All posts by jkkblog

I'm a freelance editor and writer with a background in history and foreign languages.

An eyewitness account of the rise of the Internet, for millennials

March 12, 2016 jkkblog 4 Comments

Why does everyone my age, the people who raised the millennial generation, now look to criticize the kids for being exactly as they were raised to be?

I hate it. My generation needs to take some responsibility for its choices, just one of which was the transformation of our society to a fearful, bubble-wrapped, constant-parental-supervision, hyper-PC world. Dodge ball is banned and yet school shootings skyrocket? Schools like jails? Crazy assloads of homework? Teaching to tests? At what point do we stand up and fess up to the kids: “We inherited a pretty good world, then got fearful and greedy, and screwed it up for you. We are sorry. We will stop giving you so much shit.”

Maybe, if we stop giving them shit now, they’ll pick out better nursing homes for us when the time comes. That, you realize, is the endgame. The vengeance of the elder is the calm understanding that the youth will one day experience arthritis, that one day Immodium will be more their recreational drug than ketamine. The vengeance of the youth is to make the elderly pray that their arthritic days end sooner. This cycle poisons us all. The kids need us: they need our support, our love, our examples, our wisdom, and our friendship. They need for us to share. And we need them: we need their liveliness, their change, their new outlooks, their ability to program the remote without wanting to throw it, their help with the physical tasks at which we are now semi-competent, and their friendship. We need for them to share. I can think of no more toxic way to spend my final years than in a gated community filled only with other old goats, who really buy into this ‘honored citizen’ and ‘senior citizen’ stuff, who leave miserly tips for harried waitresses they berate, and who do their best to hide from all youth, watching old Hallmark and INSP TV shows all day that reassure them how The World Ought To Be.

That world is gone. Be as nostalgic as you wish, but live in the now.

In the now, I just watched a video wherein teenagers attempted to use a typical twenty-year-old Windows 95 computer. I found their impressions fascinating. They did not intuitively grasp its basic functions, though some were very interested in the history. It occurred to me that many young folks, never having known a world without the Internet, do not apprehend how recent a phenomenon is this hyper-reliance on easy-to-use Internet. My generation’s harmful reflex is to ridicule them for this, which shows me that my contemporaries have lived this long without learning much. The proper response is not to make fun of the kids, and we ought to have developed enough wisdom to grasp this. If you’d like them to learn–if you would like some empathy and understanding from them–take time to teach them. Then let them teach you how their experience differs.

Speaking of which:

This comes from my own point of view as I lived it, now aged fifty-two, born in 1963, high school class of 1981, Bachelor of Arts 1986. When I was young, I reflected at how ancient I would be in the fabled year 2000: 37, practically a museum piece. I didn’t own my first computer until 1987, and it was a forgotten machine called the Atari ST. Of course, to use any form of Internet, one needs some form of computer, so it is essential to discuss the rise of the personal computer.

1980 (36 years ago): after striking a deal with Microsoft to bundle DOS (which in turn M$ buys off a fellow in the U-District who turns out to be like the guy who traded a winning lottery ticket for a caramel macchiato latte) with the product, IBM markets the IBM PC. At first, it costs about as much as a year’s public university dorm housing, or about 10% of an annual survival wage (at that time, one could almost eke by on minimum wage). The PC immediately wins, spawning a host of imitators (“clones”). Not much of anyone is on the Internet, which does exist in its ur-form, but is not for mere mortals.

1981 (35 years ago): That fall, I entered college at a major university which was as technologically current as any such institution. Very few students had personal computers, and none of them connected to the university’s systems, which were monsters that required entire rooms. PCs (to include all personal computers, including Apples and many long-deceased brands) cost several thousand dollars each, in an era where the minimum wage was around $3/hour. The university had computers for registration and other recordkeeping, as did large businesses. For computer science classes, there were ‘computer labs’ so people could practice fun stuff like Fortran programming. (Ask your engineer uncle about Fortran.)

1986: more students had PCs, but the Internet was still in its Arpanet ur-form, which had been around since 1969. This was a distributed network meant to operate by passing information through many possible paths to get from one point to another, rather than having to use This Dedicated Wire (which might be cut by an earthquake or the incineration of St. Louis, etc.). It wasn’t for us. I spent five years in college, as a history major, and wrote an inch-thick stack of papers. I typed and retyped every single one on an electric typewriter, typically three times: first draft, refinement and edits, final version.

