Category Archives: Editing/writing life

About doing this stuff for a living.

Editing/writing life

Bloggings will continue until morale improves

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When you are a ‘lancer, you write for anyone who will fork over, presuming it doesn’t violate your basic life principles (hope you have some). When it’s slow, you have to get creative.

With that in mind, this winter I turned my pen to technical writing on contract. No, it is not la vie litteraire. I honestly don’t think much of said vie, with all its pretense, pomposity and poseurs (and frequently poseuses). It is my belief that there is no such thing as writer’s block; there are people who want to write, and they do that. There are people who don’t want to write, and they do not do that. Right now I want to write, and I am obviously doing it. Well, to be a ‘lancer, you have to ‘want to write’ because you’ll get paid, if for no other reason.

Which explains why I spent the morning assembling a document concerning specifications for cable plants. (No, you goof, you cannot grow them in your garden. Silly gardeners.) Would I prefer to be approached by a major publisher to write a balanced history of the United States, one that would thus piss off everyone with a political filter and earn me hate mail calling me a Commie pinko and a Fascist pig in the same day? Moot point, for I will not be so approached. In the meantime, should I be expanding the ways I can present my ‘lancing résumé? If I don’t, I evidently don’t want to write that badly.

So, I’m writing about cabling. There are some benefits to this besides the money. While my engineer boss is a very good writer as engineers go, it’s fun to be engaged because of the perception that I know more than him about my trade. I realized that when I had to explain to him some of the proofreading marks and issues with punctuation. Mine to present the knowledge, his (as owner of the firm) to say how he likes it and wants it done, and mine in turn to do as all good ‘lancers do: produce quality content to spec on time with a diligent work ethic and a positive attitude.

Here’s the interesting revelation from the process of application. He had quite a few applicants, most of them fresh out of college with liberal arts degrees. I did not expect my nearing-fifty age to be an advantage, but it was. He found his applicants not mature enough for what he wanted in his workplace, which was someone who would show up on time, work without texting every few minutes, observe the recognized protocols of workplace dress, demeanor and focus, and in the end, do as asked without making some excuse. As I was working on my first assignment on my first day, he took a call from one applicant that pretty much said it all. The guy was checking on the status of his application, which had not received a response because he had misspelled his own e-mail address on his résumé. Let’s see. I’m applying to work for an engineer. Should I assure that my presentation demonstrates some attention to detail? Why, yes. Yes, I should. If I cannot manage that, should I pretty much fold the tent and find a new line of work? One thinks so. In any case, my new boss was urbane and courteous to the caller, but within my hearing, advised him that the position was filled. I smiled to myself and kept picking apart the proofreading I had been assigned. I perforated that sucker.

It’s not full time, and it’s not as many hours as I’d like to get, but that’s ‘lancing. You saddle up, you find out what is asked of you, and you do.

It is better training for your own writing work than you might think. It’ll expand your knowledge (I’ve learned a lot about how telecomm cables are organized, and why). It’ll give you the happy glow of cashing checks.

Most of all, it will teach you to write whether you are in the mood or not, whether you have a headache or not, because it’s time you did some writing. That’s how this blog post came about. It was time to do a blog post. I did not grant myself the option to just go upstairs and read my S.M. Stirling book, which was my personal whim–at least, not until I finished this post. Enough people have shown that they will visit here regularly that it is incumbent on me to continue supplying content I think will please at least some of the readership. Do that, and unless you have no idea what people like, that readership expands. Decide that you are in a blah mood and don’t want to write, a little too often, they forget about you soon–as good ol’ Stroker Ace taught us. “Blow their doors off, Stroker.” Just listen to that banjo work.

When in doubt, remember that bloggings will continue until morale improves. This one improved mine, at any rate.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Amacomedy

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There’s a new trend: the hunt for the silliest possible items on Amazon, and the large-scale posting of product ‘reviews.’ I probably shouldn’t participate, seeing as I have a professional presence there, but I guess I see it this way: if having a sense of humor is a bar to working somewhere, not sure I want to work there to begin with.

