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

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

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

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

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

RANT Deliverance! (with apologies to Cornel West)

Oh, the twisted road of word processing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does anything make any sense?

Copyediting: Response to Instructions

D—: I should have this wrapped up in the next day or so. The writing is pretty clean, so thanks for that. I'll use Track Changes and also provide a clean copy if you and the editor would rather work from that as opposed to vetting each of the changes. If not, I'll skip that step.

I'd like to use Word's Comments feature for queries, as opposed to in-line queries [QY: like this], as they're simpler and have less chance of messing up the text.

Regarding the notes, I'll use the basic available information in a style that's pretty close to Chicago that I've established with a few of my nonprofits that traffic heavily in these types of medical/social science citations. The notes provide the usual information, with a standardized form or forms for the URLs/DOIs. It's a simple approach and gives the readers everything they need to find the citations online -- or not, if they'd rather not. Something for everyone, and not too complicated. My main question for you, though, is do you want the notes numbered consecutively through the book? Since there are relatively few of them for a book of this length, that may not be a bad approach, and it also saves the book from having a bunch of notes numbered 1 or 2, which sometimes seems a little goofy to me. Your call. It's easy to do either way, mostly a function of setting up page breaks with section breaks rather than page breaks.

And I'll assume, unless you tell me otherwise, that you want page breaks before each new chapter. Even without coding added at this stage, I think it would be easier for your designers.

So many people are working on weekends these days, even the salaried folks, so if I hear from you today, that's great. If Monday, that's fine, too. But I'll probably be able to start keying today.

Thanks.

Bob

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 We Go on to the Next Round Robin

Hope 2019 has been OK so far. 8,752 hours to go, one at a time.

The following image is cribbed from the FB page of a local author whose short reminiscences of her horrific but probably not unusual childhood I am now rewriting. I am putting this work in place of three other jobs I'd rather not be doing just at this moment. 

In all honesty, I'm just killing time until I return to some self-prescribed catch-up sleep. The new year starts . . . mañana.

Killing Time in the Twenty-First Century

The czarina and I watched Inside Llewyn Davis a few days ago. I think that's the right spelling. Coen Brothers movie about the New York City folk music scene in, well, really you can pin it down to a few days in 1960 or 1961 based on one of the closing shots of the movie.

Even though folk music right at the moment depicted in the film's days was way too earnest for my taste, the movie did take place in the neighborhood that kinda grounded my teenage years. As I remarked when watching the movie, "I was born in the right place, just about twenty years too late."

Anyway, I'm wasting time (see title) waiting for my goddamn phone to charge up so that I can get a VPN code to log into one of my work emails. When I was in Denver last month, I showed my younger issue how, considering different programs and phone codes and all that nonsense, I had to open up nine different computer screens and phone messages just to get started. And that's what I'm doing now. Waiting. For something to charge. That. I.

Never

Use.

Wrong century, folks.

And I hate to harp on it, but I'm still not up on the world since November 7. This—in a construction that baffled the Eurotrash we housed for a few months—is not unlike measuring sobriety. I actually clicked on one of my usual news sites today and managed to click away before it loaded. It was like sticking your head in a bar wondering if you could get back out. I am learning firsthand about the phrase "ignorance is bliss." I think there's stuff my wife wants to talk to me about or show me on TV. She said, "You can't keep this up forever." I replied, "I can keep it up as long as I want to."

So, rather than give people hell under an assumed name and enjoying and not enjoying the game, I'm here, typing to no one.

Thoughts of authors are colliding. In the resurrection, does your virtual life go with you?

Weather Report

Turned out to be a record one-day December snowfall. Just sent to a Northeast-based press that had inquired:


Everything's fine here. We received about 10 inches. The only time we lose power is when it's 70 degrees and sunny outside, with a slight breeze blowing. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. Of course, my car and house are encased in and surrounded by snow and ice, but we have nowhere to go. The streets are clear. The dogs are confused.

All the snow and ice around the house will be gone in a few days when the rain comes. And the side of our house where we do 100 percent of our egress and ingress is all northern exposure and the driveways are blocked by the house, so they never see the sun this time of year.