By 1986 (30 years ago), a fair number of (the limited number of) computer users dialed into BBSes (bulletin board systems) in order to argue with strangers over common interests. It was like logging onto a web forum, but one had to dial in with a modem and phone line. Modems–little e-telephones which bore some resemblance to a DSL modem or cable modem in shape, size, and function–sounded bizarre when making the connection, like a bunch of springs boinging against a background of phone static. Maybe like a didgeridu played while tipsy. Of course, BBSes were never used as porn repositories or to share pirated software. That’s why we do not get the expression ‘l33t’ from ‘elite,’ which was not the term for a pirate BBS, because of course we would never indulge in warez (which was not the slang term for cracked pirated software). If the BBS was long distance, one paid through the nose in long distance charges.

1988 (28 years ago): PC ownership has moved well past IBM, which is showing an astonishing refusal to face facts. The Mac is the desktop publishing weapon of choice, but big companies still use ‘minicomputers’ (which could easily take up a whole room) or mainframes, a.k.a. Big Iron. IBM is cannibalizing its Big Iron business, trying to dictate to the PC industry, and the PC industry is listening to IBM about as much as you listen to your drunk uncle’s political and career guidance.

In 1988, I began a job selling computers, a foot soldier in the trenches of the IBM-Microsoft wars. M$ won, but it hadn’t yet decided to try and control the Internet. People who used modems to dial BBSes are now buying faster ones and signing up for Internet accounts; they still have to dial up. An always-on Internet connection, like your modern DSL or cable modem or fiber, is as affordable to average people as a yacht. Wireless is unknown. Windows is available, but it: runs on top of DOS, is buggy and cranky, and mostly sucks. This gives us a foretaste of what we can expect from M$ once IBM is crushed.

What did we even do with computers before we could dial up to the Internet and search? We wrote. We created art. We programmed applications, shareware, and so on. We compiled the code we wrote. We balanced checkbooks. We kept business books. We played games, oh god, how we played games. We used spreadsheets to automate calculations, letting do the heavy arithmetical lifting. We created databases to store large amounts of information, user interfaces to enable the research of the database, and report formats to present the research results. We drafted plans for building and bridges. We could look at the library’s card catalog, a voluminous wall of pigeonhole drawers we used to find books, and realize it would one day go away. So would the microfiche. There truly is much one can do with a computer that is not connected to a broadband network, and we did all of it.

1992 (24 years ago): The web will soon exist, and one will be able to browse it, but only with a text-based web browser. The dawn of the graphical user interface (which is how we elders describe the interactive front end of your Windows 10 or Mac OS whatever) is nearly at hand, ready to pave the way for unlimited porn. Windows is beginning to suck less. By this time, the PC has begun displacing both minis and big iron. Most people still get online with a modem, dialing in over a landline. Cell phones are uncommon and pretty spendy, and the idea of doing the Internet over your cellphone would have seemed like technological magic had anyone mentioned it. Laptops were big but not uncommon. Color inkjets were coming along.

1996 (20 years ago): a lot of PC office networks now ran on a thing called “Novell.” All you really need to know about Novell is that it was incomprehensible to normal people. By this time America Online–which had become one of the main ways people connected online (others were quaintnesses called CompuServe, Genie, etc.)–had unleashed its computer-illiterate, text-speaking “r u m or f?” and “ur a looser” hordes upon the Internet. That may have marked a transition point: until then, the Internet was sort of like a club that had unspoken rules and traditions, to which not everyone was willing to do the work to belong. It was rapidly becoming a free-for-all devoid of all standards (in other words, it was assuming a far more American character). For a while there, people like me got to enjoy a certain snobbish self-satisfaction, though I’m not sure how much good it did, since the AOL outlook took over. It was like one’s favorite pizzeria one day became a Chuck-E-Cheese’s–in mid-meal.

By 1996, the graphic web browser was king. The battle was between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. The release of Windows 95, which you laughed at when you saw the video of the teens, marked a major turning point in making mainstream computing more stable and easier to work with. As you might expect from M$, it was doing everything it could to require the world to use IE, and the world refused. All that warfare against IBM, and it had learned not a single lesson about customers. There is no corporation that will not turn into a moron factory given enough time and success.