My plan is to collect them here as I find them, so that if people want, they can bookmark this post and come back to it any time they need some pant-peeing mirth. Without further ado:

Save Your Marriage–How to Stop Divorce (credit to old Eps Fez crewman Gary)

Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant–55 Gallon (credit to my nephew Vann, thank you!)

Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer (credit, if memory serves, to dear OrionSlaveGirl, thanks!)

Accoutrements Yodeling Pickle

Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gal.

Uranium Ore

Playmobil Security Checkpoint

Filexec 3-Ring Binder

Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable

Bic Cristal For Her Ball Pen (this one is kind of famous)

Unicorn Mask

Book reviews, Editing/writing life, Human relations, Married life

Professor Willis Konick

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Let us begin 2013 on the ‘Lancer with something joyous and uplifting. [This text is superceded in mood by the final para, but let it stand as set for what it meant while Willis was with us.]

It has been a quarter century since I last saw him in person, he has since retired; and still when I see a friend post about Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy, I think of Willis Konick.

To call him ‘Professor’ was unthinkable, as Willis would advise the entire class on the first day. An alumnus of and longtime professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, his entire life was bound up with the Russian language, Russian literature and UW. He taught Comparative Literature and Russian Literature there for so long it became hard to imagine UW without him. If I were to call him ‘Professor Konick’ in this blog post, someone would find out about it, and one of two things might happen. That person might call me out in comments as a complete fake, because anyone who ever actually attended a Willis lecture knew good and well that no one used his last name. Or that person might send the blog link to Willis, who would not only recognize my name and remember me, but who would write to me asking how I was doing, suggesting we have coffee any time I was in Seattle, and politely reminding me that his name was ‘Willis.’

I am not making any of this up, nor am I exaggerating. Willis did his best to have coffee with as many of his students as possible, and had an amazing memory for faces and names.

Willis’s class was the one no one skipped. It was always in a lecture hall with at least 200 seats, usually more like 300, purely because of demand. Yes. A literature professor so entertaining and appealing that the school was forced to schedule his classes in large lecture halls. People scrambled to get into a literature class. Whole decades of UW undergrads filled up their humanities distribution requirements with English 111 plus whatever Willis classes they could squeeze into. Except for a few hundred math and tech wonks from other countries who spoke such minimal English that a literature class was out of the question, at UW all 35,000 students learned of ‘Willis’ in the first week on campus.

While an excellent lecturer and student of the genre (he speaks and reads fluent Russian, and each year would read War & Peace or Anna Karenina, alternating), neither that nor his obvious love of everything about teaching accounted for all of his popularity. Much of that stemmed from his famous impromptu in-class skits to dramatize a character or concept. Willis would reach into the mass of 250 students, and without error, pick out the perfect individual as his foil. Didn’t matter whether it was a nervous young lady in a sorority sweatshirt, a blowhard, a future engineer, or one of his groupies. No one ever refused, even when he chose someone deliberately for shyness. He was known to dump buckets of water on his head on stage, strip to his underwear, open his shirt and claw at his pale chest, and so much more.

I too had my day, and the best way to convey Willis is to tell the story.

I can’t even remember whether it was a Comp Lit or Russian Lit class, not that the distinction ever made a difference with Willis. De facto always outshone de jure. He was teaching Anna, and as I recall, the class was in Gowen Hall on the Quad. Willis was explaining the nuances of Vronsky, and then his bespectacled eyes got that wild look which told us something was coming. He scanned the classroom like a confident quarterback whose pocket is just barely holding, quick head movements and a smile repressed only by force of professional will. The eyes achieved lock-on when they hit me. “JOHN! YES, YOU! JOHN! COME DOWN HERE, PLEASE, I’D LIKE A WORD WITH YOU!”

