Karma? You Decide

We then engaged Ed Thompson, who did a masterful job of translating the document into English, and Bod Land, who performed the editorial tasks to make it sing.

Funny thing is, I saw this typo at indexing stage (it had been correct earlier) and pointed it out. Supposedly the error was corrected before the file was sent to the printer. Some things are just meant to be.

Organization Man

[breathe]

I’ve been wanting to write two posts for quite a while, and I’ve figured out a way to combine them. Now if I can just write.

The issues deal with authors providing proper guides through their books. Such guides come in different forms.

1. Author/date citations. Authors, take note: An author/date citation (e.g., Jones 2009) is intended to, and must do no more than, provide a marker to an exact place in a properly compiled Works Cited list, or maybe a References list, if no other Jones 2009 appears. As a copyeditor or proofreader, I don’t want any other information except author and date, except a page number for a quote or “emphasis added” if the author feels the need to alter the cited copy. If your reference is to “Hitler 1928,” and that happens to take me to Bernard Hitler, Now I Am a Fountain Pen: The Story of My Bar Mitzvah (Flatbush, NY: Gravesend Press, 1928), so be it. No explanation required. The sole requirement is that every citation must have an exact match-up in the list at the end of the book or chapter. 

You also can’t change the names of organizations to suit your purposes. The name in the references list is the name in your chapter in the citation — unless you tell your readers otherwise. That’s life.

2. Subheads. Love them, especially as a proofreader or indexer, and for different reasons. But the copy following the subhead needs to bear some semblance to the subhead itself. As an indexer, I’m often lured into thinking mistakenly that the author and editor may actually have known what they were doing when they assigned a title to a certain section of a chapter . . . only to bring up the matter four pages later into the discussion.

The issue of subheads brings up organization in general. I’ve mentioned  this gripe before, but it happens weekly. I don’t want to be 200 pages into a book and read repeatedly what points the book is going to make or is trying to make. To me, it puts the author in the way between me and the content. If I want a first-person account, I’ll read one.

[This morning I picked up a book that my wife had left in the kitchen. I held it up to the dog and said, “Zooey, people read these things for pleasure. Can you imagine?” My mind is turning to mush.]

So, as an indexer, I don’t want to see subheads that introduce four pages of transition material and never mention the actual topic — unless I figure out your game early on, which unfortunately I never do soon enough.

Unleashing the Word Horde*

Tired of looking at the old entry, and no time to compose anything coherent. If printed books are dead, no one bothered to tell my publishers.

So, forthwith are posts that I had in waiting. I'm tired of looking at them, too. If they no longer make any sense, well, I've had a few other entries like that as well.

* * *

CreateSpace: Garbage In, Garbage Out

6/2/2012: In full disclosure, I wrote this rather hastily some weeks back. Would someone who actually knows please tell me the story: Does CreateSpace ever typeset copy for a book's pages? Or do they simply print what the author/customer supplies . . . PDF, Word doc, whatever? Is there ever any human contact? Do they provide a good service? I was just ranting here . . . to a degree.


If you're a self-publishing author and you don't know how to format your manuscript properly, your book is going to look like absolute crap when you get it back from Amazon's CreateSpace . . . unless CreateSpace has different levels of service, and one of them actually gives a darn what your book looks like as Amazon taps your bank account.

My two experiences with CreateSpace page proofs show that the folks at CreateSpace set exactly what the customer sent in. Maybe that's all they do. In some circles, that would be called "customer service." In my world, that's called "revenge."

To all self-publishers or ghostwriters working with same: For a very nominal fee, I can clean up a manuscript so that your page proofs will look, well, like a book when it's designed. And I can pretty much guarantee that my charge up front will be a hell of a lot less than what Amazon will charge you for typesetting corrections after the fact -- if they even perform that service.

And it will be worth it. Because unless you know what you're doing, and without that kind of intervention, your labor of love is not going to look like any other book on your shelf -- and I'm not saying that in a good way.

Many writers, frankly, just care about the cover and the spine. Author's name and title and, presto, "I'm an author." But if you care what's between the covers, you really do want it looking as good as possible. You don't want your readers saying -- and I've heard this -- "The book was prepared so sloppily that I put it down."

A self-published book can look as good as any other book in the world. Yes, it can. If you don't know how to make that happen, people can help you.

I'm one of them.

Shameless plug over, but that's what this real estate is all about, folks.

* * *

Two Kinds of Writers

Early in my blogging days, I spoke of Bill Shipp, a man who made his bones in journalism before I learned how to read. When I first worked with him, he had already written for four decades and was a giant of Georgia journalism by any metric. He demanded heavy editing. The rare call I received from him usually dealt with the paucity of my red marks rather than their overuse.

I do some pro bono work for a nonprofit that likes having its work proofed, edited, torn up -- everyone there, except the executive director. She doesn't want a word of hers touched. Doesn't matter if it's a point of grammar. Leave it alone.

--

I returned a manuscript to an author a few weeks ago, and I'll admit -- as I admitted to the author -- that my customer service was not up to par. And I'll state that here, just to be fair to the readership. Mostly dealing with turnaround time and communication. I performed, however, a rather thorough edit.

