For Your Consideration: The Em Dash

http://www.slate.com/id/2295413/

The link above is making the rounds among editorial types. Personally, I have a feeling this contributor's writing would be tedious under any circumstances. When you've made your point intellectually and graphically within the first three paragraphs, and then proceed to drive the point into the ground and break it off, you've gone on far too long for me.

As with all kinds of writing, judicious use of whatever tools are at the writer's disposal is crucial. That statement refers not only to dashes but to words themselves.

Wednesday's Prodigious Passive Prize Goes to . . .

"On the one hand, it may be argued that the determination of the minor islands to be left under Japanese sovereignty required by the Potsdam Proclamation had been made by the treaty."

Today's index entry

Mornin, Bob, 98–99

Apropos of nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

haiku monday: chicken

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

Quote of the Day

From a book on the study of happiness:

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

Back to the Roots

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

Heads typed in all caps, requiring rekeying.

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

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

I could go on.

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

Is the Internet a Great Place or What?

 الصفحة التي كنت عليها تحاول إرسالك إلى http://boblandedits.blogspot.com/.

 إذا كنت لا ترغب في زيارة تلك الصفحة، يمكنك العودة إلى الصفحة السابقة.

Copyediting and Proofreading Harry Potter

No. Not me. The only interest I have in Harry Potter is that I'm glad it interested a generation in books, and a few members of my family are mighty interested in the books and movies.

We also have a British first edition of one of the books that I think was purchased in Germany in 2000 when one of the series came out. Interesting thing, from what I understand, is that one of the chapters ends differently than the US edition, and there might even be some chapter titles that are different, or a couple of chapters in different order. Huh? Well, whatever.

Anyway, I've linked below to a story about the woman who proofread the first few in the series and copyedited the last few. It's only mildly interesting, but I figure that a mention of Harry Potter might draw a little blog traffic. Shameless whore? Present.

Harry Potter haiku anyone? I'd be at a loss . . . except to use it to riff on publishing and money and myth -- and my wife wishing she could have seen Daniel Radcliffe in Equus.

http://www.sj-r.com/top-stories/x911070733/Riverton-woman-says-copy-editing-Harry-Potter-books-was-top-secret-job

Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Play?

Email received this morning from a publisher:

======

Hi Bob:

I know you have several projects in your hands right now, but I’ve run into a problem and I’m contacting all my indexers to see if anyone can help!

I received an index from a new indexer yesterday (my three “regulars” are busy), right on schedule, but it’s not acceptable.  I now have a book that is going to be overdue, without an index.  The book is 288 pages, with 8 pages of that reserved for the index.  The biggest problem with the rejected index is that the indexer does not have a grasp of the theological content, and many of the entries just don’t make sense, the contributors to the volume are not referenced properly, some of the page ranges are too wide, and poor decisions are made about what to break down and how to phrase things.

It may be possible to salvage some of the work—I could forward the rejected index to you—or maybe that just makes more work than not.

In any case, if there is any way you could help out with this index or if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Haiku Monday [Sleep]: The Report

Haiku Monday: The Winner

Toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.

—Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681)

The translation I originally heard for this statement was “Life is a dream, and dreaming, a dream.” I know barely enough Spanish to know that’s not a literal translation, but it’s close enough and it’s the one I’ve stuck with. And it sounds better in Spanish anyway.

Anyway.

My methodology.

I read nothing and, as you’ve now seen, made no comments while the posting was taking place. Promptly at midnight I printed two copies of all the haiku/comments. I put one copy aside, and then gave the other copy to my 18-year-old son, instructing him to black out all names and avatars. I was committed to treating this contest as much as possible with the haiku masters being anonymous.

I did read up a little on haiku, most of which echoed what Troll’s already explained elsewhere. I did not take the elements of classical Japanese haiku into account for their own sake; that is, if you incorporated classical haiku elements you were not awarded for it, nor were you penalized for their absence. And a little research shows that American haiku has branched off into pretty much a different form regardless. And that’s what we’re here for: some good ol’ Amurkun haiku. But in the case of Kireji particularly, I think it helps make for some good poetry.

And that’s what we’re dealing with: poetry, but you have a not very good English major doing the hosting. Furthermore, as your host and judge, you have an editor who’s had to suffer professionally through some of the most painful tripe ever written in the name of verse. Imagine the worst—the absolute worst—greeting-card/Burma Shave doggerel you’ve ever read. Then set up rhyming patterns that are broken out of laziness rather than intent. Then entirely screw up the meter. That’s most of the poetry I’ve been paid to endure.