You know you are about to be had, but you go anyway. You know you are going to be embarrassed, but you also know you’ll remember it when you are twice as old as the day it happens. As I made my way to the aisle and descended the steps, I saw Willis do as he so often did, turning toward the stage and bounding onto it. Anything to do with acting or performance subtracted decades from his sixtyish physical age. He awaited me with sparkling eyes but as solemn a countenance as he could enforce. There was a sturdy wooden table up there, for some reason, and he encouraged me to have a seat.

“So, John, you were in my class last quarter,” began Willis.

“Yes, Willis, I was.”

“And you turned in your final paper.”

“Yep.”

“How do you feel about it?

Something in his tone cued me. I can’t explain it any other way. He had given me 4.0, and still I gave the right answer. “Not too good, Willis,” I responded glumly.

“No,” he answered gravely, making sure to pitch his voice so they could hear him in the back rows (he had an effect like Epidaurus that way). “I hate to say this, John, but that was the worst paper of the quarter.”

I waited, doing the despondent face as best I could.

“In fact, your paper was so terrible, it was the worst paper of the year. I’m confident that nothing that will come will be worse. Your paper was so awful, I have given you a 0.0 for the quarter. I trust you understand.”

Still I sat in mock glumness.

“Sadly, John, your paper was such a disgrace that I felt compelled to bring it to the attention of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He agreed with me that it was the worst paper he too had ever seen. It was so disappointing that, harsh as it may seem, you are being expelled from the University.”

I looked miserable.

“You know how Reagan calls the astronauts to congratulate them? President Reagan is calling your parents to chastise them for your paper!”

I heard the first giggles from the audience, but I held back my own.

His tone went almost sympathetic. “Now, John, it’s obvious you can’t stay here. You must go, as you must leave the University. But is there anything you’d like to say before you depart in complete disgrace? What would you like to say to the class, and to me? Would you like, for example, to ask for another chance?”

“Doesn’t seem right, Willis. It was a pretty poor effort.”

“Yes, it was,” he answered sternly. “Nor would you receive one. Would you like to plead that you tried your best?”

“That’d be lying. I didn’t try at all.”

“That much was obvious,” he said, voice mournful. “Would you like to tell them that in spite of all of this, you’re still a nice guy?”

He’d thrown a switch. Nothing in his tone signaled anything; it was all in the genius of his having chosen me for this specific skit. For the first time since he’d initially addressed me, my head snapped around to him. “YES!” I said, raising my voice a tad in indignation.

Willis smiled, stood up in his most professorial stance, actor’s posture discarded faster than you could think. He raised a finger. “I MAY BE A COMPLETE SCREW-UP, BUT AT LEAST I’M STILL A NICE GUY. And that is what Vronsky is trying to tell us here. John, thank you,” he added. I made my way back to my seat, as I had seen so many other students do. None of it had been rehearsed or planned. In a few seconds he could read precisely the type of person he needed, to react in the precise ways necessary to demonstrate his point, picking him or her out of nearly three hundred people.

Fifteen years later, when I was authoring my (as yet unpublished) Irish travel narrative, my wife encouraged me to write to Willis and ask him to author an introduction. I thought she was nuts, but I did it. He asked me to send him the ms, in print, and I did. He pointed out what was missing from it, and encouraged me to read a couple of other travel books that would demonstrate the qualities my ms needed in order to become publishable. You always take all personal career counseling given you by your most admired figures, or you’re an idiot. When I’d finished the rewrite, I sent him the portion he wanted to see. He praised my remedying of the flaws and agreed to write an introduction if I wished. While no one ended up publishing the book–which I still may do on my own–one more time, I learned a lot from Willis about writing.

He retired in 2007, aged 77. And if you think anything you just read is far-fetched at all, I have the Seattle Times to back me up.

Thanks, Willis, for everything on every level. Oh, and I’m re-reading Brothers. Maybe this time I’ll get at least half of it.

P.S., December 16, 2016: Willis passed away November 30, 2016. I feel so fortunate to have known him.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

The Epinions days

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Ho ho ho…it’s time for your early Christmas present. The article is just the wrapping paper.