2000 (16 years ago): by now, broadband (DSL, cable, other ‘always on’ connections) was going mainstream, and phone modems were starting to look pretty dated. By 2000, most non-Luddites had some form of Internet connectivity; all companies worthy of the name had web presences. Also, at the false millennium (1/1/2000), there was a major scare because most of the remaining big iron software didn’t support eight-digit dating, and they had thrown away the source code. Much doom-and-gloom, much foretelling of apocalypse, and in the end, not much impact. But by this time, one didn’t need to watch the TV news to know about it. By this time, quite a few people learned about it on the Internet. I would say that around 2000 was the time when the Internet became like the telephone was to my parents, and the cell phone is to my nieces and nephews: “can’t function without it.”

Also around 2000, M$ followed up the very successful Windows 98 with Windows Me. Everyone hated it. Everyone. It was the Jerry Sandusky of operating systems. At that point, we began to realize that every other M$ operating system was going to be crappy, and the savvy among us planned accordingly. We’re still doing it.

By 2000, the Internet was an integral part of collegiate life. Our next transition would be Wi-Fi everywhere, and the decline of the PC in favor of the so-called smartphone, but you were around for those. I’ll let you figure out how to teach your grandkids about it, someday after I’m long gone. And if you do it better than I did, I’ll doff my spiritual hat to you, and wherever we go, when you catch up to me, we’ll have a single-malt.

Was it strange for me, having this enormous transition happen just a decade too late to help me through college? It was, but mine is not the first generation such things have happened to. It just is. We adapt as best we can, some better than others. (My mother is 75 and simply refuses to get on the Internet, and in her case I suspect that’s a pretty good thing.) Around 2000, too, Internet-based shopping and reviewing had gone very mainstream. That’s how I got into writing, through writing book reviews at Amazon, then product reviews at a now-moribund site called Epinions. I still keep in touch with a lot of people from Eps.

So. If you are twenty-five, by the time you were old enough to think about shopping, you never knew a world without the Internet; it was just something that had always been there, like oxygen or Abe Vigoda. (Like the telephone was for me.) And yet it wasn’t always there, and we did live productive and happy lives without it. I swear.

But one can never really go back, and for as badly as my generation has hosed down the world you live in, most of it knows that much at least. Even so, when next you take a look at one of those comical videos where teens look at Windows 95 and can’t even imagine how it was ever useful, at least you will know how it played out.

One last thing: lest the fogeys sell you a bill of goods, just as you look at a Windows 95-based computer and laugh at its abacus-level technology, your parents were doing the laughing in 1990. Only then, they were laughing at the people still using their pre-DOS CP/M machines, such as the Kaypro portable with its tiny green screen and floppy disks, the size of a briefcase. Or their old Compaq Portable, size of a hardshell suitcase, better known as the “Compaq Draggable.” They chortled at the elders still using cranky electric typewriters with worn-out ribbons, and at those who bought computers but still insisted on daisywheel printers (essentially, computer-driven typewriters) over the obviously superior dot-matrix printers. (That old, greasy printer at your mechanic’s shop with the word ‘Okidata’ on it? That’s a dot-matrix printer, with its rough images and its eardrum-tearing whine.)

As for our times, we can work together. If you’ll keep helping me figure out how to connect all these stupid new cords I don’t understand, I’ll be happy to reciprocate by helping you see how your parents’ world really was, and feeding you useful bits of data about their times to help you dominate them in debates.

Editing/writing life, Technology

Limping along with an eight-year-old printer

March 9, 2016 jkkblog Leave a comment

It’s true. I’m still using a printer from the Bush II administration days, a Samsung CLP-300, and I’m immune to the idea that I should just replace it. It still works, and I’m a cheap bastard.

Well, maybe I’m not what you normally think of as a cheap bastard. I may just quietly donate to your charity and not say a word. I wouldn’t resent my taxes if I didn’t think they amounted to a donation to organized corporate crime with handy government laundering. I don’t mind paying for quality. I don’t mind buying you lunch and leaving a nice tip. I insist that my wife buy business attire without looking at the price tags, so that she gets what she needs rather than trying for false economy. I don’t mind spending, but gods, how I hate waste. I bought a quality printer, it still works, and it would therefore be wasteful to buy a new one. If I figure a charity for phonies or wastrels, they’re dead to me. If the lunch I buy you turns out to be lousy, my furious yet private embarrassment will assure that the restaurant has seen its last nickel from me. If her new clothes don’t hold up, we are shopping somewhere else next time. So when I buy something, I’m going to take good care of it, and I’m going to get every second of safe life out of it that I can.