Then there was the book of womanist theology/poetry I edited, in which the author spent the first 100 pages discussing herself and her qualifications for writing the book before getting to the content . . . kind of like I’m doing here. About page xliii of the preface (quoting my brother-from-another-mother Steve, “I crap you negative”), the author thanks a professor “who recognized me as a poet before I named myself Poet.” God save me from such insufferability. Haiku thankfully doesn’t allow much space for that. Nor would this crowd foist it on me.

About the topic. I’m generally sleep deprived. I slept most of the summer when I was fifteen years old, and sometimes I feel like I’ve been paying for it ever since. When Moi gave me an update toward the end of the day on Monday about what was going on in the comments section, I responded:

No sleep for the czar.
National Poetry Day . . .
Winks: Gang aft agley.

Yes, haikusters, yesterday was National Poetry Day, as declared by the United Nations. March 21, every year. And I didn’t even know it until one of my friends who declined to participate pointed it out to me.

And now it’s the middle of the night, or getting there, and still miles to go.

Enough background.

The criteria.

After the syllable count, what did I look for, numbered but in no particular order?

1. Turns of phrase or use of language that made me think, Wow.

2. Stark images of beauty. Or depravity. Or horror. Or glory. Two or more in seventeen syllables garnered extra points.

3. Economy of language. We’re all limited to the syllables. Within that, though, did the piece juggle more than one concept? Did it work on different levels? How much word power went into one intensely honed and crafted little nugget within a nugget?

4. Humor. Always a positive. Barring that, soul-crushing despair works, too. Or hope. But some emotional content.

5. An interesting take.

6. The proper combination of intrigue and comprehensibility. Did the haiku have an element of mystery, but could a reader who didn’t know what the topic was still figure out the topic, or at least come close? If you wrote about sleep or something related to it, but you’re the only one who knew it, that’s a little too much inside baseball. And I’ll admit, I’m kinda literal and frankly not too bright. Metaphor goes right past me. We’ll come out of a play or a movie, and my wife will say, “I thought the play was about such and so,” and I’m like, “Damn, I pretty much thought it was about the plot.” So, subtlety to the point of obscurity doesn’t work well for me.

Analysis.

This section is for you Nate Silver fans. Participants submitted, by my count, 29 haiku on topic. Of those, I had to kick out seven for violations of the only established rule: 5-7-5. There were some nice turns of phrase in those discarded lines, but unfortunately, they couldn’t count toward the contest.

I tried to categorize the topics. Some I counted in more than one category. These are very much subject to interpretation/change.

Dreams, 8

Sleep as metaphor, 5

Sleep, physical aspects of, 4

Sleep, absence of, 4 (very interesting)

Waking, 4

Other, 3

Sleep, as escape, 2

Sleep, spirituality and, 1

The results.

This is the hard part, as there was good in every single entry.

Joe D G, an old pal of mine who’s always had more than a finger in the spiritual realm, started us off on a nice note, grounding us in the eternal verities. The juxtaposition of presuming sleep yet being in a state of thorough awareness is jarring and makes me want to linger on this verse. The pairing of loss and gain also intrigues.

A newer pal of mine, spiritual after another fashion -- and one who straddles the line between friend and family member -- Drew hits me right where I live, as I’ve always viewed sleep as a pleasure of the flesh. And “the second best thing,” I am presuming he means while lying down.

Karen ranked high with her observation. And it’s absolutely true. Hurricanes also hit at night, it seems. I liked the mystery of the 2nd line ending with the number, and the last line devoted entirely to time.

Last week’s winner Foam had the first phrase that really grabbed me: “Forty winks gone sour.” A great lead, pushing me into the rest of the piece. “Contorted yawn” -- aren’t they all? Her first haiku (excuse me for turning editor here) I thought was promising until the last syllable of the second line. We’ve had 11 syllables of noise. The word “noise” there seemed unnecessary. Some type of ‘60s Batman graphic might have been good there: “buzzing whining chainsaw ZAP!” Ooof? Thunk?

Master Troll’s first effort: I must admit that this one failed me. Probably my ample ignorance showing. I don’t know Troll that well, but I know enough to know that he’s trying to achieve something here that’s just out of my grasp . . . like a name I can’t remember or a song I can’t recall. If he lets on what the secret is, I’m sure I’ll think, Of course! But until then . . . He acknowledged he needed to come up with something better. And of course, the master did.

The dead poet salute from Troll was great. I like the “stop” at the end of the first line sans punctuation, so there’s a visual stop but no stop at all. “Frosted” is a great touch. The capitalization of “Promise Keeper” in the first line makes me think of the group by that name, which throws me off a little, because I expect the next two lines to somehow evoke more imagery along that train of thought, but I’m not seeing it.