My writing start came at a product review site called epinions.com. The concept was for actual consumers to provide consumer-helpfully written product reviews. Books, games, movies, lawn mowers, breast pumps, computers, cell phones–if you could buy it, you could probably get it added to the Eps database. When Eps first began, people could make real money there. By the time I got there, the gravy train was stuck at a siding. I believe the site began in 1999; I showed up in 2001 and was fairly active through 2003, tapering off thereafter. I’ve made about $433 from it over the years.

At first, I took the site seriously and attempted to write relatively serious reviews. It didn’t take long for me to realize that some of the most creative and witty minds I’d ever seen were also at Eps, and they were mostly not taking it seriously. In my halting way, I began to follow their various leads. I got some writing feedback, some positive and some negative. In hindsight, my work was mountainously egotistical, pretentious, sometimes facile, and often relied on cheap gimmicks rather than intellect, but I think it improved. I certainly got to see a lot of examples showing how to do it better.

Over time, the would-be comics of Epinions and their sympathizers coalesced into a rolling circus called the Fez Crew. Sordid-1, one of the funnier folks you’ll ever read, was the group’s founder and soul. My all-time favorite Epinions piece still remains his travel review of Arizona. He wrote a three-part review of his mercifully brief stint in the Maricopa County Jail. He did not recommend Arizona as a destination. For a couple of years there, we had a lot of fun. We did protests, writeoffs, even tribute pieces to members we learned were terminally ill. Some of us were one step from being ticketed or community blocked by the admins, and we were always afoul of the Eps cops. This group was heavily populated by stay-at-home moms (a fundamentally honorable profession practiced by more than one Fez Crew-woman) who took diaper pails, sippy cups, kiddy movies and such deadly seriously. They had private groups away from the site, which they reckoned were secret, where they kept hit lists of consumerly-unhelpful people and ganged up to try and rate their reviews negatively. We parodied them a lot, such as the time I reviewed Grand Theft Auto III as a homeschooling tool. But in the end–and only partly due to the Eps cops’ gang-rating–Eps ceased to be fun for most of us, and we went on to other things.

For a lot of Eps alumni (either Fez or simply friendly forces, admired for genuine writing talent), that meant careers writing for real money. Cornelia Read was one. David Abrams was another. Many of us eventually found one another on Facebook, though after we had all reconnected with the people we liked, we didn’t have that much to say to each other, so the Fez Crew on FB became moribund as a semi-informal grouping. Few of us still write at Eps, though most of us still write. Brett Nicholson will one day get a screenplay published. It wouldn’t be fair to call Markham Shaw Pyle an Eps alum–I understand that he was published before Eps began–but he wrote some of the more thoughtful reviews and commentary there. It turned out to be a pretty good literary practice field and weight room.

Something got me thinking of those days, this evening, contributed by frequent commentator OrionSlaveGirl. It seems that the spirit of Fez lives, as you can see in the Amazon reviews of this banana slicer. What you see here, good reader, is exactly the fun-loving Fez spirit we once had at Epinions. Enjoy. And happy holidays to you all, in whatever form and shape, and thank you for your many visits here this year.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Why no politics

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Those of you who visit here regularly may have noticed that we managed to get through a whole US election season without any partisan politics. I thank you all for not starting any such irritations in the comments; my affection for the readership grew in this time. But it may be useful for me to explain the many reasons behind my studious avoidance, since many of them relate to the views that fuel the writing:

  • I am not aligned with a major party, and am fairly bereft of faith in the process, so my rooting interest is limited to begin with. I feel that elections are something for other people to get worked up about.
  • This is my professional public presence. I make my living with my writing. I don’t check my readers’ political cards, and I find the notion abhorrent. If I share writing, it is for all, and whether we might agree or disagree on any issue is beside the point.
  • The above relates to a view I do hold strongly: one of our great problems today is political incontinence. I define this as the inability to set politics aside and work/play/eat/laugh/boff/live together in amity, caused by the inability to shut the hell up about one’s politics. Politics are like bowel movements: they’re fine in the proper places, even necessary, but the world doesn’t need a report on every last instance, nor does it need a constant flow of other people’s on display. I have determined that this must be a bastion of political continence. I know too many deeply intelligent people all over the spectrum of politics to think less of any person based purely on a political stance. It is important to me that no one walk away from here feeling litmus-tested, and to fulfill that mission requires strict political continence, which must begin with me.
  • If I started the discussion, it would become a fight, because I am a fierce and passionate man. I have seen how many people have behaved over politics in the past year, and many of the types of things people have said would be things they couldn’t take back–it would not be my way to let them. I also might respond with words I couldn’t take back, and being me, I probably would not want to back down. Know thyself, especially thine weaknesses. Whatever gain could be had from allowing that, well, it eludes me. Who could I blame but myself, were I to open that door? It would all be beside the point, which is that I am here to represent my writing to the world, not bicker. There are other places I could bicker, if so minded.
  • People need oases from politics at the best of times. These are not the best of times, and in these, they need oases that much more. People need good places, and I’ve striven to craft one.
  • I have never made a pronouncement/demand that commenters avoid politics, because I didn’t need to. The blog seems to have drawn people of good political continence. If I had to, I suppose I would, though the reflex of just deleting the political comments might be enough to send the message. It is fatuous to come out all bombastic against a problem that does not and likely will not exist. “Okay, thanks for that. What’s next, a proscription outlawing all living velociraptors? No mammoths allowed to post on the blog?”
  • The blog has taught me that social comment is possible without overt political commentary. At the outset, I wondered if this would be the case, and how to handle it.
  • Politics tends to bring on the sin of bloviation. Blogging should not be bloviatory.
  • Confession: I’m not really that knowledgeable about politics, nor do I think most people are. It’s my view that most people who take to political pulpits really don’t and can’t know the facts, because most people would not invest the time. They would take the word of news articles, or their favorite websites, even simply take the headlines and not read the articles. If I find myself having to guard against that, I must assume I’m not the only one. Therefore, my default assumption is that most of what I see is baloney based upon baloney: unsubstantiated conclusions based on unchecked, taken-for-granted suppositions. It is impossible for everyone to check everyone’s references, or even all of one’s own; there simply isn’t enough time. We do have substantial reason to believe one thing: that a lot of what we read and hear and watch is misleading, either by journalistic sloth or by design. I once heard a co-worker, a pretty bright guy, take issue with my questioning of some version of events. His argument: “But it was on the network news! Of course it’s true!” With that statement, it became evident that our world views were parallel. There’s a word that gets misused. What does it mean? Two lines are parallel only if they can never touch. ‘Parallel thinking’ doesn’t mean agreement, despite how people throw it around. His thinking and mine emanated from such different fundamental assumptions that common ground was elusive.

So, from deep inside me, thank you for keeping us free of partisan crap here at the ‘Lancer. Thank you for reading, commenting, liking, visiting, and for motivating me to write. When I begin to conceive a blog post, I am asking myself: “How will this inform, uplift, entertain?” I have aborted quite a few posts because they didn’t supply good answers to that question. Thanks for being the reasons for the question.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

The blook: today’s publishing trend

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I keep seeing this, so it’s time we gave it a name. From a writer’s vantage, the 2000s have been defined by the crumbling of the NYC stranglehold on the publishing apparatus. The proles can now easily buy the means of production. Self-publishing is the way of the day.

This has led to the blook: the blog that eventually becomes a self-published book. The idea is not new, of course, but an evolution of the colook (collection of columns turned into a book) or the slook (collection of short stories turned into a book). All that’s changed is that now everyone’s a columnist and short story author, me included. Blog consistently enough about a subject, and you can get by with publishing the collection as a blook.