That would explain why my pickup truck, which is half my age (it dates back to the early part of the Bush I administration), is still on the road. And I don’t want a new one. If you give me a free Ferrari, I’ll never even drive it just for curiosity’s sake. On the block it goes.

The way my mind works is that, since most people buy new trucks after five to eight years, and I have not bought one in twenty-six, every day of operation is pure value profit–that is, the value I gained exceeded expectations, and exceeded what most others gain, and is still racking up the wins.

I remember when color lasers were four-figure office luxuries and color inkjets became the norm. Ever since the first HP DeskJet, though, which retailed for $1000 (and people paid it), the purpose of printers has been to sell supplies, not to make impressions on media. HP was once the gold standard, but it lost its way, and now gives users Fiorinal headaches. Now I’d buy a Canon or a Samsung.

My CLP-300 has a parallel port. Before USB took over the connectivity of our peripherals, kids, printers required a big thick cable called a parallel cable. It was pins on the computer side and an oblong block on the printer side, and it clamped down there. I don’t think my computer even has a parallel port now.

Its power draw is so heavy that I couldn’t print without a battery backup. Absent this power source, the draw would cause the computer to power cycle, probably before the printer had all the data. When it fires up, the lights in my office dim for a moment, and I am once again reassured that my battery backup will work at need.

After about ten pages, as each new page feeds, something begins to clack inside. At fifty pages, the clacking gets louder.

When I send it a long and complex job, it thinks for about thirty seconds before it even begins to print, like an elderly man assigned a young man’s job. You think I should what? it seems to demand. If it’s a picture, it makes a passive-aggressive protest by leaving a few weak lines the vertical length of the image, just to remind me that I have inconvenienced its repose.

My printer jams now and then, for any reason or no reason, which will require me to pull the beast out and extract all the stranded paper by pulling with force. There is no other way. I suppose that the rubber takeup rollers have become plasticized from heat and age.

It has a collector cartridge that gathers up loose toner from inside, presumably with some sort of blower. When that fills up, there is no real signal that it needs dumping, but the beast won’t print. Samsung thinks I should spend another $20 on a new piece of plastic rather than just dump its contents in the trash. Of course, since inhaling a bunch of toner is toxic, dumping it poses challenges.

Depending on my printer’s mood, after a certain length of printing time, I will start to smell overheated plastic. Soon thereafter, the job will halt until the beast cools off. I don’t start long jobs and then leave the house; I stay close enough to smell any real smoke and hear the alarms.

After printing, it will protest for an hour with periodic power draws. Not strong enough to pop the battery backup again, but strong enough to cause a click and the lights to dim a tad.

The toner cartridges, size and shape of half-pop-cans, go in like torpedoes in a submarine’s tubes. When the light starts flashing to tell me that a cartridge is low, I take it out and perform a sort of rocking motion to distribute the remaining toner as evenly as possible. When the light goes solid red to tell me that the printer has had enough, and insists that I replace the empty cartridge, I rock it again while cursing it. About half the time, that gets me another fifty pages.

I’ll take ’em. They are value profit.

I don’t mind spending, but holy hell, waste is my enemy and I will war against it to the knife.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Eat your serial: The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver, Bowl 4, by Shawn Inmon

March 5, 2016 jkkblog 2 Comments

No, you haven’t missed anything. I haven’t been announcing these installments, though I ought to have done so all along. This is the fourth of what will eventually be six installments, and I was substantive editor.

Shawn at times brings up story ideas just to troll me. I deserve this, because he has a thick skin about some of my margin comments. When he first brought up the idea of a middle-aged failure who commits suicide and wakes up back in his teenage body before life went south, I showed exaggerated patience in acquainting him with all the issues time travel brings into storytelling. That failed to discourage him, and he wound up writing a very good story anyway.

Now we’re on Bowl 4 of the serial, and what I like is that Shawn’s not afraid to wreck stuff. (Not often, anyway. Whenever he gets too attached to his characters, I heckle him about it, and we get some action.) He has thought through the metaphysics of his story environment, and in my view, has made good decisions and lived by them rather than taking the easy way out. When authors answer “why is it this way in your book?” with “because I say it is,” that’s usually code for “because thinking it through was work, and would have been icky, and I just wanted to write this, so I did, go to hell.” They never get by with giving me that answer, but too many are willing to give it to their customers. That’s what readers are, the customers, and authors need to remember that.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t rock the readers’ world. Fairly typical conversation:

Shawn: “And then I’m going to kill off Person A, ruin Person B’s life, and leave them wondering where that leaves Person C.”