To me, “Lizard” is the best of Troll’s trilogy. It’s understandable yet mysterious. I’m not sure if this is some waking dream of his own, or maybe Troll fell asleep with the TV on and awoke in the middle of a nature show. Either way, the lines, to me, reflect that odd sense of confusion and certainty that accompanies coming out of a dream. Did that happen? Am I awake? Something is vivid, and five seconds later is gone. We shed memories of our dreams like a lizard sheds its skin. Or like the Onion headline read a few years ago, “Cast-off Paris Hilton Skin Found in Central Park.” Oh, never mind. Nice work, Troll. And nice alliteration with “learn lizards lunch” and “shedding skin sometimes.”

Moi: The first one has me entirely confused, like Troll’s first. I am likely just a simpleton. This seems to be the tale of a longing lover, or not. I’m not sure who is sleeping here, if the narrator is desiring sleep or commanding it. There seems to be a lot of activity going on for something delayed or maybe interrupted. Many mixed signals here. But as always, keep in mind that I am an idiot.

I think the second of the trilogy combines two beautiful thoughts: “Sprung from winter’s cold / cruel womb,” and “newborn shoots bloom a / tribute to the sun.” Great phrasing, great application of the topic. What knocks it down a notch for me is the “a” dangling at the end of line 2. The internal rhyme on the line is nice, though (womb . . . bloom), and I think even transposing the last two words would have worked better, also leaving you with the interesting phrase “a bloom / tribute” and a strong emphasis at the end of every line.

The third haiku, Moi, is one of four in the lot that I ranked with the highest scores across the board. “Psycho sous chef dreams”: “Flash of kitchen knives / sunk deep into fattened flesh.” Are these dreams about a psycho sous chef? Dreams by a psycho sous chef? With just enough of a hint of Jeffrey Dahmer here, I wonder if you’ve been watching far too many cooking shows. I especially like the rhythm of these lines.

I think K9’s 2nd and 3rd lines are outstanding. The phrase “defenseless hemispheres” is perhaps my favorite of the entire contest. Indeed the brain at sleep is defenseless. I’ve always puzzled at people who are afraid to relay their dreams to others. Most of us have no control over what goes on in our dream state. Our hemispheres are indeed defenseless for that time. “Birdsong alarm,” also nice. The first line throws me, though. “A little like death” . . . I think of the French phrase la petit mort (the little death), which is a euphemism for orgasm. But I guess la petit mort leaves us somewhat defenseless as well. K9, while you’re not a winner this week, just for “defenseless hemispheres,” I’ll be happy to send you the phonies or the fraggers book. Both are good. You can email me your address, and I’ll send one along. My email is landondemand@bvunet.net.

Boxer: Dogs do indeed dream; of that I have no doubt. I enjoyed the pun on “rest”: “Spring sun awakens the rest.” And plants and birds certainly rejoice upon awakening as few other beings do, whether by song or by stretching to the sun, or by opening themselves to the warmth and glow. Beauty awakening all around.

Derek is a pal of mine who I knew would step up and deliver. Numbers one and three nailed it. The Scots couple murdering more than sleep -- wonderful. Sheep dreaming of electric shepherds as they run through blades of grass. What does it say that two of the top-ranking haiku deal with sharp instruments? Is it me? Is it you and Moi? I don’t know. Is there some Jungian thing about knives? Derek’s middle haiku was a tame, pleasant interlude.

KafkaFishy brought us the best word: “Insectuous.” Brilliant. We have a lot of literary haiku this week; don’t know if that’s the norm. Fishy’s second, third, and fourth ones are impressionistic, evocative . . . but like Troll’s Z, I feel like they are just out of reach for me. I love the sounds of “rose apple sedation” and “deep clover dreaming,” but the meanings are elusive, or maybe illusive. Again, it’s probably just me. Perhaps they are dream images. I also like the double interpretation of “Gypsy dreams of God.” Is this a Gypsy dream, whatever that might be, or is it a gypsy dreaming? But going back to number one: Metamorphosis! was bunched with a few others right at the top of my rankings.

Karl also got into my head: “I’m up, not at all . . . on autopilot.” Yes indeed. The juxtaposition in the first line is great. “Here I am, but I am not.”