Looks like the package will arrive here on time, if they can ever figure out how to eject it from the Nutmeg State. I'll keep you posted.

https://www.fedex.com/apps/fedextrack/?tracknumbers=xxxxxxx.

Winter in the South

Forecasts are calling for anywhere from 3 to 10 inches over the next few days. I think it'll be on the high end, with my vast meteorological experience, which basically comprises studying the radar and making sure I have enough materials on hand to enjoy it.

Where things get tricky in the South is the lack of preparation. I was in the middle of Snowjam '82 in Atlanta, which was an epic clusterfnck. Plenty of stories. I forget if it was during that or another weather event in Atlanta when I worked the solo 16-hour shift at Dittler Brothers, home of the late, lamented airline timetables; rigged scratch-off games; and one of my two great collections of fellow staffers. (Again, so many stories, especially from when Atlanta was still in its very early crazy-growth stage, on the cusp of the AIDS era, and I could and have and will go on.)

I loved the 16-hour shift, alone. The same South Atlanta crackers who ran the proof room said good-bye to me in daylight at 4pm, then returned at 8am the next day to find me still there. When they asked where everyone else was, I said, "Some couldn't make it. The others called in and asked me if they should come in, and I said, 'Don't bother. There's not much to do, and I'm here already. No reason to risk it.'"

8 hours @ $6.25/hr = $50
8 hours @ $9.375/ hr = $75
1 days' work (1982) = $125

And we were often told, at the last minute, "You're working 12-hour days for the rest of the week, then 12-hour days all weekend." At one point, we'd worked 42 consecutive days, often at 10 and 12 hours a day. We were the only hourly nonunion people in the printing plant. Only one person refused to work any additional hours, and that was the late Bill Leonard, whose passing was covered in this blog. He was a great proofreader and always gave off the air of, "What are you actually going to do about it?" Never received any blowback.

Monthly expenses at the time:

$150 rent
$90 "incidentals"
$60? utilities and insurance
gas and food

As I've said, I never had more money in my life than when I was making $6.25/hour: mostly because of forced perpetual overtime, no time to spend the earnings, and nothing particularly I needed to spend it on.

UPDATE
Oh, and I forgot the entire purpose of the post: I suspect that today's Bristol Christmas Tour of Homes will be canceled due to snow. Around here that's known as the War on Christmas.

New Blog Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've Been in a Mood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

A Record I Am Not Happy to Set

Harking back a few days, I appear to be on the way to having a 150-page indexing manuscript to edit down. That's just ridiculous—and it's what I get for caring a little too much.

Proofreading. Lots and lots of proofing. That's what I need. I'm so much calmer with a stack of paper and a red pen. I can deal with disturbing concepts a whole lot better when I'm just reading about them. Having to massage them into indexable form is a different story.

Take a book. Smash it into thousands of little pieces and then put them back together in an entirely different form. Indexing in a nutshell.

Prayers are welcome.

Daily Demands

Working on a 600-page index—40-plus chapters, all different authors, global study of an Issue of Importance. Indexing is different from proofing and copyediting in that longer jobs make for increased difficulty in a way that doesn't affect the red-pencil tasks. Typically indexing problems grow exponentially with length, and indexing problems are not always easily solved. I'm speaking of consolidating entries and subentries and even keeping track of what you've discussed. My usual tendency to overindex also gets worse with length, because I don't want to leave something out that might reemerge 450 pages later—and I want to have enough subentries because the listing will be huge. Sorry, publisher and Chicago, but this index is going to have a lot more than a dozen main entry numbers for UNSCR 1325.

At this point in my life, and I hope this is no jinx, there aren't many hard-to-solve proofreading and copyediting problems. Make a decision, mark the style sheet (in the case of copyediting), and move on. It's someone else's prose and output. Indexing is an original product, the result of decisions I make related to content and wording. It's writing. It's hard. It's not fun.