Me: “Your readers love Person C, and will think you’re a sick man for doing that to him.”

Shawn: “Yep! This is going to be great!”

The serialized novel, impractical in the pre-e-reader days, is getting more traction. As a form, it offers advantages:

The author has to hook people into the story early, or they won’t stay with him/her.
The pricing and revenue are spread out.
The author may later choose to combine the bowls into a full-length novel, which means a chance to correct anything s/he doesn’t like in hindsight.
It offers people quick reads, a thing I can appreciate as I wade halfway through a history of Argentina that’s got to be six hundred pages, half of them purely about economic data with a focus on cattle products.

In the case of this particular bowl, I had to help Shawn break his logjam. He no more believes in writer’s block than I do, but there are times when he finds his motivation and creativity at an ebb. When that happens, he does what he should do. He sends a shoutout to his hardworking and dedicated editor, explains his plight, and requests help. In this case, I took a look at the story so far and told him: “You are bored with your characters. Memorable characters are a strength of yours, and it’s time for you to inject a brand new one.” That’s a good method for most fiction authors when they find the writing in a bogdown phase: maybe it’s time to create a new character to play with. Shawn went to town, came up with someone fun and entertaining, and that gave him the creativity laxative he needed. (He will get me for that.)

This serial has exceeded my expectations, and I think readers are enjoying it as much as I enjoy working on it.

Editing/writing life

Lachrymose intolerance

March 2, 2016 jkkblog Leave a comment

The longer I continue in this work, the more outside its mainstream I feel. One of those areas is the way we use language.

For some reason, I never have motivation to play word games or solve word puzzles. A long list of obsolete words does me good only to register them in my inactive vocabulary in case I run across them, but I never have a desire to resurrect and start using them. I see a post betting me I can’t think of a place name that doesn’t have a given letter in it, and I say to myself: “Well, whether I could or not, I don’t really want to.” And I know of very few writers who can get by with using obscure terms and making them sound natural. I’m the sort of person who sees stuff like “Eschew terminological obfuscation,” understands it, and doesn’t think it’s cute.

Then again, anything that makes me feel like I’ve wandered into a Mensa meeting causes me discomfort.

Nothing against anyone who finds that sort of thing interesting. I wish I did, because I would disappoint less people. Then again, if I were more like other people, all sorts of things would never have occurred. But yeah, for whatever reason, I never take those quizzes to test my vocabulary. If it’s not improving through my work and leisure reading, that means my brain has started the granola transformation process.

Maybe I do too much work with words to have any brain space left for playing with them.

I guess ‘lachrymose’ has stuck in my brain as the poster child for obscure terms people seem excited to work into their writing. If it’s a natural part of the way one communicates, then that’s one thing, but I suspect that most instances amount to showing off. I no longer even show off even in those rare cases where I have come across someone who is both so evil as to deserve intellectual belittling, and so stupid as to be belittlable through vocabulary. The rest of the time, the obscurity is alienating. I can see readers with average vocabularies saying to themselves: if he were a better writer, he’d be able to express his message so that his entire audience understood it. I guess I’m not in the audience.

Can’t think of many situations where one would want to kick some people out of one’s audience.

Adventures, Human relations

Harold’s sneakers

February 26, 2016 jkkblog Leave a comment

I used to know a guy named Harold, whom I met through my good friend James. Well, Harold had issues, though he wasn’t a bad guy at heart. In short, Harold was a perpetual, seemingly compulsive liar. He would brass through any lie even when presented with plain evidence to refute it. Harold was convinced that he had been a very important member of a secret special ops unit. If the subject of a language came up, he claimed to speak it fluently. Harold lied about so much that one believed nothing he said, and one was surprised whenever a truth leaked through all the fiction and horseshit.

Even so, I never expected he’d burn a friendship to get a couple grand, but live and learn. He still owes me that money, plus interest, ten years in.

I did have fun one time, when Harold showed up at my door unannounced, wearing his green beret (which was draped on the wrong side). I did not miss a beat. “Little girl, I’d like two boxes of thin mints, and two boxes of the peanut butter dream cookies, please.”

Before entering, Harold raised a middle finger, signifying his disapproval of my greeting.