The author's comments were very nice, including this remark:

Your work on my book was excellent and finding you encourages me to write more and more and more.

Frankly, I can't think of much higher praise for an editor. That one's a keeper. Even better, the author writes about interesting stuff. Pinch me.

* * *

Special Onetime Offer: Legacy Rates

6/2/2012: I actually never got around to the point I wanted to make here, which would have made the headline make sense. Ah, well. It also leaves a blog post in my head. Dammit.


This post is neither a coupon nor an attempt to gather more clients into the LoD fold, although I never mind doing so. I worked long enough in the insurance industry to understand spreading the risk.

Rather I'm looking at a wholesale overhaul of my rate structure for authors -- not publishers -- based on a number of factors, primarily self-publishing and authors writing in their nonnative language. Nothing against such authors personally, but it makes no sense to charge them anywhere close to the same as the publishers' rates. The work is invariably more difficult, requires far more hand-holding, and takes longer . . . and there's little potential for repeat business, where an easier project down the line makes things even out.

Too, once a writer (I'm thinking of one in particular from years ago) knows an editor is going to clean up a particular editorial issue every time, the writer has no real incentive to understand what the hell the editor is doing and write it correctly to begin with -- even a matter of the simplest English composition.

Imagine 2000 pages of this:

"Why did the dog eat the biscuit," Ed asked?

Not a 2000-page manuscript. But five different novels of about 400 pages each. Don't you think after the first one, where I corrected scores of such constructions, the author might have learned something? (And this author is old enough to know better and of such demographics and background that the author is clearly not a stupid individual.)

When I say "old enough to know better," I'm talking about some of the great divides in U.S. education. This author is old enough to have learned the basics of composition very well. At the time the author grew up, I doubt he could have made it out of third grade composing a sentence such as the one above.

(Too, people of a certain age, regardless of native intelligence and barring some mitigating factors, can read aloud without hesitation. Not universally true with people under 30.)

* * *

Word of the Day, and Other Irritants

6/2/2012: I have a longer list on three small pieces of paper. Time to throw them out.


while at the same time

about 38

both (yeah, "both," thanks to a university press managing editor who scrubbed a manuscript of every single one before sending it to me for copyediting)

very unique

coteaching with another teacher

* * *

[no title]

6/2/2012: I have no idea why I saved this. I think I liked the part of the sentence that appears after the second em dash.

It is interesting to note the rather Pelagian character of this soteriology, emphasizing the centrality of human agency over against the initiation of the divine—particularly salvation by moral emulation—and therefore providing no real sense whatsoever of how the divine actually enables the salvation of the nation beyond merely providing the opportunity.

* * *

A Day in the Bunker

I've referred to it many times before, whether on the blog or in conversation. Here's a day at the LandonDemand Intergalactic Corporate HQ:

By the way, I was raised on this show. I think it showed four times a day in NYC when I was growing up. Things haven't changed much, except now there's only one bed in the adults' bedroom.

* * *

And this added bonus, from fall 2009. 

6/2/2012: I forget if I posted this exchange. I emailed Moi some version of it. I'd forgotten most of it, but the whole thing still makes me shake my head. "Per" is the gender-neutral pronoun that an author used. I employed it here for a while to maintain gender anonymity. In this case, per is a dude. Now, I don't say "per." I just change the person's gender. Or not.


I'm going to take a page from one of the most offensive yet most popular Internet sites, the Drudge Report, and break the news here. Anytime someone tries to put out some dirt on Matt Drudge, he immediately posts the article on his own site, as if to say, "I got nothing to hide." This is another way of saying, "The best defense is a good offense."

Yes, indeedy, folks. Far and away my most bizarre client has given me the heave-ho. I'm not going to get into too many details, to preserve per's anonymity (I am fair, after all) and thus to preserve my own hide.

Let's just say this: Per is a Bible-thumping prophet (like an apocalyptic, see-the-future type) and an America-loathing rabble-rouser. Per foresees the end of America as we know it unless we all come to Christ and change our ways. I can go on and on about per, as I have come to know per over the last year or so, but I will let the slightly edited correspondence speak for itself.

===========

Yes Bob I will send the western union today although I am not going to pay you for re-editing your own work in chapter 26. The other day when you ask me, where did I get this copy from. . . I got it from you. That is the reason why I run everything through you before including it in the manuscript, so the entire manuscript will have to be re-edited because it is my opinion you either farmed it out originally or you did not do such a good job that you have found your own work to be problematic with errors. I know you by now (not using any gifts of foresight) that you are not going to re-edit this entire manuscript again, and do it right at no charge, but in my opinion you should because I have already paid you for it, and even if you did go through it, it is further my opinion you would not go through it with a fine tooth comb, so my only option at this point is to hunt for a new editor and wish you the best. I will send you some money but frankly in my opinion, I have wasted about [dollar figure here] and the manuscript is not ready to go to press. Goodbye Bob.

===========

Isn't this fun? Here's the response I wanted to send. Special blog exclusive.

