be, for example, line editing to the point that many/most sentences need restructuring -- or extensive reworking of documentation such as notes or bibliography, which probably wouldn't apply here. But if I thought reassessing the rate was necessary for any reason, I'd let you know before I went too far down the road.

The process is pretty simple. I'd ask for one-month turnaround from date of receipt, and no payment is necessary until the job is complete. You send me a Word file, and I return to you three files:

1. The edited manuscript with all the changes indicated/tracked.

2. The same document with all the changes accepted. This would be the working document going forward.

3. A style sheet for the book, indicating editorial and spelling decisions, style and consistency notes, and so on. 

The manuscript will likely include some queries for you, and I prefer to handle those with Word's comments feature (the little balloons in the margins), if you'd be comfortable with that. If not, I can always present them as inline queries [QY: like this.]. Your call.

Occasionally I'll have need to contact an author at some point during the process with, for example, some repeating issue that I want to make sure I don't miscorrect. Doesn't happen that often -- and I know authors are always available for questions -- but typically it seems that once I receive a manuscript, unless I'm running late (ugh), the next time you should expect to hear from me is with the three files above, followed by an invoice. 

I think that's it. If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Thanks again.

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.

And Speaking of My Online Gig, from Which I Am on Hiatus

Thankfully, this ain't me, but there are some interesting parallels:

We get forty little thumbnails, that way we don’t have to watch the video we can instantly see “oh, well there’s some genitals” or “there’s a man’s head but he’s not connected to it” . . . something like that. And we can instantly apply policy. It’s extremely streamlined.

How to Market Your Editing Services at an Annual Convention

You can make it real easy by already having the following:

• 35 years of experience
• no need for additional but only replacement work
• an exhibit hall full of present clients who can and will happily leave their perch and vouch for one's services 

Thankfully, I've accumulated the items on that list. Reports from AAR/SBL 2018 to follow (or will appear above, eventually).

One thing that occurred to me just now: That dopey English professor at UMass-Lowell who refused to pay me for an index a few years back and that dopey southern university press (link most intentional*) that agreed he was an @hole of an author but refused to stand behind me wash far in the background when I'm meeting face-to-face with world-class theologians and publishers who are genuinely happy to speak with me and who value my work -- and who lament my (mostly) getting out of indexing.

So many nice people. And coming from where I live, being in a gathering of thousands of scholars, none of whom appear to be morbidly obese or emaciated and meth-driven, was joyous. From the time I left Tri-Cities, TN, airport on Friday morning -- traveling through the ATL airport, 2.5 days in downtown Denver, coming back -- I did not see a single morbidly obese person until returning to the gate for the return flight to Tri-Cities. A woman in her mid- to late 20s, and a two-seater.

* LSU Press notwithstanding. Tennessee also.

News Report

I remain news-free. Twelve days. A lot of people still are moving and smiling, and not just the crazy ones. And I feel a lot better.

Sample Response to Author for Indexing Query

Just sent this letter to an author looking for an indexer. I'd asked for a few sample manuscript chapters since the pages weren't ready yet. I'm also printing it here so that I can use it as boilerplate, not that I'll remember it. I'm so geeked up about going to Denver tomorrow, I'm still working on what should have been finished seven hours ago. Gonna be the usual long night before travel. "Live and don't learn, that's us" (Watterson). I wonder if AAR has ever done a Calvin and Hobbes session. The question should be, "How many?"

+++

Thanks very much, J——. Even though I'm a known quantity to —— Press, I understand their and your stance perfectly.

As far as the prospectus, my first reaction as an indexer is, If I had this before starting any book, my life would be immeasurably easier. I'm just sitting here shaking my head at the thought. I might ask authors or presses for it in the future, and if that's the case, I've gotten my money's worth out of this correspondence already. 

All that notwithstanding, your material has made it with room to spare under my psychic limbo bar. If the job were to come my way and came with the usual 6x9" or 6x9.25" trim size, the rate would be $5 per indexable page, which is generally from the first page of the introduction through the end of the last chapter, inclusive. Add on to that pages for any indexable front matter (maybe a preface, not foreword or acknowledgments) and back matter (notes, not bibliography or appendices [except in the most general of fashion]). For a book around 90K words, maybe 230 pages or so? Of that, usually about 210-15 would be indexable.

So if it's the usual academic trim size, entirely depending on the final page count of indexable material, probably in the $1075 range, give or take. If you're associated with an institution that might be paying for the work, I'd ask to start any necessary payment paperwork (registering as a vendor, submitting a W9) at the beginning of the job. I've found that being a first-time payee can take an inordinately long time, and I like to grease the skids. If paying on your own, I accept checks or—for the more adventuresome or 21st-century, which isn't me—PayPal.

Let me know whatever you decide. I'd like to work with you and will add you to my schedule if that's your call.

Thanks.

+++

And if you're wondering about that rather formal head, I'm putting some knowledge to work. 

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.

Fate

Going to Denver, AAR-SBL 2018, this weekend. 