Fleur, another dear old friend, received very late notice and tossed this off in a manner of minutes. And I rank it at the absolute top of the 2nd tier, just out of the running for the top slot. “On the pillow, a shadow / of my face remains.” Although I’m fighting off Shroud of Turin images, I like this very much. She also mentions weep / sleep / pillow. Unfortunately when I wake up with a moist pillow, it’s usually drool, but that’s more than you need to know.

Yes, Kym, I think we all can relate to being so tired that even our dreams bring sleep. Very nice image, kind of uroborotic, if that’s a word. A frustration for me has been dreaming of actually working on the manuscript that I left when I went to bed. I wake up feeling like I’ve been working, yet no more work has been done. Quite frustrating. But dreaming of sleep is almost like the Doublemint commercials. Going back to what Drew said, it’s like a second helping of pleasures of the flesh.

Of the disqualified haiku, I won’t call you out by name, but some phrases certainly got my attention. Wish I could have included them:

* according to the / circadian rhythm / siesta at two [love the thought]

* uncertainty is fading / now I can get some [amazing how removal of stress induces sleep]

* rest awaits in the grave [yes, I’m counting on it, too]

* so begins the flowery revival [beautiful]

* fifty-one and fighting [is that three of us?]

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a prize.

Well, all of you do. And like just about every other week, the choice is impossible, but it has to be made. As I mentioned, with the help of my son, the haiku were completely anonymous this week. I read and graded and ranked them and did all that, and only afterward did I look at my second sheet to reveal the names and other comments. And frankly, I thought some of the pieces were actually written by other folks. I couldn’t tell who was who.

Four haiku were at the top of my list. Two actually came from one person -- Derek -- which is quite impressive, given the competition. (But if you know Derek, it’s not at all surprising.) Fishy’s insectuous dream horror shared in the three-way tie for second.

But the one that grabbed me, that I laughed out loud upon reading, whose rhythm hit the marks from start to finish, and whose wordplay works on a few different levels:

Flash of kitchen knives
sunk deep into fattened flesh.
Psycho sous chef dreams.

Moi, Stepping-Stones is yours, presuming you were serious. Congratulations. It was a very tough week in which to win.

Thanks to all for allowing me the honor of hosting and judging. I’m going to try to get . . . some . . . sleep.

Haiku Monday (3/21 edition): The Topic Is Sleep

For those of you who've come here for the latest installment in LandonDemand's travails in the publishing world, please excuse -- or revel in -- this temporary interlude.

It's Haiku Monday!

Former participants know the drill, and here it is for the newcomers. Go to the comments section for this post and submit your haiku. This week's topic is sleep. Any take whatsoever on that word is acceptable. The only requirement is that your haiku meet the mandatory 5-7-5 syllable structure. No matter how delightful, if I have to count past that on my fingers on any given line, that's an immediate disqualification.

We editors can be sticklers for style.

Now, those of you who actually know something about what really make up good haiku, have at it, and set an example for the rest of us. I'll try to read up a little on haiku in the meantime and remember what I can from Troll's ongoing teachings, but I can't guarantee that a classically formed and perfect haiku will beat out something that just really grabs my attention.

We editors can be arbitrary.

The competition is intense; there's never a clunker in the bunch. Submit more than one if you're inspired. Deadline is Monday, 3/21/2011, 11:59pm, EDT.

Winner does come away with prizes. Of course, the absolute most coveted prize is the privilege of displaying the Haiku Monday winners' badge, prominently shown in the right-hand column of this blog. (I am an extremely humbled former winner of this honor.) You can display the badge on your own blog or, presumably, your Facebook page, your mailbox, your forehead, or anywhere else you'd like to draw attention to your accomplishment.

The second most coveted prize I am demonstrating here: the option of hosting and judging the following week's contest (not mandatory).

The final prize (not available in all states; supplies are limited) is a gift from the judge or another contributor. This week's gift is a book from the LandonDemand client library. Among the fascinating tomes you could win are

Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America
Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam
Dual Disasters: Humanitarian Aid After the 2004 Tsunami
Stepping-Stones: A Journey Through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne
Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866
Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion
Einstein, Polanyi and the Laws of Nature
Cowboy Park: Steer-Roping Contests on the Border

In keeping with this week's theme, I can guarantee that many of these books will indeed induce sleep.

I've got many more. Depending on the winner's area of interest, I'll try to unearth something you'd actually want to read or can give to someone as a gift. Trust me, no offense taken. I read every one of the above titles because I was paid to -- although some had the side benefit of being interesting and well-written.

As will your haiku.

Winner announced sometime Tuesday, 3/22/2011. Best of luck. And if you're new to Haiku Monday or this blog, feel free to participate. Everyone is welcome.

So, haiku away. If you're not already there, the topic is sleep.