===========

First, when I asked, "Where did this come from?" I'm certain I was referring to a specific piece of text, not an entire chapter, and how it fit into the surrounding text. I'd need to see the context for the statement.

On to larger matters:

You've received all the tracked versions of every document you've sent me (all of which I've kept), so you've seen exactly what I've done along the way -- no portion at all of which has been farmed out. I don't farm out my work any more than you farm out your prophecies.

You've had no complaint about the work until now. You've had scores of opportunities to say that you didn't think my work was up to snuff and to end our relationship based on the quality of the work you were receiving from me. I've never heard a single word from you along those lines -- even though you claim that you've been rereading and rereading the manuscript. If there were really something seriously wrong, you would have noticed it long before now, and you would have terminated the relationship long ago. You obviously felt comfortable enough with my work to continue to send me regular updates for nine months after editing the original manuscript, and to send me emails asking for advice, which have always been answered. Along the way, you'd mentioned at least twice all the money you'd be sending me once the book came out because you treat well those people who treat you right. Those aren't the actions or words of an author who is unhappy with the editing.

I can guess at any number of reasons you now no longer want me to work for you, but I'm not going to try to get into your head.

Every person who is in publishing full time will tell you that copyediting is part of a process, which includes proofreading as well, and proofreaders often catch what a copyeditor has missed, especially in a manuscript that at this point is being slapped together totally haphazardly, with a sentence here and a sentence there out of context going out for editing. If the manuscript overall is now not reading the way you want it to, it's largely because of the process you've undertaken since last November.

I've been getting emails since last November with documents titled things like, "last change before typesetting" and "one last thing." You can attribute it to [ . . . ] or your desire to have this book be its best, but I've worked with any number of folks who also have issues with [ . . . ] and who want the best for their publication, but who also intuitively understand what it takes to make a publication its best and how to work with an editor to bring that about. Your approach to the text of the book at this point is akin to a dog who keeps digging up a bone and looking for somewhere else to bury it. You just can't leave it alone, and confusion is the inevitable result. If you want to blame me for that, that's your decision. The corrections you've been sending my way have resulted from your claims that you had a better way to say something, or you've been adding new material (election, Michael Jackson, new interactions at churches), or you've been qualifying your experiences in [ . . . ] to make sure you don't land in additional legal trouble. Never have you said, "I didn't like the way you did this. Please review." Never. Not once. And that you kept sending me material clearly showed you thought I was doing something right.

According to your own account, you've gone through photographers, web designers, cover designers, and editors before me -- blaming them for all the problems and their inability to do what you want them to do. I'm now added to the list. Without the gift of foresight, I suspect the pattern will continue with typesetters, proofreaders, indexers, printers, distributors, bookstore owners, publicity people, and so on. When I read in your book that you'd been in 20 car wrecks, 19 of which were not your fault, that about summed it up. And when I read repeatedly in your book about your lack of faith in the United States and the American judicial system, yet when I look online and see that you are constantly in court, asking that very same American judicial system to clear up your problems for you, I see that I've been dealing with a bundle of contradictions all the way along.

You are certainly correct that I would not reedit the manuscript again at no charge. And I'd be wary of vendors who give you rock-bottom rates and claim decades of experience. I don't think you'll ultimately be happy with their work either, or you'll find that they'll start charging you for continually making changes and adjustments (as they should), which will make their original low price end up not so low in the long run.

You say that this book will come out on God's time and according to God's plan; if that's the case, then your dealings with me have just been part of a grander scheme in which you claim to have complete trust. Or maybe it's like the judicial system: it's something you fall back on when it suits your purposes.

I wish you the best of luck with the book.

Bob

Note that this book remains unpublished. June 2, 2012.

*Headline: thanks to William S. Burroughs

quote of the day

"Observing isn’t the same as seeing. Our own research convinces us that educators do not describe what they see during a classroom observation; rather, they see what they can describe (Brookhart et al., 2011; Moss, 2002)."


That this statement is about educators is immaterial to me. Your assignment is to consider this point and comment:


We don't describe what we see. We see what we can describe.

Great Moments in Parenthood

I have two sons. One just sat in his last college class today; he graduates in a few weeks. He has something like 198 credit hours, having needed 128 or so to graduate. The extra credits came from AP courses and the requirements of his chosen areas of study; he had to stay in school for four years to complete all the courses for his majors (and minor). So, one about to graduate college. Very proud parents.

Second son is a college freshman. Financial aid deadlines are nigh, and I required access to his student/institutional account. His log-in information, which I can never remember and always neglect to write down somewhere sensible, is a random jumble of letters and punctuation.

Flashback to 1989 and 1992, respectively. Both my sons were delivered via Cesarean section: scooped out of the czarina’s swollen belly, cleaned up, and delivered to the czar’s expectant arms.

Both sons were hyperalert upon arrival. Heads up, eyes focused, looking around, taking it in. I can brag a little; both these kids were smart newborns. Nothing got past them. In the case of one of them, I think more than a little knowledge came from somewhere else.