I was in contact with the folks at one of my publishers today about the confab, one of whom has started his own press that I’m also working for, and he offered to give me a badge for the conference. Just call him when I got there. 

So, no housing costs (staying with son and daughter-in-law, one mile from convention), no registration, and my wife remembered we had points on some card that got me enough airfare to fly out there. She says I was meant to go. I wonder if she’ll keep that thought in mind if I get run over by a bus.

If you had told me thirty years ago, or especially thirty-five years ago, that one day I would be traveling halfway across the country for a forty-eight-hour period to attend the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, and that I was really looking forward to it, I would have laughed in your face.

Then again, although there were extenuating circumstances, my first presidential vote was cast for the ticket of Ron Paul and one of the Koch brothers. 

And the irony of both are not unconnected. 

Seven days, no news. I really just can’t recommend this enough. I’m going to have a hard time in the Atlanta airport, trying to avoid televisions. Might be time for the earplugs and finding the nearest airport chapel.

I think it was in Atlanta one time when I was traveling through that I stopped off in the chapel for some peace and quiet. Muslim guy comes in, puts his rug down, does his thing, and gets up to go. I said, “Please don’t take offense, but how do you know which way is east?” He said, “I saw some other guy do it this way.” Speaking of thirty-five years ago, that’s a question I never would have asked in my youth, before meeting the perpetually curious and sociable woman who became my wife.

Next airport chapel I went into, I noticed that they had the direction marked on the wall.

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.

Telephones: Hate 'Em

"People with nothing to do resent any imposition on their time." --William S. Burroughs.

And people with too damn much to do resent not when something else is put on their plate but being kept waiting to do whatever it is has to be done.

I'm sitting here waiting for a 10am phone call. It's 10:40a. Sitting here with my thumb up my butt is billable time in my mind, but that's not important. I'm not going to try to get my head back into a project -- and I've already shifted gears from catastrophe -- only to have to put it down again. It's turning into a different catastrophe.

Seething. Bigly. 

I've About Had It with Excuses

1. I have a client that owes me about $2000. Invoice was sent in April with plenty of advance warning. After a month or so, the client asks if I've deposited the check -- which I'd never received. What happened? Here's the story I was told and have experienced. A regional energy company (not in the client's region) got a check made out to Bob Land, cashed it, and stonewalled my client for four months about a refund of the money. I contacted the energy company, which knew nothing about the situation but offered to follow up and to pay me or my client immediately. Once the client started getting calls and emails from the energy company to track down the check, all of a sudden the client says the situation has been resolved. Client is waiting for the check from the energy company. Client receives the check. I receive a check for half the amount invoiced. "It's all I can afford."

2. I am in a war with a national pest control company, which has agreed to refund me $1220 for useless services rendered. I received a check today . . . for $1020 -- which I will not cash, so as not to indicate acceptance of an offer. I am in touch again with corporate customer service.

3. I presently have no health insurance. We have COBRA through my wife's former job, but claims are being denied because the insurer canceled my wife's former employer's policy after a premium was misapplied -- so the employer says. It's taking weeks to remedy the insurer's error. So the employer says.

Some days (most days? all days?), I really do yearn for an escape from capitalism and a whole lot of other stuff.

Back on Topic

Dear Bob, 

I have a couple of questions re the editing suggestions in CV, which I hoping you can help me with. 

The first relates to use of hyphens and dashes. I see that in my efforts to make the CV look a bit more as though it is a printed, professional document, I have over-used the en dash. From what I can see through your suggestions, it should be used for page ranges, but not 'co-chair' and the like. Yet, when typeset, it would seem to me that hyphens look like en dashes. Any wisdom on this would be very helpful! (I haven't yet changed the hyphens/dashes in CV, hence my query at this stage). I do like your suggestions for em dashes - but again don't really know when to use them. I can see you have suggested them in cases where either colon is used up in the sentence, or is about to be used.. 

In a good font that's not trying to be fancy or too quirky, en dashes are clearly distinguishable between the length of an em dash and the length of a hyphen. En dashes are never used in place of hyphens for compound words. Where they occur in text would be joining two phrases, one of which might be a compound. The example that Chicago gives is a "New York<n>London flight." Use of the en dash indicates that the words "New" and "York" go together. It's not a new York-London flight. I hope that makes sense. I've seen some authors or maybe even a press style sheet indicate that an en dash should be used to connect two nouns of equal weight, but that's very subjective in my opinion -- and certainly not the norm.

As far as my rules, such as they are, for em dashes: to me they are never to be used in place of a semicolon -- that is, to join two complete sentences together. (Some writers do this.) Rather, they are more to make a subsequent or additional point to the original one, but without relegating the text after the em dash to a parenthetical. It's a softer pause than a full stop (to use the Britishism). Again, I hope that makes sense.

