Well, I'm All Better

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

RANT Deliverance! (with apologies to Cornel West)

Oh, the twisted road of word processing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does anything make any sense?

insomnia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signing off, if not exactly out.

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

Hi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excelsior,

Bob

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

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

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

+++

[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

And the Occasional Personal Revelation

Dateline, Bristol, VA; Central Appalachia, USA

If you request anything down here stronger than aspirin, they notify the DEA and Interpol.