Immediately in their father’s cradle, both boys began to hear the murmur of one of their dad’s favorite pieces of writing, T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Too many great lines to mention. But upon leaving the womb, the first words they heard other than from medical professionals were as follows:

Let us go then, you and I, 
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherized upon a table; 
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, 
The muttering retreats 
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels 
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: 
Streets that follow like a tedious argument 
Of insidious intent 
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .  
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”  
Let us go and make our visit. 

I ask my son today for his login information so I can access the financial aid application. 

He writes, “An easy way to remember it: the first letters of Let us go then, you and I.” 

I suppose there’s something to be said for being in on the ground floor.

This, folks, is the fun of parenthood—not the inevitably negative and crazy-making buttons that all parents put on their children. Neuroses, personality quirks . . . all that stuff comes with the territory, even if they manifest in entirely different ways than in the parents’ generation.

But my son’s explanation retrospectively gave a day of thinking about financial aid and taxes a glow, and that happens—well—never.

I love my children. Very proud of both of them. I’m way behind in work and dealing with long-forestalled issues, but what fine moments and ultimately a red-letter day.

How often do you read that on this blog?

"America . . . I'm trying to come to the point"

But first, this musical interlude.

This video, a little choppy to turn a nine-minute song into a four-minute one, shows the Nice performing "America" from West Side Story. That's Keith Emerson on organ, before Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. This isn't exactly "Lucky Man": the Nice used to brandish whips on stage, and as this video shows, Keith Emerson had a thing for stabbing his organ with kitchen knives. Freudish interlopers need not apply.

Point of the post: What the hell's going on with "America"?

No, not like this: Allen Ginsberg's America. (Maybe it's not a great poem, but it's a killer rant.)

Rather, a number of my publishers insist on replacing "America/n" with "United States" or "U.S." In scholarly work, especially dealing with international relations, using the actual name of the country is more precise. The more obvious and underlying reason is an emotional one: people throughout the Western Hemisphere are "Americans," but they are not U.S. citizens. They were Americans before there was a United States, no?

I'm liking this approach more and more, although it's sometimes a pain to implement after the fact. But if authors did everything correctly to begin with, copyeditors could mostly fold their tents.

Now I'm trying to sneak in "United States/U.S." on manuscripts.

You do what you can. "No, but for that one starfish . . ." Oh, lord.

What I'd like to get a handle on, now that I have British punctuation all sorted out (see "British as a Second Language"), is what the hell's going on with "Britain"?

Britain
Great Britain
United Kingdom
England

Here's a lesson for you newcomers: One of the best things you can do as a copyeditor is admit your own ignorance and not be afraid to display it to others. Queries get it off your mind and put the responsibility on someone else.

(Frankly, as a copyeditor, proofreader, or indexer -- and this is beside the point entirely -- I'm not paid to do the author's research. If I happen to be sitting at the computer while I'm working on a bibliography, I'll check a publisher's city name or an incongruous date. But I'm not going to spend a bunch of time doing consistency-making based on Internet searches when the author presumably has access to originals.

I will, however, query all day long. Unless the author or publisher just seems ignant.

And I'm also not, as a copyeditor, going to check to see if all the websites mentioned in the manuscript are still live. FYI.)

So, does Britain = Great Britain = United Kingdom = England? I ask because many authors appear to think so. Are the terms entirely interchangeable? Does "Britain" or "Great Britain" ever = "England"? Always? Why or why not? Are dates tied to any of the different terms? And going with the "America" thing, are there cases when "United Kingdom" is used, but it includes people who don't want to be invited to the party? Does "British" = "English"?

It's 5 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Productivity Is?

Yeah, well. What can I say?

I think Publisher's Weekly linked through to the following article, or maybe I saw it on Bloomberg. Doesn't matter. And, as is typically the case, I didn't read every last word. That's how it goes.

Are Apps the Future of Book Publishing?

I have never downloaded an app, nor, as far as I know, do I own a device on which I could use one. Maybe I could get apps for this laptop PC. I have no idea. That shows pretty much how out of it I am. I'll give up my dumb phone when they pry it from the extensions of my cold, rapidly aging nervous system.

But I read enough of this article to know that it's good news for freelance editors. As is self-publishing. As is any mean, medium, or mode that gets people reading and writing and writing and reading more.

I've not read more than 200 words of a Harry Potter book, probably to a child years ago . . . and I fell asleep before he did. But I'm very happy that J.K. Rowling had people buying books like crazy.

And when she goes to adult fiction, it's not gonna be as crazy, but crazy still.

I met Barbara Kingsolver at a local event in town a few years ago and told her as much: I haven't read a word of what you've written, but boy am I glad people love what you write.

HBO logo, circa 1972

Say 35 years ago you wanted to get into working on sitcoms -- not acting, but tech stuff. Pretty limited outlets for doing so, right? Three networks. What do you have now? Scores of sitcoms on multiple cable channels that the world could do better without. That's not the point. Someone's editing that footage, handling props, doing lighting . . . makeup, gaffers, best boys, key grips, assistant assistant special boom operator UK crew, Japanese yutes to do the anime porn . . .

No, I've never seen any of that stuff either.

