Tag Archives: editing services

Dismounted

May 24, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

When you live in an area where a car is more or less essential for any liberty, and you have to take your truck in for three days, and your wife is out of town and your nephew is busy being 18, you are like dismounted cavalry. Where the hell’s my horse?

My thinking is to embrace it. I have a perfectly functional bicycle and I’m not disabled. I should be able to walk or ride where I need to be.

And if I can’t, nephew will take time out from being 18. One advantage to not asking a whole lot of the nephew is that when one does ask him for something, one is generally in the moral right to hope for more or less cheerful compliance.

Adventures

SCA

May 22, 2011 jkkblog 2 Comments

For those of you who don’t know, that stands for Society for Creative Anachronism. Put simply, they play medieval, but without the cholera epidemics. It is on my mind today because I am shortly taking some friends to lunch after they finish up a local SCA event. I was invited, very kindly, but declined partly due to feeling so out of place. I am not sure how often I can say ‘forsooth’, and I’m always nervous if I don’t know the social etiquette of any situation. Nonetheless, they seem like a group of the sort of people I nearly always like. My friends are good examples, using many of the skills in real life agriculture and householding. I find them hardworking, energetic, cheery and intelligent.

Is it silliness? I play Dungeons & Dragons, so if roleplay is silliness, then I guess I’m silly myself. Sure, anyone can go overboard on pretending to be a brave knight. One can go overboard on golf, too, or crocheting or cat ownership. SCA seems like a very crafts(wo)manly way to have a good time roleplaying and understanding how people lived back when, thus teaching history.

You’ll get real bored and real old standing around waiting for me to utter the sentence “Teaching history isn’t worth while.”

Book reviews

Missoura

May 14, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Today I was inspired to look up my very favorite William Least Heat-Moon quote. If you do not know who he is, he is an excellent travel author. He’s from Missoura. His commentary on that situation:

“A Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete Easternness, and the Easterner taking him for a cowhand.” –William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways.

Now, if I denied you links to Heat-Moon’s writings after that appetizer, I’d be a cad:

Blue Highways (circling the nation away from freeways)

PrairyErth (an intensive study of my family’s county in Kansas)

Roads to Quoz (a search for stuff out of the ordinary)

River-Horse (he boated across America, at least all but 70 miles of it)

Columbus in the Americas (historical study of the old slaver)

Heat-Moon can seriously write, and has a quirky style that comes at the situation from angles others would not see. I love editing travel narratives, have written my own, and I get how difficult they are. They are even harder to do very well.

Homeownership, Married life

My cold remedy

February 25, 2011 jkkblog 3 Comments

Most people think this is somewhat batso, but it seems to at least keep me from getting as acute a version of the annual pestilences. Woke up this morning with my throat feeling like I had been belting out death metal love ballads all night after attending a Husky game. When it became evident that I was going to get sick, I engaged my cold remedy. Cold, flu, don’t know and don’t care which; if it produces congestion, this is what I do.

My first act is to pick up the telephone. I call Round Table Pizza, and instruct them to send me immediately two extra large pepperoni pizzas with chopped garlic and jalapeños. If I’m pretty nice to them, they may put on a little extra (yet another reason to tip pizza guys and gals). When it arrives, I consume as much of the pizza as possible (I’ll heat it up and eat off it for two full days).

I also make green tea with lemon, and steam myself in the shower, and Nyquil myself to insensibility at night. If I cough, just plain Robitussin, no antihistamines.

The pizza achieves several things. For one thing, I’ve done it enough times that it’s sort of a conditioned signal to my system: call out the reserves and mobilize for battle. We aren’t taking this lying down. For another, it’s good for morale; the pizza is good, and it feels like I’m doing something about it, which is better for your attitude than ‘yuck, I’m sick, I’m so miserable, I hate my life right now.’ The jalapeños are just about sure to clear out my sinuses, and while garlic’s mild antibiotic properties aren’t really in play against a virus, it does generally boost your immune system and is quite healthful. (It’s also good for others’ health, as no one will get within five feet of you after eating all that garlic.) What is more, you just poured a remarkably noxious substance over the system invaders. Gonna hang out here a while, eh, you little varmints? Okay, fine. Have a drink on the house! I can almost picture the viruses saying to each other: “You idiot! Why did we ever let you book this trip? I’m never using that travel agent again! We’ve died and gone to Naples!” Yeah, enjoy. Come back if you ever need another toxic sludge lesson chez moi.

What I don’t do is suppress symptoms, except to sleep at night (rest being essential), or unless there’s a severe fever. As I reason it, the symptoms are your body’s way of fighting back. Why hamstring your body? Hell, fuel it up for heavy fighting. I go through a lot of handkerchiefs (I have about thirty, so it’s not like I have to reuse them, and they don’t chap my nose as much as dead trees). I drink lots of milk, eat lots of cheese, everything that is supposed to make you have to blow your nose more. My body’s playing bouncer and I certainly am not going to bar the door from the outside.

Does it cure it? Of course not. Does it lessen the acuity? It certainly seems to. Does it make it more bearable? Yes and no. I might feel less lousy during the day if I suppressed the symptoms, but I think I’d stay sick longer. I’d rather have three days of major suck than five days of medium suck. I just seem to rebound quicker with less chemicals and more just fueling up my body and letting it do what it was designed to do.