Another time, Harold got snowed in at my place during a freak Pacific Northwest westside snowstorm. He was stuck there for three days, during which he managed to get my sliding glass door stuck open due to ice, thanks in turn to his frequent need to go out and smoke. Since he had trudged some distance through the slush to reach my place, he had arrived with very wet sneakers, which he removed. My carpet would never be the same again. Harold’s sneakers had a legendary stench, and he was now walking around my place in his wet socks. He claimed to have contracted some sort of jungle fungus in the tropics. I suspected he probably just hadn’t changed his socks often enough.

When I awoke the next morning, and went down the hall, my nostrils cringed before the assault of Harold’s fermenting sneakers (probably almost ready for la remuage et le dégorgement). This will not stand, I told myself. My solution was silent, swift, and sure. I dug three quarters out of my laundry coin jar and scooped up a scoop of laundry detergent. I looked at Harold, pointed at his shoes, then to my door. I sat the coins and detergent on the table and went back to my room, hoping that my body language had conveyed the full urgency.

The funniest one, though, was when James needed his house painted, as he feared he might need to put it on the market due to illness. Harold and I teamed up to paint the house. Now, James had a small mutt named Willie. Willie, an inoffensive creature to anyone partial to dogs, annoyed me and I paid him no attention of any kind. Willie did not care. Willie liked me anyway, and for that reason, James liked me. This was a pretty hot day, Harold had rented a paint sprayer, at the use of which he was inept, and we weren’t having a very easy or clean time.

James, being the good guy that he was, ordered pizza for all of us. (He was too frail at that point to help paint the place. He would eventually need a transplant, which would buy him some more years before we lost him.) Harold and I were glad to go inside for lunch. I was so tired, sweaty, and hungry that I didn’t even care that Harold had removed his sneakers.

We all shared a jovial pizza lunch, eating our way to the crusts. Willie expected that this would be his snack time, and began to get a little eager. James chastised him in that piercing nasal voice I miss to this day: “Willie! Good dogs get, and bad dogs don’t!” Willie, no fool, resumed his patient wait. Soon James pitched a succulent pizza crust in his direction.

I swear to you that this is true: it landed directly in one of Harold’s shoes. I would not fictionalize something like this without telling you so.

James, of course, had not meant to do that. Willie’s reflexes caused him to dart for the thrown food, and within six inches of Harold’s footwear, the dog halted as if he’d hit a force-field. Willie stopped, examined the situation, sniffed, and backed off. He gave James the mournful canine look that says ‘You are such a fucker,’ and trudged away in sorrow.

When it registered what we had just seen, that was probably the best laugh we all ever had together.

It’s how I like to remember James, a man whose eulogy I would one day have to deliver.

Editing/writing life

All that red ink

February 20, 2016 jkkblog 2 Comments

The first time a writer receives his or her edited ms back from someone like me, I am told, the sheer volume of corrections can be traumatic. For years I wondered why this was so, because I understood how minor 90% of the edits were. I wasn’t seeing it through my clients’ eyes, for whom lots of corrections make it appear that their brainchildren have been found very wanting. I need an explanatory document to cover this subject, and this is a great chance for the general readership to see how the sausage gets made.

All this, of course, is my own practice. Other editors may do things differently.

The ms comes to me as a single MS Word document, in .doc or .docx format. If it is not in that format, I will convert it. There are specialty writer packages like Scrivener and so on, but I lack the patience or need to adapt to these. Compose it in whatever you like, up to and including Notepad, but I’m going to work on and submit it to you in Word format, at which time you can again do with it however you think fit.

Word has a feature called Track Changes. I use this feature in every case, and I can’t imagine a situation where any editor would not, even if the client stated that it was not necessary (which I also can’t imagine). This feature enables me to add comments in the margin, and will remember the original document as it was before I got freaky. When Microsoft figured out that change tracking was fairly easy to use, it launched immediate efforts to confuse the issue by renaming this the Reviewing Pane. No new features, just everything has to be rediscovered again. That’s all MS does these days, push the user interface around and make the software worse each time. This is why I cling to outdated versions until something forces me to downgrade (i.e. switch to a later version, which is never an ‘upgrade’ in any sense of the English language).

The differences between the original and my edited version will become the tracked changes. Each change will show as a strikethrough and replacement, taken out to the margin. The deletion of a loose space will show the same red line out to the margin as the deletion of a paragraph. Any formatting change, any minor typo fix, does not matter how great or small: it will produce yet another line of ‘red ink.’