Before the return to indexing, though, I have some hours to put in for a relatively new client. I try never to mention or allow readers to identify clients here (usually successfully, I think), but one particularly notable employer resulting from some early posting on this blog comes in for a little revisiting. I ranted my way into employment with an Internet publishing outfit called Demand Studios, subsequently Demand Media Studios. If I ever write the book I've been asked to, but never will, that seven-year-long episode could merit a chapter.

But now it's led to a similar gig of reviewing the work of dozens of contributors to a company called Dotdash, which used to be about.com, which predated Google, for Chrissakes. about.com for a short period was the property of the old grey lady, but unfortunately for my great aunt Ettie, I cannot now say that I work for the New York Times. She'd have been pleased. So far, the task almost approaches pleasant. Causes me to learn a few new tools (never bad for this dotard) and actually improves my editing for more scholarly endeavors. And if the gig ever turns south, which I hope it doesn't for a long time, you'll not hear about it here.

For All You Self-Publishers Out There: CreateSpace

Bob, I just sent book out last night and it's due to arrive on Tuesday (I couldn't bring myself to spend $45 for Monday!)  As a product of CreateSpace, it is all you said it would likely be; in short, stunningly disappointing and defective in just about every way. (In my own defense, I tried hard to get our team to go to another publisher; the numbers were just too good for CS.) If you would like to point out any defects, feel free, and we will try to fix the ones we can.

Their margin of error is a whopping 1/8 inch, so bindings almost all off center, the books are all wavy, the cover stays open after a single perusal and bends skyward, the bold of one author’s story bleeds too much (we are going to use a different typeface; if you have any recommendations of other ways, typefaces to set his story off, they are most welcome), and our designer said the back print job is worse than the local Kinko's would do. Other than that, pretty good inside, except the color is stark white, so we are going to try to change to a cream or beige.

Today's Great Customer Comment

One of my publishers asks me to bid on a large novelization of some ancient stories. Large, like 800-900 manuscript pages, and you can look at my rate sheet and do the math yourself.

The author responds, "I already spent a lot of money with a content editor. Why should I spend more on a copyeditor?"

Very reasonable question, to which I can usually, through a page or two of sample editing, offer quite damning evidence of why a copyeditor provides essential value.

The managing editor for the press asks if I can do a sample edit to show the author what he'll get for his money. In perhaps the first time in -- well -- forever, I tell a client that, indeed, the manuscript is in such good shape that the $4K or so spent on copyediting would be misused funds . . . and it would be such easy money. Through a sampling of different parts of the document, I can find virtually nothing I would change.

The publisher is presently recovering from a serious operation (N.B., DB: not a lobotomy). The managing editor passed along that the publisher thought she'd taken too much Oxycontin before reading my email.

What was that old image I used? Maybe those days are behind me.



But don't count on it.

Looking Forward . . . to the Past

Other than one index in progress, for the next 29 days I have nothing but copyediting and proofreading on the schedule. Feels a little strange. Can't say I mind it entirely.

Although an easily indexable book generally offers better compensation per hour than the other two tasks, unfortunately most of my clients don't dabble in easily indexable books.

Author Contact, Codes, Thanksgiving

Some presses put me directly in touch with authors. I speak of dreading that experience, but the exchanges are often pleasant and rewarding.

Most of the time, a press's managing editor sends me a job, and I edit and return it to the managing editor. No mess, no fuss. I also can say certain things to the managing editor about a book that would be more difficult to say to an author.

[Sometimes, though, I wonder if presses don't always know when there's such a problem with the manuscript, and they want the anonymous copyeditor to blame when they bring the hammer down on the author.]

When I'm put in touch with the author, I can't hide behind the anonymity that copyediting usually provides. Thankfully I've never had the paths cross of Author Contact and Rancid Book. I recently had one back to back with the other, and I started thinking how fortunate that the author I was dealing with had written a very nice book and wasn't trying to pass off a bunch of financial and demographic research done in 2004 in the present tense as if it were still relevant.

But I digress. Imagine that.