The other query relates to the use of the comma in, for eg, 'XXX, YYY, and ZZZ'. Almost everywhere it looks like I've omitted this comma, so I'd like your wisdom on the different (opposing) conventions around this, and why to go with the option of always inserting rather than omitting the comma - thanks. Also related to this is that if the comma is omitted in the original, such as the name of an organisation, should I be inserting it anyway for the case of consistency, or respecting the original? An example is:  Patagonian Department of Industrialisation, Competition, Science, and Research. In the case of the place of publication of a work, it seems a bit clunky to include the comma, as in: Abingdon, Oxon, & New York: Routledge - or perhaps it just looks this way to me because it is next to the ampersand. 

Among the reasons I loathe the AP style manual, which is to say US journalism and advertising conventions, is the absence of the serial (Oxford) comma. It makes for clarity in every case, which can never be said about not using it. If you want a great reason to use it, please see http://img.pandawhale.com/lCwkE7-why-i-still-use-the-oxford-com-QAUW.jpeg.

Another good example is "I'd like to thank my parents, the pope, and Mother Teresa" vs. "I'd like to thank my parents, the pope and Mother Teresa."

On organizational names or book titles and consistency, I always prefer to silently insert it in places such as bibliographies. Running text might be a different matter for recognizable organization names. And really, it's had to tell what a book title actually is without looking at the copyright page. I've seen publishers do different things with covers because the design looks better, but the Library of Congress info says something different. In the case of Abingdon, Oxon, and/& New York, frankly I like what Chicago says: Use only the first city and delete the others. As regards the comma next to the ampersand, APA (American Psychological Association) style, which covers a lot of the educational world in the US, doesn't mind it at all.

About the only organizations for which I and many publishers routinely honor the original spelling, capitalization, etc., is the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; don't ask why) and the occasional UN Programme.

Lastly, in cases where there is a capitalised 'T' in 'the', should this be made lower case in a title, even if it appears as a cap in the original, eg, A Millennial History of The University of Eastern Patagonia. In this case the university's names is 'The University of... ' and the often make a point of emphasising 'The'. 

Once again, such organizations make things very difficult for editors. Here in the US we have The Ohio State University, not to mention The Coca-Cola Company (and as a 20-year resident of Atlanta who spent way too many hours laboring in design and typesetting shops, I learned to enforce the latter vigorously). These days, I'm rather moody about such things. As an editor, I always want to lowercase it (it's not my job to uphold the style sheet of every organization out there); on the other hand, there is honoring the brand. I typically lowercase regardless of the desires of the institution, because I have my own brand to uphold. I like a consistent look. (Again, Chicago allows for, if not encourages, silently making such changes.)

One more query: why should the superscript be removed in '2nd national conference on... '? Is that to make it ready for typesetting, if that were to be the next step in a publication process? Often printed books seem to have the superscript, and so I guess I'm wondering whether it looks more professional to make a rule that all these will stay as superscript in my document. 

To me, superscripts have no place whatsoever in text, unless it's mathematical copy. If Microsoft Word didn't have a default setting for superscripts, I don't think it would occur to people to go in and manually change it. I think 2nd with a superscript looks very amateurish. As I tell people about Word's spell check, I don't want Bill Gates doing my editing, any more than he would want me doing his coding.

I ask all these minor questions just so I can settle on my own rules in the CV and also to learn from you about what are the conventions and reasons. 

Thanks very much!

No problem. I think you and I just wrote my next blog post. I'll change all the specifics.

That's What This Blog Is All About, Charlie Brown

This blog serves, as the header above states, as my business's website. Thanks to the Google for the cyberrealestate. I've attracted over time clients from Kuwait and Australia, not to mention Oxford University Press, based on people who've found this work diary. That was back in the day when the Google's algorithms were a variation on the old Stalin line: "Paper tolerates anything written on it."

Tangent: You know the line attributed to Stalin, "To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs"? Seems that he cribbed that from my notorious cousin Lazar Kaganovich, although Lazar probably picked it up from somewhere else. For all of his, uh, charms, I don't think that original thought was high on Iron Lazar's list.

Anyway, even in spite of the Google's algorithm changes, a year or so ago, the author of a nascent Fred Neil biography found a posting I'd done about one of the few surviving video clips of the late, great Fred Neil. Alas, in the interim we've met and hit it off quite nicely, and tomorrow I'll receive the complete manuscript.

The notion that I'll have a heavy hand in a Fred Neil biography is one of the things that makes my crazy work life worthwhile. That, and nailing a friend's father years back for telling me he taught ethics at the School of the Americas with the line, "How interesting. A good friend of mine did the original English translation of Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation." Perhaps my greatest party moment ever -- well, at least in my mind. You could just about see the steam coming out of this man's ears. No telling how many times he'd gotten away with that line.

Not as dumb as I look,

I remain,

Yr. humble and obedient servant,

[drum roll]

Geo. Washington

Another Author Bites Back

Fiction author for whom I've edited five or six books has a character in the most recent tome who shape-shifts into a venomous snake -- evil's right hand. The character's cover story? Freelance copyeditor.

Thanks, boss.

Another Happy Customer

Oh, that they were all this easy to please:

I just love all your periods and commas! Gives such a feeling of security!