PS: For an example of a previous contest, please visit http://trollstroll.blogspot.com/2011/02/haiku-monday-water.html

Fortune Cookies: 0 for 2

"A dark-haired woman will soon be giving you a gift."

"You have a charming way with words and should write a book."

I suspect one's not gonna happen, and there's no way the other's ever gonna happen.

UPDATE: Within a week of receiving these fortune cookies, a dark-haired woman gave me a gift because of my "charming way with words." And that is no joke.

Today's Quote

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

Bertrand Russell

As I Was Saying

Well, after a most different and difficult start to the year blog-wise, it's back to the trenches.

Received a call a few days back from a prospective author, referred my way from one of my publishers. This publisher primarily prints books for motivational speakers, often of a religious bent -- mostly, but not always, tending toward Christian fundamentalist/evangelical.

Author and I are going through the usual drills: size of manuscript, format, turnaround time, rates. Author mentioned earlier in the conversation that she has her PhD and she thinks the manuscript is already in pretty good shape (double red flag). Now she asks what other services I provide, because she works with some Christian associations that might have a need for what I do.

I explain -- copyediting, proofreading, indexing -- and then say that I work for a number of denominational/scholarly presses: "Westminster, the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation; Orbis, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers; Crossroad, mostly Catholic topics; Paulist, the Jesuits. I've also worked for the Episcopal publishing house. . . ."

"OK. But have you worked for any Christian associations?"

"Associations? Well, these are all publishing houses."

"Yes, but I'm referring to Christian organizations."

"Umm, do you not consider Catholics Christians? Presbyterians? Episcopalians?"

"Well, I'm just in the looking-around stage, so I'll be looking at other editors, too. I've got your information. Thanks."

 
Bigots. Anyone who thinks Mitt Romney has a chance in hell of being president doesn't know enough people like this author, and doesn't realize how many of them there are, and that they vote like crazy. And you can take that any way you want.

Jessica Thompson: A Remembrance

With a heavy heart, I revisit these words from a blog posting just a few days ago.

With Demand I truly feel like I’m part of a company and a community, and I’m not talking about getting the warm fuzzies over corporate America and a shameless march toward the almighty profit. I’m much more talking about the relationships I have with some of my fellow copy chiefs and a small handful of the editors in my charge.

After the minor fecal storm that my year in review created, I’d planned on treating Demand once again with the anonymity typically afforded to my other clients. I was likely going to do that anyway.

In retrospect, however, the above paragraph inadvertently made the posting into something meaningful.

One of my fellow copy chiefs died yesterday.

Jessica Thompson, whom I knew only through the series of tubes, died in an accident at her home in Cambodia. She’d gone there last fall for a bit of adventure: a six-month copyediting gig at the Cambodia Daily.

I only knew Jessica through a bunch of email exchanges--mostly of the snarky, informal kind that circulate among a group of friends--and then some side emails that spun off from that. Such is workplace friendship in the virtual world.

Jess came across as a lively, curious, intelligent, very funny woman. I’m stunned to think I’ll never have the pleasure of meeting her in real life. I believe in my last side email to her, I’d told her that if in her worldwide travels she ever found herself driving up I-81 through Appalachia, we were only two miles off the interstate and there’d always be a place for her here.

She spent some time writing for the Times of India, from the perspective of a young, female American in New Delhi. When we first started working together, I checked out some of her posts. Here’s an excellent example that generated a lot of comments. More are available by searching “Jessica Thompson” “Times of India”:

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/chandnichowktochicago/entry/eve-teasers-back-the-off

Her bio on that page reads, “Jessica Thompson is an American journalist living and working in New Delhi as an editor for Times Internet. She is not from Chicago, but says she is sometimes because more people know where it is. She is actually from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jessica lived in New Delhi for four years in the 1980s as the child of a Foreign Service Officer, and returned last October to pursue her dream of escaping the American media collapse.”

The news is still coming in on what happened to Jessica. I think I can speak for all the copy chiefs by saying we miss her already.

Shout Out to DSSers

Thanks so much to all of you who have read and commented about this blog on your website. It's really quite fascinating to see what people will say behind the veil of anonymity that they likely wouldn't have the guts to put their real names to in an email or a response to this blog.

Real names. I've put myself out there. Would any of you care to do the same? No, because you think you'd be jeopardizing the position you have with the company you all seem to loathe, but which still absolutely fascinates you for some reason. If it's just a gig, why do some of you people have hundreds of posts on DSS? And some of you don't even work there anymore? Amazing.