In a recent project I copyedited, the press had coded the book before it came to me. Thus, the material below in angle brackets appeared before most blocks of copy. The material following the second bracket is what the code stands for:

<2HT>Second half title

<A>A-head

<ACK>Acknowledgments

<B>B-head

<BIB>Bibliography

<BMH>Back matter head

<BML>Back matter list

<BMT>Back matter text

<BQ>Block quote

<CN>Chapter number

<COT>Chapter opening text

<CPT>Chapter part title

<CT>Chapter title

<DED>Dedication

<DIA>Dialogue

<ESIGN>End of <SIGN>

<FMH>Front matter head

<HT>Half title

<L>List, unnumbered

<LH>List head

<LTR>Letter opening

<LTRT>Letter text

<N>Notes

<NH>Notes head

<NL>Numbered list

<NLH>Numbered list head

<P>Poem

<PN>Part number

<PST>Part subtitle

<PT>Part title

<SB>Strong break

<SIGN>Used for newspaper article titles, etc.

<T>Regular text

<T1>First paragraph of text

<TFL>Text flush left

<TOCBM>Table of contents back matter

<TOCCN>Table of contents chapter number

<TOCCT>Table of contents chapter title

<TOCFM>Table of contents front matter

<TOCPN>Table of contents part number

<TOCPST>Table of contents part subtitle

<TOCPT>Table of contents part title

<TP>Title page

NOTE: Ethnographic sections, which should be typographically distinct from regular text, are indicated by an “E” preceding individual code elements (e.g., <ETFL> for ethnographic text flush left, etc.).

This manuscript has more elements than most, but a list half this size isn't uncommon for most books. Part of what I do -- when the press doesn't do it first -- is put similar codes in the manuscript myself, thus telling the designer how to lay out the book. Put as simply as my brain can understand it, the designer can set up a certain style for chapter heads, search all text coded <CH>, apply style to code, and voila. Of course, there's a whole lot that goes on after that and before that, and nothing is quite that simple, but that's what the codes are for.

For this reason, authors, the look of a manuscript ultimately doesn't matter. 

Theoretically you could send a manuscript to a typesetter in 4-point Ridiculous, superscripted, and as long as these codes are in place, the designer should be able to work jes' fine.

The obverse (?) is also true. No matter how much you try to fancy up your manuscript, there's a point of diminishing returns for everyone down the line -- and you, too. A properly coded manuscript needs no formatting other than bold and italics and a few other things that import into design software. Boxes and shading and all that goes away, and a designer needs to re-create it. 

That's why an author should never put boxes and shading and auto-lists and all that other unnecessary noise in a manuscript in the first place.

Not that this author did. Well, actually I don't know, because the press obviously intervened on the manuscript before I saw it. But when I compiled my answers to some of the author's concerns, I noted that many of them dealt with how the manuscript looked, and the codes -- which, after all, are significant to me (duh, like knowing proofreading marks and reading subway maps -- aren't these universal survival skills?) -- weren't much help to the author.

My email to the very nice author follows, and please note that this was not my initial correspondence with the author. We'd already established a rapport and worked some things out between us, with some give and take on both sides. This email was sent essentially after my work was complete.

Hi. Just responding to some of your queries, so you don’t worry about this stuff.

1. The columns of contributions not lining up -- actually, they are, in theory. There’s a tab space between each number on each line, but just not a tab in the ruler, so the spacing is all different in appearance. Once the designer imports that text, the tabs will be there, and everything will line up pretty.

2. <LH>Oyster Dressing.

You’d wondered about this not being bold. The designer determines all those specs at typesetting time. The LH indicates it’s a head. I’m sure it’ll all make sense on the page.

3. You should be reborn a human being so that you will have a good life.” [Q: Shouldn’t there be end quote marks here (or somewhere) to close the instruction?]

No, because the text preceding it is set as a prose extract.

4. [Q: Can we put a blank line between the ends of all the poetry sections and the next paragraphs?  It bothers me that it all looks so crowded.]

Again, that’s a design thing that will be resolved at typesetting. There’s typically space around extracts and lists in most books. Don’t worry about how the manuscript looks. The designer goes by the codes, not the spacing on the page.