This I don’t like. When I buy a book, I’m expecting that someone meant it to be a book, with previously unpublished insights and a unifying theme. I’m not expecting it to be a bunch of stuff I could have read for free, or seen in the right magazines. I see this as a cheesy way to avoid the long project fatigue of sitting down to author a real book from start to finish. Waspish of me, but: it’s a great way to author by Tao. Ever read the Tao Te Ching? It’s all about doing by not doing. The blook seems exactly like what Lao-Tzu had in mind, applying his concept to authoring.

All the same, the consumer can adjust expectations and willingness to pay. If I think blooks are of less value than books, I can avoid buying blooks I consider not to deliver fair value. However, they sneak up on you, both at the bookstore and at Amazon. In the end, if you aren’t too enamored by blooks, the only answer is to research them yourself before you buy.

Editing/writing life

Some cold realities about getting published, for your information

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This is adapted from an e-mail I wrote to a client, when asked for advice about publication and marketing of one’s own books.

Most of the publishing world is parasitical. It wants you to do all the work and provide all the content so that it can make most of the money. It operates on the principle of the remora.

Your decision is between self-publishing, small press publishing and New York. The main difference between the three is that with New York, New York gets all the money and also locks up more of the rights. Small press probably treats you more humanely and pays you a little better. With self-publishing, you keep all the rights and make all the money.  Also, with New York and most small press, they want ‘exclusive submission.’ That means that they entertain the fantasy that you should pitch it to them, then wait for a reply before you pitch it to anyone else. I’ve seen more credible fantasies in Penthouse Variations.

Notice I didn’t specify any actual benefits from small press or New York. They confer mainly the ‘I made it’ prestige/legitimacy factor, a commodity that is fading faster than the big houses want you to believe. They will mostly do minimal to no editing or marketing for you. They will do a cover for you, but they will inflict it upon you without much input allowed from you. They will typeset it for you, but they can screw up real, real bad, such as accidentally publish an early draft rather than the one you worked so hard to refine. (I am not joking. It happened to a pretty respected author I sort of know, Allen Barra. When I wrote to him to ask, “Al, say it ain’t so, how did this get so screwed up?” he wrote back and told me what had happened. Since I was writing a review, he insisted on paying to send me a copy of the right version. If I was going to write a review, he wanted it to be his best work, which is not what the publisher fricking printed. Unbloodybelievable.)

Suppose it sells for $12. New York will pay you $1 per copy sold. You’re still on the hook for most of the marketing. If you self-publish, you keep $12 per copy sold minus the printing cost. This means that NY has to outsell you 12:1 just to break even, and you signed rights away to them. If you succeed well enough on your own, publishers may come calling. I’d be careful. Publishing is a business. The main reason for them to call is because they want some of the money. The burden is on them to demonstrate why you would make more money with them than you are now, and that that is worth the rights you sign away. Many of them count on you being so wowed that you won’t read the contract too carefully, much less send it to an intellectual property attorney for review.

Your odds of getting an agent are minimal; your odds of a lot of terse rejections are high. Publishers at least sometimes act like you are also a customer, which agents know you are not. Just as many publishers want to buy the home run best seller that will make them zillions for no work, many agents want to pitch the easily pitchable book that will make them thousands for no work.

There are exceptions to all of the above. These are trends, not universal realities.

If it’s a non-fiction book, in order to pitch it, you need a query letter, a book proposal and a copy of the current Writer’s Market. If you don’t know what any of that is, you need to learn, because not knowing what that stuff is would be akin to trying to breastfeed baby and unsure where Junior is supposed to find the spout.

Edit: this piece prompted Shawn Inmon, the self-published author of a compelling true love story, to put forth his own perspective about self-publishing. If you felt this was worth a read, I think you’ll feel Shawn’s post is also.

Editing/writing life, Social comment

Editing a book on child-raising…me, of all people

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My current project is to edit a book on child-raising. This is funny.