I'm getting great amusement about the thrashing over the Michael Steele quote at the top of the blog post, which was pretty obviously intended to point up the cultural illiteracy of the gentleman who headed up the Republican Party over the last few years. From what I've seen at DSS, subtlety isn't a strong suit over there. I can draw a few conclusions from the inability of a number of you to grasp the intent of the post. None are complimentary.

Interesting that "Patrick," another courageous soul, hasn't taken down the forum topic and the thread he started, even though he claims his SOP is not to allow mentions of real names on his site. Not sure what his fascination or motivation is here. I guess he's driving traffic while he can, not that I blame him.

Some of you should really learn to read. I've searched this page for "Moi" as a first-person reference. Moi is a friend of mine, whose blog I link to and who sends in comments on some of my posts. "Refers to himself as 'Moi'?" Where?

I don't claim to be a writer. Never have, nor would I want to be one. It's very hard work to do well, and it's not for everybody. Not all writers are editors, and not all editors are writers. The best of both admit they need the other -- another point that many DSSers seem to miss. Editors, when they are writing, obviously need another editor. If you want to see some nice writing, I'd invite any of you to check out Moi's blog and hunt around a while.

Yes, Adam V. Lally, I can see you're from Atlanta, or at least near there. It shows up in the Feedjit gadget. As do the hometowns of most of the other people who've checked in here. St. Charles, Mo., Englewood, Ohio, Syracuse, N.Y., Austin, Topeka, Phoenix, Tucson (hope you're not too hung up on grammar), Huntington, Rego Park, N.Y., Lake Forest, Calif., Mankato, Minn. . . . It's a regular travelogue.

Anyway, hope you're having fun. The longer everything stays up and active, the less I'm convinced that Patrick's all that concerned with anonymity after all.

Year in Review 2010

As former Republican Party chair Michael Steele said, quoting his favorite book War and Peace, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Well, actually it was neither. Just love the above anecdote.

The problem with writing a year in review is actually remembering the year. As a freelancer, sometimes the days float together. Weekends aren’t different from weekdays. The deadlines are short, and the seasons aren’t real defined. Another FedEx shipment comes in, another UPS drop-off; the lines on my work calendar change, but not much else. So one year slips into the next.

My sons turned 21 and 18 this year, and I turned 50. I guess those are some milestones.

For my fiftieth birthday, I went to a place I’d read about a number of times in the course of my employment: The Abbey at Gethsemani, www.monks.org. This is the real deal, I imagine. Other Trappist monasteries around the country seem to have given themselves over to being convention centers. The Thomas Merton Institute, which I think is near Gethsemani, does some of that stuff, but the Abbey itself is silent, peaceful, beautiful, mesmerizing. I’ll never think of birds chirping in the same way again. Five days there, and I’d do it again tomorrow. In certain frames of mind, I’d sign up for the long haul. I’d probably have to get over that whole Catholic/Jewish/agnostic thing, but frankly I suspect that the longtimers there have some pretty good questions of their own. I spoke with the Retreat Master for a while, Father Carlos -- a very worldly monk who had been a parish priest in the Philippines, and the order still ships him around the world for various duties, so it’s not like he’s lived the cloistered life. We were discussing what passes for where I am spiritually and psychically, and he said, “Organized religion will ruin you.” Straight from the horse’s mouth.

But if it weren’t for organized religion, I’d have a lot less work. As always, the players come and go, and even within that, the amount of work I might get from any given publisher varies greatly from year to year. For that reason, as a freelancer I don’t turn down work and will usually find a way to put in a plug for myself if a new contact comes my way through a third party. More on interesting referrals to come.

I found out toward the end of last year that the managing editor at one of my main clients is retiring later this month. This news makes freelancers very nervous. The managing editor (or sometimes the production editor) is the person in a publishing house who farms out work to freelancers. I’ve had one or two managing editors over time whom I’ve wanted to take out life insurance policies on, in case anything ever happened to them. Catherine comes close to being one of them. She’s a very tough customer, but we’ve managed to craft out a pretty friendly relationship over the years. I remember one time when I gave her a hard time for her handwriting. She informed me she had polio as a child. I’ve felt stupider, but not often.

So, Catherine is leaving at the end of this month, and I’m hopeful that she is training her replacement well. I told Catherine last month that she should only say four words to the new hire: “Bob Land [name of another freelancer here].” Catherine said she’ll make sure the new person understands who the good vendors are. The good thing is that one of the two people whom the search narrowed down to had no previous publishing experience. That’s a plus. The fear is that a new managing editor comes in with her/his own list of favorites. Big fear.