The point is that as much as people want to talk about the death of this and the last gasps of that, the form might change, but the function and the desire don't. I've maintained that I don't care if what I work on comes out in ebook format or on stone tablets.

And the more that people are interested in reading and writing, and published works, and sharing what they're reading about, and interested in finding out more about it . . . all this is good for the next generation of freelance editors. If you're in your twenties and you want to be a freelance editor, know that there's plenty of work out there. Your job in your twenties is to begin to find it. Don't be shy. And begin honing your skill.

And a lot of people want to tell their stories in what they consider to be permanent form. That's still a "book." For what it's worth, I still think the go-to item for posterity will be a printed book. Does a digital file really exude warmth? As Aunty said one time (paraphrasing and sans affect), "I bought a book from a used bookstore and saw someone else's little notes and margin jottings. They were delightful. Top that, Kindle."

Even if an app could match it, it wouldn't be the same. Anymore than anime porn is the same as . . . well, never mind.

My yob is to help people and publishers put the written word out there. And the more stuff to put out there, the better it is for the profession.

Oh, it's tax time, too? I need to oil my abacus.

This Just In: Footnote of the Day

Still a bachelor, with time to spend with his students outside the classroom, he was a popular teacher and even coached crew. In an enterprising but fruitless effort, he once tried to coach his crew from the air using a tiny airplane and a megaphone, but the engine noise drowned out his instructions. His imaginative failure drew some press attention.*


---


* “Airplane Coaching Fails,” Washington Post, November 7, 1919.

Words I’d Change in the Dictionary

Merriam-Webster's editorial board: Are you listening?

health care: I’ve been uselessly enforcing this one for too long. One word. Let’s get it over with. 

record keeping: No way should this be two words. I could handle record-keeping. Even better: recordkeeping. See also child rearing; decision making; etc.

work site: already in the dictionary: workbag, workbasket, workboat, workbook, workbox, workday, workforce

            but work camp, work farm. OK, so I see the pattern, but I don’t see that it makes sense.

There are others. Many, many more.

Yours?

Danny boy

Quickie Quote

Alfonso starts laughing before he even begins to tell this story. Back in the 1970s, when lunch hour sometimes included a meal and some alcoholic refreshments, an employee named Jimmy Erwin was supposed to meet an inspector at a job site. According to Alfonso—who went up through the ranks as a laborer, truck driver, foreman, and superintendent—Jimmy decided to stop at a bar across the street for lunch and proceeded to have a beer or two. His plan was always to walk back across the street to meet the inspector, but needless to say, Jimmy lost track of time. When the inspector showed up, he didn’t see Jimmy but he saw his truck parked at the bar. So he waited another twenty minutes. Finally, Jimmy came out of the bar, saw the inspector, and walked right over to him, never skipping a single beat, and yelling, “Don’t EVER order pizza in that place!”

—Margaret Kirk [names changed from original]

Land on Demand Hits Las Vegas: I Get the "Loathing" Part

Not impressed.

I think what I needed was Raoul Duke and his attorney, the Brown Buffalo, at my side — to keep my mind off everything else.

What is it? Ninety-five percent of Nevada is missile testing range? Couldn’t the government get something entirely right for once? Is it too late?

Sorry, Moi, to diss part of your region of the country, but I just don’t get Las Vegas at all. It’s like the worst of the worst of some things that I think are pretty bad already. And the state has a Mormon U.S. senator? Can someone please explain what the hell is going on here?

How Not to Do Business

1. Get my name from another freelancer.

2. Call and give me details on a job, and ask me to work up a bid and schedule.

3. Approve the bid and schedule, telling me in no uncertain terms to put the job on my calendar.

4. Email me fifteen minutes later, saying, “Thanks, but your rate is too high. You’d probably do better work than the person we’ll be paying to do it, but we’re going to go with the other person anyway.”

What’s wrong here? If you’re an author or publisher calling around for a variety of bids, that’s fine. Tell me so. And if I don’t get the job, that’s fine, too. Well, it’s not fine, but it’s part of business.

What you don’t do is tell a vendor to ink the job on the schedule, and then cancel. Don’t make the original commitment. Your certainty makes you look worse when you backtrack on it. 

Not that it’s a huge deal. It’s just poor form, and my typical conclusion is that an organization which acts this way would likely have created more troubles once the project was in progress.

When the Author Pushes Back on an Index

Sometimes authors make suggestions for indexes after the indexes have been written. That’s understandable, although as an indexer it drives me crazy—maybe even a little crazier than when authors submit their own lists of index terms. The nice thing about the latter is I can largely ignore those if they are not helpful.

But letters from authors to a press’s managing editor when the book is days away from going to print are harder to disregard.

Authors are not indexers, God bless ’em. And I’m not an author.

But indexing has certain rules, and they’re not complicated. I’ve managed to pick most of them up just by doing, only later finding out that the way I work is generally accepted practice. Simple, but not easy.

Also, retrofitting an index—moving certain concepts around or creating new entries after the index has been edited and submitted—is almost harder than writing the index to begin with, especially when the request comes a week later, and time to work on it comes later still. At that point, the memory of the book is washing pretty quickly into the dead zone.