Some of you may not know this, but I’m not real good with children. I never wanted to produce any; the day my ex-fiancée told me very seriously that she was pregnant, shortly thereafter revealing that it was a joke, ha ha, something broke inside me and I never trusted her again. I have recently learned that I can enjoy being around good children for about three or four hours. I can endure them for three or four more, after which I need a couple days in a bar. If they are relatives it’s easier, but only to a point. If they are not exceptionally well-behaved, it’s excruciating. In short, perfect kids about whom I authentically care are difficult enough for me. The other billion are rather harder.

I did not ask to be this way, and it’s not something I’m glad for or proud of. It’s very inconvenient to be missing the gene that says kids are inherently cute and funny no matter whether they are attempting to start fires, defecating in their pants, doing something that they have discovered will frustrate adults, or making a crayon drawing of your pet. My life would be much easier if I liked being around them all, and I have tried to like it. It’s like trying to like a food you must force down. It is like telling yourself that discomfort is joy, edginess is relaxation, cardboard is food. I wish them great educations, lots of adventures, good friends, drug avoidance, full safety and very happy lives, with which I’m increasingly willing to intersect as they age toward maturity. If I had to work at a school, I would rather be the night janitor than a teacher. Night janitors perform a key job to help education happen, and by then the kids would be gone, rather than in my classroom torturing me, knowing that I couldn’t actually discipline them and they could get away with making my job hell. People know when they hit a vulnerable spot, and kids learn it early, long before most of them learn that gratuitous cruelty is not a character strength.

When my wife wants to mess with me, she talks about starting a daycare in our house. She thinks it’s funny. Yuk yuk, what a card. Everyone slap your knees.

As for me, I think it’s pretty funny that I am now editing a book on parenting.

The authors made a good choice in the sense that I’m completely unequipped to debate their parenting concepts. Life has taught me that ‘bad mommy’ is this enormous bugaboo for mothers. They’ll come to blows with the one who even implies Bad Mommy. They’ll yowl that they are Good Mommies, even if their junior Satans are out-of-control unbearable (not just to me, but to normal people). They’ll follow obsessive, fearful childcare regimes in order to avoid even a hint of Bad Mommy. Not that they don’t also do much out of pure maternal love, of course; surely so. I’m not saying that Bad Mommy drives all their decisions. I am saying that in many cases, I smell fear as an additional motivator.

Bad Mommy is even a pack behavior. I used to write for a product review site called Epinions. At Epinions, there was a clique I called the Mommy Platoon. The Mommy Platoon could give you 1000 words on a diaper pail without giggling. Sippy cups were serious business. They kept offsite message boards dedicated to gang-rating reviews they deemed to take parenting insufficiently seriously. They said appalling things to people in comments. Singly, they were cravens, but with the company of a cult of mutual reassurance, they found a form of gangster courage. One of their most devastating bullying weapons was Bad Mommy, used without remorse to bring other women to tears, simply for seeing parenting differently. A number of us, with goodwill and empathy, wrote reviews that made light of parenting and its issues and products, honestly hoping to bring the readership (including the Mommy Platoon) a few good laughs. Laugh about parenting? That was as popular with the Mommy Platoon as bomb jokes are with airport security. I think a majority of the mothers at the site despised the Mommy Platoon.  In the end, a key factor driving many of us away from Epinions was this Mommy Platoon, which evidently never learned the lesson mentioned above about gratuitous cruelty. One lesson I took away from that experience was just how dramatically Bad Mommy will influence a mother’s actions and outlook. I feel for them. I’d hate to have that hanging over me.

Bad Mommy is probably a positive thing in at least one sense. Motherhood is exhausting and endless, and it doesn’t have very many breaks. Perhaps when parenting needs doing in spite of how she feels, at times, Bad Mommy is the lash that drives her onward to do what is needed in spite of her being her own person with her own pains, emotions, desires, and so on. I’m glad I don’t know for sure. I wouldn’t want her job. I could in no way do it, and I marvel that she can.