The year 2010 started out with not much on the books, and I panicked. I went back through my lists of invoices for the past few years and started identifying clients who hadn’t contacted me recently. As one of Moi’s posters once said, “I wish it was that easy.” Sometimes it is. I ended up rehabilitating three or four companies I hadn’t heard from in a couple of years. One of them ended up leading to another publisher that now uses me to edit one of its journals (4x/year) and has used me for one proofing job (I’ll contact them for more). The original company itself has probably contacted me for four editing jobs since reestablishing relations. Another publisher, for whom I used to proof a good bit, is now back into the regular groove of sending me work. I don’t know why some publishers all of a sudden forget a freelancer is there. If it was a problem with my work, why upon contacting them would they say, “Oh, you’re available? We’ll have something for you this week.” It happens too frequently to say it can’t happen.

Interesting contact/client: Usually I don’t mention people by name, but I might as well here, just ’cause it’s kind of fun. I indexed a book this year for one of the Rolling Stones. It wasn’t Keef’s book, but still cool. Chuck Leavell was the keyboardist for the Allman Brothers after Duane Allman passed, Sea Level (his own band), Clapton’s Unplugged band, and scores of others, and he also has been the Stones’ keyboardist and de facto musical director since the early 1980s. By “musical director,” I mean he makes up the playlists and all that when they’re on tour. He’s also an environmentalist and tree farmer and plantation owner in central Georgia. I had indexed his autobiography a few years ago, Between Rock and a Home Place.

He’s written a new book, Growing a Better America, and when it came time for the index, he contacted Mercer U. Press and asked for the name of the indexer on the last book. Thus it happened that I started exchanging phone calls and emails with one of the Rolling Stones. Great guy, extremely friendly. My wife, Tere, of similar Alabama-Georgia roots as Chuck, was excited. When he called one time, Tere said, “Is his name actually on your caller ID?” Yep, there it is.

As I was sending him my invoice, I indicated that I’d be happy to barter some future editorial services on his next book in exchange for some Stones tickets next time they tour. We’ll see. But that’s my interesting author story for the year.

Fun books. In my particular niche of the publishing world, not too many come through. My idea of fun is loose leading. But the good thing about working for university presses is there’s no telling what will come across the desk sometimes. A fun book this year was Doonesbury and the Art of G. B. Trudeau, from Yale UP. If you’re a Doonesbury fan or a fan of illustration and graphic design in general, this book is a winner -- or even if you’re looking for a gift idea. Lot of nifty stuff in there about the mechanics of putting the strip together, as well as illustrations of a great deal of collateral that Trudeau has developed over the years, such as for local festivals, advertisements, and so on. And while Trudeau himself came out with a book last year that was strictly a Doonesbury retrospective, and that’s not what this one tries to do, the book still gives an arc of the strip over time. Since I stopped reading Doonesbury about a million years ago, seeing where he’s gone with it was interesting. And it’s always fun being reminded of “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”

One of these years, I’ll go back through my invoices to determine how much of my work comes from proofing, editing, and indexing. I’m always complaining about indexing on the blog, because good news rarely makes the front page. So many of the books I index are rather a chore, because I don’t have a good grasp of the content. I just indexed a book (2011 news) for the sister of a woman I worked with 20-something years ago -- freelancers, take note: don’t change email addresses and such too frequently that people can’t find you (and I suppose a blog or website helps as well) -- and University of North Carolina is the press. I’d love to have them as a client, but I’ll wait awhile to bug them. I probably already did, years ago. Anyway, UNC has a lengthy document of indexing instructions, some of which is quite helpful. Even though they instruct indexers to begin all entries with capital letters (grrr), they provide one very good piece of advice for the indexer that I would do well to apply to all future work: don’t put so much detail in the index entry that the reader finds nothing else when going to the page. Excellent advice, yet I fear that it’s exactly that kind of detail that at least one of my clients and certainly authors groove on. We’ll see if I can incorporate the concept without angering folks.

One of my freelance cohorts tried to get me to do an index for an ebook, a step I’m presently avoiding.

Other technological developments: One of my publishers wanted me to mark up a PDF for proofreading instead of returning hard copy with corrections on it. After offering my perspective on that task, the publisher backed off. We’ll see where that goes.

Copyediting is still copyediting. I’m doing a little more coding and applying of style sheets than before, which is fine. Doesn’t take much time (applying style sheets is almost fun), and it’s certainly a benefit for the publishers.