5. <CT>Silk Stories [Endnote 1 is here after “Silk Stories,” not at the end of COT]

No can do. Note markers after chapter titles, heads, etc., are verboten. Needs to go after the first next logical block of running text, usually the first sentence -- as done here.

6. Need to keep “nowhere” lowercase in “middle of nowhere”: From Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate: middle of nowhere : an extremely remote and isolated place  *ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere. 

If we wanted to uppercase the term, really it would be Middle of Nowhere, Montana, but we shouldn’t do that either.

Hope that helps.

===

Happy Thanksgiving, folks. Hope it was a good one. We forsook the home event, and three of us -- myself, my wife, our younger son -- drove to Weaverville, NC, to a nice little restaurant and had a delightful meal and walked around a little afterward. Back home, nothing but another night at home. Nice change of pace. No preparation, no clean-up, and 90 minutes or so of quiet conversation that might be better than we'd get at home, with all the jumping up and down around the table that would be going on. My younger son's the type whom sometimes you don't know what's going on until you ask, and some of the time you don't even know what to ask, so the occasional direct answers and questions we get out of him in such situations are always helpful. His older brother has gone through parts of his life when we seemed to hear most of the goings-on in his head. That has never, ever been the case with our younger issue. I guess there's benefits to both. And it comes and goes. Once our younger son gets on a roll, it's nice to find out what's happening in his life.

I'll probably fry a turkey at Christmas, but I think we just made it a family tradition to get the hell out of town and go eat somewhere else on Thanksgiving. I guess it's our Central Appalachian version of Thanksgiving in Chinatown, which we've also done. With Asheville and environs 75 minutes of a beautiful drive down the road, that's not a problem.

View from 19/23, Tennessee/North Carolina

The Process: Ulysses 2

Except for a three-and-a-half-year break when I was in college, I’ve been proofreading one way or the other since I was 14 years old. I’m 52 now. Seen a lot of stuff. The progression has been more or less orderly.

I also copyedit and index, but proofreading’s the one whut brung me.

My older son is an actor, just out of college, and as of the beginning of this summer had a year’s worth of paying acting work ahead of him. (Hallelujah.) I spoke with him a few days ago and asked, “Do you enjoy it now? The routine of the work and the rhythm of the day? It’s different doing a show 30 times instead of five, and rehearsing three or four other things at the same time. Are you enjoying it? Can you see yourself doing it for many years to come?”

His answer was an unequivocal yes, and I can understand it. My first job out of college was proofreading airline timetables and lottery tickets. Sometimes 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Once went 42 days without a day off.

Of course, that’s my life now, but it’s different having an employer say, “No weekend this weekend, and oh, by the way, 12-hour days.” And that’s about how it went down. Fait accompli.

It's also a little different when you're 21 years old without a responsibility in the world.

Anyway, I finally left the company, but my next job was another proofreading gig, and every job since has had an element of proofreading in there. I obviously enjoy the work and figured I’d seen about everything in the last four decades.

* * *

I’m going to deviate from this blog’s norm for this coming series of entries by naming company, author, and title. As Finnley Wren said, “I didn’t mean to bring this up again. You’ll forgive the reference? It’s an intrinsic part of the story.”

Some months back, Oxford University Press contacted me to help in producing an ebook of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the 1922 text of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I thought reading Ulysses would be enough of a challenge, much less proofreading it. I’d heard about it all my life as one of the great unread pieces of literature -- unread because of its difficulty.

But I have to read it. Difficulty is no more of an issue than for books of systematic theology I indexed in which I barely understood a word. The work must be done.

What are the rules for this game? Make three Word files created from scans of a printed volume match every single jot and tittle in an acknowledged world masterpiece, along with 50 pages of introductory matter and 250 pages of explanatory notes.

The 1922 Shakespeare and Co. edition of Ulysses has about 4,000 known errors (typographical, factual, intentional, unintentional), all of which need to remain in the book.