So I’m editing a parenting book. Here’s the thing: my complete ignorance of the subject is an asset to the authors. I can play my position, which is to fix anything that is flawed about the way they have presented their ideas (as opposed to the ideas themselves). Their parenting advice sounds pretty smart to me, and I think it’ll be a great book; my job is to do my all to help that be so. They must find it a blessed relief that I have zero temptation to debate parenting with them, in much the same way as I have zero temptation to debate Sanskrit translation with lifelong Sanskrit scholars or fly-fishing techniques with a lifelong fisherman. They tell me their previous editor (who sounds very Mommy Platoon to me) fired them and said she would pray for them. I’m impressed that this did not dissuade them. When they sent me the sample chapter to see how I’d handle it, they deliberately picked the most controversial one, just to see how I’d react. When I learned that they had done this, they impressed me more.

I like the project. The authors have a very good sense of humor. I can’t imagine them in the Epinions Mommy Platoon. Along the way, I’ll teach them some stuff. You can divide aspiring writers into two categories: those who want to improve, and those who want to be Frosted Flakes with the reader/reviewer/editor as Tony the Tiger. These ladies are serious about it, which means they have a very real chance to get somewhere with the written word.

Here’s to all moms. They have a hard job.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Recent project: _Feels Like the First Time_, by Shawn Inmon

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Inmon’s first foray into print (if that link doesn’t work: http://www.amazon.com/Feels-Like-First-Time-Story/dp/1479258946/ ) is deeply personal, telling about how he lost and later rediscovered a true love. I was his proofreader, for which he has lauded me way out of proportion to my contribution, Shawn being a fundamentally generous and thoughtful guy.

I came to the project in a very interesting way. As some of my dear readers know, I cut my comic writing teeth at Epinions (a product review site) just after the millennium. One fellow I met there, I sort of stayed in touch with him and spouse, in part motivated by a mutual small-town-Washington-1970s upbringing. A few years back, I happened to touch base with the lady I did not then know was his widow. She caught me up. I tried to provide what inadequate support I could to her, and in the process, met some of their high school friends. One was the author of this story, Shawn Inmon.

So, when Shawn had a book he wanted proofread, I was glad to sign on. I liked him and his attitude toward life, and was pretty sure I could help him achieve his goal. He wanted to publish a book to a higher standard than the avalanche of self-published dubiousness that is the rage today. How could that not resonate with me? I quickly found Shawn a very coachable and soulful fellow, with a lot of guts to put this very personal story out before the world. I probably did a little more than your standard em dash and comma police work, but I’m glad I did. He was dead serious about publishing the story and I was glad that the final set of eyes would be mine, because proofreading is something I can do. We had a rollicking good time, bantering and discussing passages as I sent the chapters in.

I believe that Shawn’s book will succeed because its fundamental honesty will resonate with the readership. For one thing, I’m not a big true-love story enthusiast, and I found myself wanting to know what happened next. This is remarkable. For another, yesterday I handed my wife the printed, red-spattered, sticky-noted manuscript with which I worked. (I really needed to get it off the office floor, where I had stacked up the pages as I finished dosing them.) Today I asked her how she liked it. “I can’t put it down! This is great! I want to find out what happens!” (And, be it noted, that was the unproofread version, which may have improved before printing thanks to Shawn’s tolerance and endurance of my dry, occasionally caustic notes.)

The reason Shawn’s book jazzed my wife is easy for me to see. Honesty. If you read love stories, you want honesty, candor, the real deal. You want the author to damn well come across, be s/he overjoyed, embarrassed, bored, frustrated, furious, whatever. For what do you read love stories, if not for authentic emotion? As I proofed the ms, my most common sentiment was: “This will ring honest. Readers can spot a phony or a candy-ass, and they would and do barbecue those kind. They will feel the reality here, and it will grab them as it grabbed me.”

Link posted earlier is to the print version, but Shawn’s with the times, also providing a Kindle version (search Amazon on ‘shawn inmon’). If you resonate with honest love stories by a man unafraid to share what he truly felt, you’re going to like Shawn Inmon’s writing as much as I liked working with him.