For a book I indexed recently the managing editor sent me an email with some issues the author had. Here’s what I sent the managing editor. We ended up reaching a mutually agreeable conclusion. All's well that ends.

——

[DEAR EDITOR:]

I’m working on this now and will have it to you this morning. But I’d like to hear from you before going too far down the line.

Now that I’m comparing her comments to the index and the book itself, I’m seeing a number of issues that I can explain and that just might stem from the author not being an indexer. Nothing wrong with that. I’m not an author. But indexes are written a certain way for a reason.

I see what she wants/means by thematic entries, but much of what she wants already appears—and there’s a reason that some of what she thinks is missing doesn’t appear.

Her first suggestion is for an entry on

“Destruction of housing, nature, individual properties, family life and religion.”

Individual entries already cover all of this, under the concepts she mentioned that are important to the reader. The author is asking for a main entry of “destruction,” and I don’t think readers will go there. And destroying a house is much different than destroying family life. People interested in homes, farmland, deforestation, family, and religion can find entries.

“Crimes: thieves, robberies, prostitution.”

To me, a main entry of “crimes” is a value judgment and a difficult call. The author pretty much (and understandably) defends any human action up to and including cannibalism when faced with mass starvation. Is forced prostitution a crime? And again, all these are covered in individual entries.

Then there’s this: The word “crime” appears 45 times in the book. Forty-one times, it’s in the listing of the cannibalism police reports. The others are mentioned in passing. “Crime” is not a topic of this book.

“Death and disease”

Not appropriate for the index to this book. That’s what every page of much of the book is about. It would be like having an accounting book with “dollars” as an entry.

“Letters of Complaints”

This is a chapter title and, thus, is not indexed.

“Starvation and brutality should be their own entries, not under provinces”

I’ll see what I can do here, but it’s kind of in the same league as death and disease.

“Entry for Children, why not for Women?”

Why not for Men? This isn’t a book about women’s rights or women’s issues, although some come up. Again, “children” seems like a natural for a reader here. I guess there are some folks who pick up every nonfiction book and might look for an entry on “women,” but I don’t see that it’s necessary for this topic.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this stuff. As the length of the email shows, it’s not like I’m trying to avoid work.

Quotes: You Can't Unring a Bell

warning

Graphic content here. Not for the weak of stomach. 

Just letting you know. 

Skip it if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.

Bloggerizing of these quotes indicates neither agreement nor disagreement on the part of the blogger.

“”

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that about this time emissaries representing the building of New York’s Red Brick (Presbyterian) Church visited Carnegie seeking support for their new church building. Carnegie was unenthusiastic about the project, so he sought to discourage them by saying that he would give $1 million for the project if they could find a single donor who would match it. It seemed an impossible task. However, the committee experienced good fortune and found such a donor. They returned to Carnegie to announce their success. The chagrined Carnegie sat down to write a check and then paused to ask, “May I ask who is the matching donor?” The committee chair smiled and said, “Of course! It is Mrs. Carnegie.” 

—Everett C. Goodwin

*

[In Wanxian region, local cadres] unlawfully set up private courts, jails, and labor camps. The methods of torture included hanging people up, beating them, forcing them to kneel on burning charcoal, piercing their mouths, clipping off their fingers, stitching their lips, pushing needles into the nipples, force-feeding them feces, stuffing dried beans down their throats, and so on. They also punished ordinary peasants by making them wear tall hats and marching them in front of the local populace. 

—A report on how to mobilize the masses and rely on the poor peasants to reveal the problems in the commune, as well as suggestions for future work, by the Wanxian Region Party Committee [Sichuan province], 1961

To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill. 

—Mao Zedong

Date: July 2, 1960. Location: Kangjia village in Hannasigou. Culprit’s name: Zhao Bannai. Victim’s relation to the culprit: Daughter. Number of victims: 1. Manner of crime: Exhumed the victim’s corpse and consumed the flesh. Reason: To survive.

Date: January 12, 1960. Location: Qiaojiaping in Hanzhai commune. Culprit’s name: Ma Ba’nai. Culprit’s status: Poor peasant. Number of culprits involved: 1. Victim’s name: Ma Naimai. Relation to the culprit: Daughter. Number of victims: 1. Manner of crime: After the victim died of illness, the culprit cooked up her body and consumed the flesh. Reason: To survive. Result: Died. 

—A study of cases of cannibalism in Linxia municipality, by the Ningxia branch of the Government Solicitude Group [Gansu province], March 3, 1961

*

In early 1968 HES did the rounds of a number of large customers for IBM equipment, for example, Time/Life and the New York Times. All these customers based their business on the printed word. But HES was too far out for them. Writing was not something you did at a computer screen. They had seen programs that set type, and maybe some programs for managing  advertisements, but the concept of sitting in front of a computer and writing or navigating text was foreign to them. “The best I ever got was from people like Time-Life and the New York Times who said this is terrific technology, but we’re not going to get journalists typing on computer keyboards for the foreseeable future.”