Thus, the task is to make an electronic file match a printed book exactly. The goal is a one-to-one reproduction of 980 pages, from a troublesome scan resulting from small type, italics, and 90-year-old Continental typesetting standards that probably did not match the author’s intent, as subsequent editions showed. The job is not to put out the best or the most authoritative version of Ulysses; the job is to create an electronic version of an existing book.

And it’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, for god’s sake. Even if it’s exactly right, it might not be exactly right. And it's being done for Oxford University Press. While I treat every job that comes across my desk the same, I'd be lying if I didn't say this one came with a bit of a higher expectation than most.

Long way from airline timetables and McDonald's scratch-off games. And I thought the novel would be the hard part of the project.

No way. Here’s a marked-up page of the explanatory notes, and it's not the worst, only the most quickly available.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Patient

After living with this beast for the better part of the last three weeks, I'd almost like to say what Jon Voight said to Ned Beatty at the end of Deliverance: "Maybe it's best we don't see each other for a while."

But it's not that easy.

Indexia

I’m working on an institutional history—a mostly scholarly book, not a coffee-table book. What I’ve come to realize about every one of these histories regardless of format, and I’ve worked on plenty, is that each merits a lengthy subentry or entry titled “financial difficulties,” not to mention “leadership changes.” For most of the organizations, the financial difficulties occur about every two decades, following either the national economy or the fact that the organization's early years were the product of a prophet who took action without waiting to determine demand.

Anyway, an index that relates financial difficulties point by point—when they take place in every chapter, sometimes more than once, and overwhelm the content (not necessarily the case here)—makes for a rather tedious index. Moreover, I don’t do sub-subentries . . . especially when I'm not dead solid certain that the press's designers would get it right.

The only time I've ever done sub-subentries was for a Sandy Koufax biography. The structure of the book necessitated it—to me, at the time. I wish I had more sports biographies cross my desk.

Anyway—how many tangents so far?—this time, I am resolved not to have an entry in this institutional history on “financial difficulties.” I might tend more toward a proper-name approach, which I do . . . never. At least not intentionally. But this book is the same story in virtually every chapter, and sometimes with the same characters. Ugh. What was that quote below? “Same bed, different dreams”? Does it apply? I'm still trying to get my mind around it.

[Interlude: I’ve spoken or blogged about how themes repeat in my work, and how a concept I’d never heard before often shows up in rapid succession in unrelated projects. After reading the book that included “Same bed, different dreams,” I worked on another book representing an aspect of Asian history (the famine in China, 1958 to 1962; ugh {my next quotes posting will come with a warning and a disclaimer}) that also referred to “Same bed, different dreams.”]

I also proofread this institutional history first, which helps me lay out an indexing approach before beginning the work. Yes, reading the book first helps. Folks have asked over the years if I proofread and index at the same time. I guess I could, but both jobs would be the worse for it, and it would take longer, maybe. I don’t want to test it, although it is a time for changes.

—

Authors or benevolent editors perform a great favor for indexers by including subheads in their books. Some days I’d rather index a tedious, out-of-my-mental-range set of proofs with a subhead every couple of pages than a more accessible work with forty-page chapters and no break . . . and no clue about where the chapter is going.

The ultimate in indexer friendliness is a client of mine that publishes self-study textbooks, with three levels of heads, key terms BF ital with alternates ital, and a list of key terms at the end of every chapter. As an indexer, that’s about as close to ooh-la-la as it gets.

—

Production notes: Hardly in the interest of greening the LandonDemand intergalactic corporate HQ, I’ve gone to mostly paperless indexing. Back in the old days of 2011, I’d print out the PDF and have it next to the laptop while my head would dart back and forth as if at a tennis match some distance away. Now, instead, I open the PDF and Word, set the windows next to each other, and go from there.

Benefits: Less time in glancing back and forth, and flipping pages (it adds up); can copy and paste names, particularly names of institutions. That’s huge.

Drawbacks: Paging through the book in hard copy to see how long a section is seems quicker. But that’s not a big deal.

You’d think I’d have figured this out years ago.

Gone on long enough. Avoiding work.

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.