To wrap up the year, on December 31, one of my very good clients (essentially a vanity press) said that 2011 was the year she was selling the business. After a short email exchange, she basically offered the business to me. At another point in my life, I might consider being a publisher, but not now . . . I don’t think. After so many years of avoiding working with published authors, the idea of spending my days working with unpublished ones while still trying to pay the bills (two kids in college next year) seems not too enticing. But one never knows.

Oh, almost forgot about my much-reviled client.

If you’ve spent any time in the last year or so around freelance writing websites, or spent any time in the last few months reading the business/tech pages of the national news organs, you’ve probably heard about Demand (Media) Studios. I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of the company and its history or its business model here. All that information is readily available with some searches, and if you’re not already familiar with the company, this little report won’t mean much to you.

Long story short: “It’s the death of journalism.” It’s not journalism. “They’re paying writers pennies when they used to make dollars.” They’re paying my son a pretty good wage for a 21-year-old, and he can work anytime day or night anywhere in the world, and he’s not saying “fries with that?” “They just put out the most bottom-feeding, feeble crap that’s available on the Internet.” They put out some very simplistic content and a whole lot of intelligent content that’s just not as much fun for columnists to write about. “They’re a sweatshop.” Depends on the work you’re doing and your approach to it. People who are making a few dollars an hour are doing so because of their approach to the task. “They’re driving down wages for all writers.” I hope I’d never hear that comment from any free marketeers. They are paying a rather decent hourly wage for the work they require, presuming one can work efficiently.

The story of my hiring is available elsewhere on this blog. I went out to a meeting with the company in September 2009 and found out that people up to the EVP level had read my blog postings. I essentially shamed them into hiring me, because they hadn’t been hiring editors with book experience beforehand.

What do I do for the company? Still a little copyediting, but mostly I supervise the work of other copyeditors, presently about 85 of them. That means I review their work every month or two and write rather detailed critiques of a number of articles they’ve edited, giving them guidance on how better to work with the writers to meet the company’s guidelines. I also help man the Help Desk, where writers query staffers and copy chiefs (that’s me and about ten or so other folks) to get clarification on requests that copyeditors are making of them.

What I can say is this: I’ve run into a hell of a lot of good editors working for this company. Some aren’t so good, but that’s going to happen when you have so many copyeditors doing the work. And the ones who really aren’t good are shown the door, sometimes in rather quick fashion. But I now work with a lot of very fine people who bring a lot of good experience to the table. I’ve met a number of these folks in person, and I’d have to say that some are pretty good friends of mine at this point. And I can also say that working for Demand has, yes, improved my work as a copyeditor for other clients.

Does the company make a lot of people angry? Absolutely. Is their output generally miscategorized by Internet bloggers? Absolutely. Am I going to continue working for the company? For the foreseeable future, for my own reasons. If I won the lottery tomorrow, would I give it up? Yep, that and indexing. But there are some aspects of the job I’d miss. Working for myself for the last 17 years (geez), I must admit that I get lonely sometimes, even though I have clients I speak with on a regular though intermittent basis. With Demand I truly feel like I’m part of a company and a community, and I’m not talking about getting the warm fuzzies over corporate America and a shameless march toward the almighty profit. I’m much more talking about the relationships I have with some of my fellow copy chiefs and a small handful of the editors in my charge. At this point, they—the people and the relationships—mean a lot to me. And while my previous stint in management, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, didn’t quite turn out as planned, I’m getting another shot here . . . not that I relish being in management by any means. But one of the knocks against me at the Fed was that I was too close to my staff. Well, hell, there’s far worse things. And I like to think that for a lot of editors and writers, I provide a certain approach to my duties that positively influences the people I’m working with.

Back to work.

Quote of the Day

From today's proofreading project:

Sober bouncers serve a "vital" function of preventing the intoxicated beautiful people from succumbing to the advances of the riffraff.

Presumably, the sober bouncers need not concern themselves with the intoxicated beautiful people succumbing to the advances of other pulchritudinous drunks.

Another Indexing Dilemma

First, Happy New Year to the loyal readership and drive-by viewers.

The rapper 50 Cent appears in the book I'm indexing. Given that numbers are to be alphabetized as if the word was spelled out, should "50 Cent" appear alphabetized as "Fifty Cent" or "Fiddy Cent"?

As projected back in November, indexes did take up much of December. I think 8 or 9 indexes rolled off the LoD desk, amid other work. Tends to drive me crazy after a while.

I'm planning on another Year-in-Review post sometime soon, a la 2009. No crazy authors this year that I can recall, but some other interesting stuff happened and may portend for 2011. And a lot of stuff went on under the radar. A peek at the Internet's most reviled content producer might be in order.