My bride thinks I’m a lunatic.

She might be right, but the ability to do this is a luxury. Other times, it’s okay to just suppress the symptoms. I was marketing my editing efforts at Orycon one year, in company with Randy Hayes of House Chaos Games, when I got a miserable cold. It was either throw away all that preparation by both of us, or bull ahead and try not to be a mucous machine. Had it just been me (I wouldn’t have been doing it, probably, but besides that), I might not have done it, but I couldn’t let down an old friend of nearly forty years willing to drive three hours each way and donate his whole weekend to helping me and evaluating my marketing approach. So I dosed maximum doses and didn’t stick around for the evening room parties.

My wife happened to be out of town, but I suspect she also would have thought I was a lunatic in this case.

Entertainment and music, Scumbag studies

Alestorm, and piracy

February 25, 2011 jkkblog 3 Comments

My friend Jennifer turned me on to this Scottish pirate metal band not long ago. A lot of metal bands can’t sing, so they seem to just smoke about eight packs of cigarettes and then sort of yell/croak. Alestorm’s better than that, and their instrumental work is quite good. While their lyrics are up and down at times, they’ve really grown on me.

If I had to pick an Alestorm tune to win you over, it would be Keelhauled. If you have anywhere within you a streak of the buccaneer, you may enjoy the video and tune.

Most pirates, by the way, met pretty ugly ends. The pirate game had very few winners. A lot were surprisingly incompetent. Pirate trivia:

Blackbeard (aka Edward Teach) once raided the Tidewater coast for VD meds.

William Kidd was railroaded in a miscarriage of justice. In a fair court of law, he would have walked rather than hang.

John Taylor, a calculating sort, actually won at piracy. In 1721 he took the Nossa Senhora do Cabo with a retiring viceroy and a fortune in diamonds, then had the sense to buy a commission in a South American navy.

While the skull and crossbones was a common motif, most pirates designed their own flags.

The sickest pirate in history might be either Edward Low (probably hanged by the French; merci) or Jean-David Nau, aka François l’Olonnais (put to a messy death by Central American Indians). Both were prone to the kind of brutalities that would make a Gestapo interrogator wince.

The Age of Piracy was in fact a rather short one, from about the 1690s to the 1720s.

A privateer is a sort of legal pirate, essentially a hired commerce raider in wartime. Kidd was one. What makes a pirate a privateer is a Letter of Marque. I think the US last issued Letters of Marque in the War of 1812, though the Confederacy handed them out like samples. It is rumored that during World War II, at least once, someone asked President Roosevelt for a Letter of Marque. Ron Paul (and no, I am not on his bandwagon) has seriously suggested the issuance of Letters of Marque as a way to combat Somali pirates.

Personally, I think it would be a great idea.

Some clients demand that their editors sign NDAs, evidently fearing that someone whose reputation depends upon a basic expectation of integrity would suddenly pirate or plagiarize their work. One might point out that one should worry more about whether one’s work were worth pirating than the possibility of it being pirated, but that’s a tactless response. In one case I have signed an NDA, because I understood the logic and was legitimately exposed to trade secrets essential to my client’s endeavors. Beyond that, no one has asked it of me. I guess I’d take it case by case.

Entertainment and music

Survivor: Redemption Island, episode 2

February 24, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

Still not sold on this Redemption Island concept. The strings of Survivor are really showing.

I have a high school friend (pretty small number that can claim that) who works in Hollywood. It was his dream, and I give him major credit: he made it happen. He’s mostly film crew and lighting. Anyway, I asked him about this reality stuff, and he explained that it was mainly about money. It’s cheaper to film pre-law students from Mississippi than to hire Jennifer Aniston. Okay, understandable.

What too much of the audience does not realize: these days, a good percentage of Survivor players are recruited. Now, why would they do that? It’s like this. Average typical Joes and Janes are a pain in the butt from Hollywood’s standpoint. They don’t always realize that their job is to create good TV, and they may not be tractable. But if you recruit a couple of semi-notorious past contestants, and a bunch of people with at least some hope of making a mark in show business (rather than winning a mill and then finishing law school in Mississippi), they’ll play ball with the producers.

The benefit here is less work necessary in editing and production. Sure, producers can create a Frankenbyte to make people say anything, but it’s nice when the cast is tractable. “Could you do that one again?” “Sure, no problem.” As opposed to: “Are you kidding? You filmed me taking a leak. Go to hell.”

At any rate, that’s where we are at. Oh, we have the obligatory old white redneck, plus all the other stereotypes. Lots of young women in bikinis, can’t even tell them apart, don’t even care. It’s wandered far afield from the original concept, and as ever, the producers don’t realize that the original concept was what made it interesting, and that all that is needed to keep it fresh is new crops of players with new behaviors. Nope, just have to mess with it. Hollywood, once again running true to form: the longer Hollywood holds anything, the more it cheapens it.

I see this as the eternal impulse to “change it up.” We deal with it often in editing as well, including the writer who self-edits eternally and never pulls the publication trigger. At some point, the thing’s got to be done.

Not saying that Hollywood should never evolve its reality shows, of course. Tastes can change in twenty years. What I’m saying is that a predictable editing of the concept begins far too early, and mainly because producers cannot resist tinkering–“making it their own.” That, I think, is more about them than about the viewer.

The Editorial Maverick