The first thing I will do to the ms is a global search-and-replace (SAR) for two blank spaces, replace with a single blank space. This will remove all the incontinently loose spaces the client has left in the ms, including those s/he used to align text horizontally (rather than use tabs in the correct manner). If the client is older, and has clung to the obsolete standard of two spaces after a period, colon, or exclamation point, surprise: the ms has just received hundreds and hundreds of tiny edits, each of which has its own red line stretching out to the margin. If the client is younger, there will be fewer, but I can still anticipate a great many. I will repeat this process until it returns zero replacements.

As I make my first editing pass, I will correct any typo that I find. Some are usage typos, such as single quotes where doubles would better suit, misspellings, little stuff. I can expect several per page. Each will result in one more red line out to the margin.

Of course, I am also editing and commenting as I proceed. I want to explain some of my edits, partly for teaching purposes, and partly because I believe that my client has the right to know my reasoning. The client is far more likely to accept an edit if s/he gets some idea of the logic that prompted it, right? This is also more collaborative. Maybe I didn’t quite get the client’s meaning in a given passage. If I didn’t, and my edit distorted something, the client should reject the edit, reword it him or herself, or confer with me to decide upon a good solution. Adversarial editing, in which the client can’t wait to “fight for her words,” doesn’t happen with me because I’m not interested in clients who want to fight. If you’re a writer, and part of your career dream is a hostile editorial relationship, I am not the right provider for you. I’m interested in clients who want to produce and sell better books in which they can take more pride, and in doing my all to help them grow. If my input is unhelpful to a given client, there is no meaningful relationship in play.

When I finish that first pass, I will usually take my eyes off the ms for a couple of days, then do a second pass that I call the normalization pass. As I did the first pass, I missed some things. I should rethink some things, and I should definitely tone down the sarcasm in some of the comments. Above all, my handling of the author’s habits evolved over the course of the edit, which means the first part sounds different than the latter parts. The second pass allows me to make that voice consistent, to apply the lessons holistically. It also generates a bunch more red lines out to the margin, both comments and new edits.

So now approaches the magical moment, the time when I will return the edited ms to my client. This person trusted his or her months of effort to my good offices. I am human, and I like to make people happy. I’m a businessman, and I like to meet and exceed the client’s expectations. Thus, I hope that s/he will love the outcome. I desire to hear that s/he finds the read smoother, clearer, more economical, and better than s/he imagined s/he could sound. I hope s/he will absorb the lessons I took time to impart, and is eager to publish and move on to the next big project, energized by a sense of quantum leap in ability. I understand that s/he will reject a few of my edits, and that’s fine. I hope I did a good job making the case for most of them.

While I’m all jazzed to hear my client’s impressions, on the other end of the wire, my client is opening the Word document to a sea of red ink. S/he can’t even follow all the changes; it seems I found multiple faults with every single sentence. To him or her, nothing s/he wrote was ever just good as it was, or so it appears from the storm of crimson lines. It must surely be a horrible shock, at least the first time.

And probably 80% of those red lines, perhaps more, are loose spaces, punctuation fixes, and repaired typographical errors. Their quantity says nothing about where the client is as a writer, except that:

The client is still using extra spaces. They all do. I have never yet broken a single client of this. I guess I should rejoice that this will save them from outgrowing my services.
The client made typos, as I do, as does everyone, and each one found is one fixed, thus reason to sigh with relief.

In other words, that the client is much like most writers, and the quantity of red lines by itself says nothing. Truly. It lacks even correlation with quality of writing. Someone could write a lousy novel requiring full rewrites of many chapters, yet do the SARs him or herself and have it proofread before it went to me, and there would be fewer red lines when I was done–yet those red lines would mean much more, edit for edit.

Before you get your work back from an editor who invested any effort at all, and had any sort of standards, be prepared for tons of red lines, and realize that the majority are nearly insignificant. And don’t take one look at it and think: Oh, good lord, I’m a disaster with a keyboard. I should just shove this in a drawer. I’ll never make it.

The true message is quite opposite. Absorb that one.

Editing/writing life

New Author Syndrome

February 17, 2016 jkkblog 7 Comments

For some, it doesn’t wear off with the first book, and for some, it kicks in well before the first book.

I was reading this great post on Ajoobacats’ blog about how rude and pushy some authors get when soliciting reviews. She has a prominent platform, and they’re willing to throw a few elbows to get her attention. The post made me realize that I can explain their behavior.