In late 1968 van Dam finally met Doug Engelbart and attended a demonstration of NLS at the Fall Joint Computer Conference. This presentation was a landmark in the history of computing, and the audience, comprising several thousand engineers and scientists, witnessed innovations such as the use of hypertext, the computer ‘mouse’ and screen, and telecollaboration on shared files via videoconferencing for the first time. The unveiling of NLS is now known affectionately and with great respect as the Mother of All Demos. 

—Belinda Barnet (emphasis added; talk about a big bang)

* 

The fact that my grandmother belonged to an extremely wealthy family was clear from her maiden name, Goldberg. The reason that this was clearly a rich family’s name had to do with a law passed under Austrian domination. The law banned Jews from using their patronym (as in the case of a character in Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz, Jankiel, whose patronym was Ben Isaac [son of Isaac]) and required them to use last names instead. Last names were literally bought from the Starosta, a sort of city hall, and some were more expensive than others. The most expensive were the ones that contained the word “gold,” like Goldberg, but also Goldberger or Goldmann. After the most expensive came a wide range of last names without any meaning at all, like Huppert or Korn. These meaningless names were also fairly expensive, because in the long list of last names that had some sort of meaning, even if one could pay more for a flattering name (like Kluger, from klug [wise]), there were many less dignified names, like Hosenduft, which literally means “trouser smell.” Such a name could easily give someone the wrong idea.

—Jerzy Kluger

“”

BSL 101: British as a Second Language

A book had been lurking on my schedule for months. Author told me about it last fall and sent me a draft in November to begin working on it. A few weeks later came a replacement chapter, then another. Thankfully I hadn’t begun working on the original yet, but I requested that when the entire manuscript was set, that’s when I should receive a complete new version. Author agreed.

Then the author said, I believe, one of the other chapters was undergoing heavy revision, or there was a new chapter or something, so everything’s on hold. OK.

Revised manuscript comes in February, followed by an email that some of the documentation needs to be reworked, and here’s what needs to be done. I wrote back and said, again, when you have a complete, finished manuscript, please send it to me. My point was not to be a jerk, and I explained that to the author. I’m not the one closest to the material. I’m not the subject expert. It’s not up to me to make substantive decisions about what’s in or not in the books.

About five hours later, the author sends me the completed manuscript, which I’ve now returned to the author, edited and tidied up. Great book, author is very pleasant. All’s good, although I do have one concern. Author said that the publisher’s deadline for the manuscript is August. I have a feeling the copyedited manuscript will not reside unmolested until then; rather, I fear that the author is going, by way of fact checking, to show this manuscript to a bunch of potential buyers of the book and tweak it for the next five months.

So, of course, down the line, some poor sap of a proofreader might be seeing When Versions Collide.

Oh. That would be me. Happy days.

The author is publishing the book with a UK press, so when the original manuscript came in last November, I had Colleen (dba interngirl) go through their 20-page style sheet and try to highlight all the differences from Chicago and any weirdness that didn’t look Amerkun. She marked plenty.

All her work was mostly for naught as I needed to refresh myself on all of it five months later anyway (formatting, a lot of things), but the press’s style sheet did spell out for me some things about British English that had baffled me. I’m not sure it does any less now.

Full point after abbreviation only where last letter of word omitted: Dr, Mr but etc., Prof., but not after contractions or in acronyms: Dr, St, Mr, BBC, UNESCO, USA. Note especially: ed. / eds, vol. / vols, Ch. / Chs, but the exception: no. nos.

Let that roll around in your head for a minute.

I’d always wondered why I would see “ed.” but “eds” in bibliographies when dealing with British works. Now I know. I probably miscorrected it in some volumes years ago. Live and learn. But to me, that’s too much to think about. Just put a damn full stop at the end of the abbreviation.

Include ‘e’ in forms such as: ageing, judgement, likeable.

> Use –ize and –ization; recognize, criticize; but use analyse, paralyse, electrolyse. Note that a number of verbs have no alternative to the ‘ise’ spelling, including: advertise, advise, circumcise, compromise, despise, devise, enterprise, exercise, franchise, improvise, revise, surmise, supervise, televise.

What the British taketh away in punctuation, they add back in unnecessary letters. I’ve never liked “judgement,” and of course. “acknowledgements” is the bane of editors and proofreaders everywhere in the United States. I don’t know what’s up with Use –ize and –ization. Nor do I understand the -lyse exception, which they don’t identify as such. In the book, I ran across other -lyse words. Do they fall under this rule? Could be argued either way.

Ellipses: … No space between points; space after only if leading to new sentence, no extra point if at end of sentence.

OK, class. Think about this one. Not only are the butt-ugly “points” (wait, here they’re not full points?) set tight, but no space around them, unless the following bit of copy is a sentence. Let me demonstrate:

The umpire was hot...and tired.

The umpire was hot, tired... He threw the manager out of the game for dropping the M-bomb.

I actually grew to like this style in the course of copyediting the book. Not saying I’d want to change to it, but it is efficient.

The ellipses, that is. Not the umpiring.