As someone who deals with quite a few new authors in his professional world, I can tell you: some of them become a pain in the ass. Not to me as their editor (they either sack me or embrace what I have to say; there isn’t much middle ground), but to nearly everyone else they know. And I know it because, when I first started thinking I could write fiction, and for some years afterward, I was such a pain in the ass about it.

For everyone who distanced themselves from me back then, I understand.

For everyone who continued to like me anyway, thank you, you’re saints.

For everyone who is now dealing with New Author Syndrome, whether in a spouse or a friend or a co-worker or a review demander, read on.

Here’s what happens. In a significant percentage of writers and authors, there develops this desperate hunger for feedback, critique, but especially approval. If it continues into the timeframe of publishing one’s own book, it takes what is a strong positive, namely eagerness to get in there and market the book, and turns it into a reek that drives away those near them. It can be found at SF cons with minimal effort, usually by the socially awkward person with the urban paranormal time travel zombie steampunk horror thriller romance who thinks that half of the panel’s time is rightly his.

In New Author Syndrome, the author’s world has narrowed down to two classes of individuals: those who embrace the faith and are useful, and the infidels who are useless. Everyone in that person’s world, and especially every new contact, is either on board with that person as a writer or is insignificant/annoying/counterproductive/The Dreamslayer. The faithful are those willing to read the book, review the book favorably, praise the book to the author, and otherwise touch up on all key points of promotional faith. The infidels are those who decline to sign on to any particular of this fanboyism/fangirlism.

Here is how you get past this phase.

If you find yourself buttonholing people in your world to read your stuff, and having trouble taking “no” for an answer, you need a critique group. This is going to hurt. The critique group’s job is not to fluff up your ego, but to tell you the truth as they see it. There are many forms of critique groups out there, but any environment whether online or in person, in which you cannot simply delete any feedback you dislike, will serve the purpose. This is how you become the writer you imagine you are.

If you have just completed your manuscript and you want first readers (there is no such thing as a beta reader, as beta testing applies to software, not literature; please discontinue that loathsome term, thank you), you need to find them without driving your friends away. It’s damnably hard, especially if you were so afraid of being a lightweight that you wrote a Michenerian opus. You may have to find someone willing to trade reads and critiques. Here’s what’s sure: your spouse may be willing to read it, but your spouse has a number of biases. Your close friends may say they will read it to please you, but may not really do so, or not quickly enough to satisfy your hunger. The pressure will impair these friendships if you are not careful. You might even end up hiring an editor to critique it (and no, I don’t mean me, unless you seek developmental editing and you are intent upon its publication). If you do engage a substantive or developmental editor at some point, and he or she is worth anything, you’ll get hit between the eyes with the most compassionate version of the truth that editor has the power to deliver. If up to that point you have tuned out everyone but fangirls, this may be devastating no matter how compassionate it may be.

If you are about to publish the book, or have just published it, yes, you must be out there marketing your work. The world expects a certain amount of this from you, and will endure it with tolerance provided you follow a golden rule: if you sense no interest beyond a very perfunctory acknowledgement, change the subject. Your need to market your book does not constitute urgency on everyone else’s part, or on anyone’s. If you are pushy toward reviewers, or fail to see the world through their eyes, you will either get no reviews, or you may wish you had got none rather than the blisterings you will earn. If your close friends do not want to buy and read your book, you will know that because they will congratulate you, ask a polite question, then wish you success. If they don’t offer to buy a copy, they don’t want to read it and they don’t want to promote it. This is not Amway.

Being a new writer/author is a lot like dating. The more desperate you are, the more of a turnoff it is. The more your world narrows to the faithful and the infidels, the more desperate you seem. Remember this: there is a whole world outside your writing and your book, a world in which everyone else has interests that are not you. If you take some time off from your writing and your book to show interest in that whole world, whether or not it helps to build your ego or sell your book, you’ll get past this phase and reach your writing maturity.

Some very famous authors never do. I recall the opening ceremonies for a science fiction convention, in which the guest of honor was a fairly famous author who is becoming fairly famous for phoning ’em in (I think he’s just hiring ‘lancers to do the actual writing). The MC introduced Famous Author. He smiled, waved, and said: “Thanks. Buy my books.”

Ever since that day, I admit, whenever I leave a review of one of his books, I admit I put a little extra mustard on the bad parts.

The Editorial Maverick

All posts by jkkblog

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New Author Syndrome

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.