Round brackets should be used within round brackets where necessary. Square brackets should normally be confined to editorial comment.

By this point, I’m enraged. It’s like, “What the hell have you people done to our language?” I want to go into a Sam Kinison rant, “Have you ever heard the word ‘parentheses,’ people? What the hell is a ‘round bracket’?” So, in this book we have some parenthetical — I guess that would be round-bracketal — in-text citations that read “(blah blah blah (Smith and Jones 2000)).” Joyous.

Use minimum numbers for number spans except in ‘teens’, e.g. 25–8, 136–42, 150–1, but 12–16.

Whatever.

Formatting:

En Rules (and Em Rules)

> An en rule is longer than a hyphen and is used to replace ‘to’ in number spans, e.g. ‘24–8’. As there is no en rule key on the standard keyboard you should indicate en rules between numbers using the normal short hyphen.

> The en rule is also used to link two items of equal weight, e.g. ‘Nazi–Soviet pact’. To indicate words which should be linked with en rules (rather than normal hyphens) type a double hyphen, e.g. Nazi--Soviet pact.

> Spaced en rules are used as parenthetical dashes or pauses. Type a single hyphen with a space before and after to indicate a dash.

> Only use em (—) rules to indicate a deliberately obscured word.

So, em dashes don’t appear. An em dash is for their purposes an en dash with spaces around it. In the bibliography, instead of the 3-em dash for a repeated author, they use an en dash.

And what everyone wants to know:

> If following UK style, always use single quotation marks for dialogue and quoted material in the text. Reserve the use of double quotation marks for quotes within quotes, e.g. ‘Edward found the trappings of “royalty” hung heavily.’

> In UK style the full stop only falls inside the quotation mark if the material quoted is a complete sentence, e.g. He called it “my house”, even though it belonged to Clara.

Now, I think I get it. But why oh why did they use double quotes in the last example, and why did they refer to a “full stop” when a comma appears? Is a comma also a “full stop”?

I’m going to have to relearn all this stuff again at some point. I think I’ll see this book again even before it goes to the publisher. Just a guess.

Tales of Brave Ulysses and Matters Mystic

The title of the post is for the Paisan, but the post is all about me. I mean, this is a work blog, right? My work blog?

And the point of the blog was originally to serve as a site to hawk my wares. Evidence over time shows that the approach has worked. I’m presently editing a nifty and utterly fascinating book on the history of hypertext. The author came referred to me from an Australian professor who found the blog and me and whose book I worked on a few years back. Now he’s spreading the love around the world to his peers. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Occasionally my readers might not be authors but managing editors who have sent work my way. It’s all good.

Those of you keeping score may remember that I’ve been proofreading since 1974. First for my high school newspaper (perpetual gold-medal winner at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association), and then beginning in 1981 with a now-lengthy series of paying gigs (in addition to and wrapped around editing, etc.). It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that I’ve forgotten more companies that I’ve proofread for than I remember.

The only time in the last 38 years that I’ve not been involved in some way with printing or publishing was during my three-plus years as an English major in college -- time during which I avoided publishing . . . and the classics. Don’t ask why. I can’t say I always make the best or most appropriate decisions.

During those college years, I met a friend with whom I’ve recently reconnected over the last few years. He’s always had one foot firmly planted in matters mystic. In a recent email from him, he warned, “Be careful about what you invite into your life.” I think the point was that if you want a door to open, you’d better be ready to handle whatever’s behind that door. It might be way more than you bargained for.

And a few posts back, I pondered . . . How would I handle it if Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans were to come in over the transom these days? And what if it required a read against the manuscript, which is rarely done anymore? Nine hundred pages of one of the English language’s most unreadable novels . . . that I would have to read under deadline pressure . . . and where mistakes carry consequences.

I thought the 900-page family history that came into my life which I edited, and which I may soon be indexing, was the universe’s little giggle on my behalf.

Be careful what you invite into your life.

Even unknowingly.

I give you a moment from last week’s Land on Demand inbox:

* *

Dear Bob:

[OUR] press is publishing an e-book edition of Ulysses based on [OUR] World Classics print edition. We are going to create this e-book edition by optical character recognition (OCR) scanning of the print book. We need to get it proofread because this kind of technology is, of course, imperfect and we want to avoid the introduction of the kinds of errors one often sees in quickly made e-books.

I am sure I don’t need to tell you that this particular book is going to be a challenge to proofread. Joyce was not a conventional speller or punctuator. There are existing typos and other errors in the book that have to be retained for historical reasons, so this will be a careful check against the original. What you would read are Word files containing the output of the OCR process. Only errors introduced during OCR will be fixed.

Anyway, I thought of you immediately. We should have the files around the 23rd of March and were hoping to have them back a month later. I don’t know exactly how many pages it will be in Word terms, but the print edition is 980 typeset pages.

* *

As an English major, a lifetime proofreader, and one whose business relies on the graces of scholarly presses, I can think of no greater capstone than to be “thought of immediately” when [OUR] Press wants to republish its definitive version of Ulysses in an in-demand format for a new millennium.


Here's lookin' at you, kid.