Tag Archives: fiction editing

Homeownership

A confused neighbor

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One of our neighbors (the only one I can’t stand) puts up a comically garish, theme-free, obnoxious Christmas light display.  I’ll call him Cletus.  Evidently, it is very important for Cletus to let us know the true spiritual meaning of this jolly holiday.  In addition to the reindeer and Santa on the roof, and the odd mixture of colored lights strung about the place, Cletus puts up a 12′ high cross edged with lights.

Cletus seems to have forgotten the birth part and moved straight to the torture and execution part.  Good lord, Cletus, can’t you stand the idea of letting the kid live a while before he gets nailed up and tortured to death? What part of this is unclear?

I have no problem with lights, displays of faith, or people having holiday fun.  I do think it’s pretty funny when someone doesn’t think it through.  Cletus, You’re Doing It Wrong.

Human relations

My grandfather’s comedy

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My grandfather (maternal; I never knew my father’s father) has been passed away some years now.  He was no more a perfect man than I am, but he was a wise man, and at times a very funny one.  He always found humor in the absurd.

The funniest thing I can remember from my grandfather was one time when he was doing one of his favorite schticks:  the dumb hick.  While he spoke with the gentle drawl of rural Kansas, he was a strong demonstration of the fact that accents do not imply ignorance.  He was intelligent and thoughtful, both as a farmer and rancher, and later as a business executive.  So when he really laid the Cletus on thick, it was quite amusing to hear.  In this case, he was reading his junk mail, aloud, as if he believed every word of it.  It went something like this:

“Dorothy, the nahs folks at Publisher’s Clearin’ House have written to me.  They say, ‘Dear Mr. Johnson, the team at PCH is pleased to officially announce yore name as the second-place winner of the $7 million grand prize.’  They say that the total amount is $1 million.  Well, Ah’ll be!  They also say they will make all necessary arrangements for me to receive mah prize, and Ah know they’re serious because they enclose a cashier’s check to cover any fees they haven’t paid.  Mighty nice of them.  Ah must contact mah representative directly before Ah deposit the check, and for more information.  Sounds reasonable.  They give me a security code, so we best keep that someplace real safe.  And you know it’s on the up-and-up because they even assigned me mah own IRS agent, Mr. Henry Cohen.  Good, because Ah don’t want any trouble with the law.”

He could go on like that for a while, straight-faced, immune to my cackles, horselaughs and guffaws.  I only cracked my grandfather up once in return when he was doing that, but that time, I got the old man good.

Grandpa was reading aloud from a Harry & David sales pitch around Christmastime–he and Grandma were regular customers.  “Harry and David would like us to help them celebrate their fiftieth anniversary!” he began.

I broke in with my own Cletus put-on.  “Ah’ll be darned, Grandpa.  Ah never even knew they was married.”

My deeply, culturally, and politically conservative grandfather busted out in a gale of mirth.

It’s one of my favorite ways to remember him.

Social comment

Pizza Hut dishonors coupons–really!

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I was too amused to be annoyed.  Called up to order pizza from PH, current coupon in hand.  It included 10 hot wings and a large pizza, about as simple as it gets.  Slam dunk.

Phone guy, after talking to manager:  “Uh, we can’t do that, our wings come prepackaged and we can only do packages of eight.”

Me:  “Coupon says ten.”

PG:  “They changed everything around just yesterday, we only have packs of eight.”

Me:  “So you’re going to dishonor the coupon?”

PG (defensively):  “You can talk to the manager if you want.”

Me (quite calmly):  “No need.  It’s a simple question; ask whoever you need to ask.  Yes or no:  are you actually going to dishonor a current coupon?”

PG:  “We can’t do ten wings.  They changed everything.”

Me:  “Not my issue.  Yes or no:  going to honor or dishonor your coupon?”

PG:  “I guess the answer would be we’re going to dishonor it.”

Me:  “Okay, thanks, then no need to place the order.  Bye.”

It’s not that I am greatly bothered over a couple of chicken wings.  It’s not that the Pizza Hut (818 N Vineyard, Kennewick, WA) evidently isn’t very well run.  It’s that the guy couldn’t even think sensibly enough to ask his manager to do something intelligent.  The coupon came in one of those mailed coupon packs, so they have to know they’ll hear about this again; obviously a manager needs to devise some form of counter-offer if the coupon is somehow physically impossible to fulfill.  I’m receptive to almost anything except ‘tough beans’ as an answer; ‘tough beans’ basically says “we are dishonoring our advertising, and screw you if you don’t like it–we simply don’t care.”

So I called PH’s customer satisfaction hotline, carefully concealed on their webpage in hopes that no one would call.  The automated answering system did its all to convince me I couldn’t even talk to a person, but I’m persistent.  It put me on a protracted hold, then hung up on me after about five minutes.  Tried again, silent void.

WWHCD? He might get confused if you ask him to locate Libya on a map, but he knew a lot about how not to screw up selling pizza.

What better way to entertain myself while on protracted hold than by blogging the experience to share with the world?

Editing/writing life

Working with editors…what’s it really like?

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The common perception is that when you get published, the publisher assigns an editor to work with you and improve the manuscript.  In some cases that actually happens, but in many others, not at all.

In my case, as a hired ‘lancer, I have been not so much assigned editors as I was assigned to editors.  The editor has a major say in that; if she wants me on the project, and I’m interested in it, I am on the project.  (Feminine pronoun used advisedly, as about 3/4 of my editors have been women.)  Obviously, if she has asked for me, we probably have a good rapport and track record, or someone recommended me to her, so I probably want to be on the project.  I’ll only turn it down if I think I would do so poorly it would damage my overall standing.  My interest or lack thereof in the subject matter is immaterial.  The pertinent question is “can I do a good job?”

So what is editing like? Editors all have their own processes.  My first editor rarely provided feedback, just took the work and changed what he felt he needed to. Later editors have run the gamut from little modification to extensive requests for change.  What no one does is suggest wording or send back proofreading; she is not here to teach me how to write, as I’m supposed to know that part already.  I can’t recall an editor ever saying anything gratuitously cruel to me, but I have had work returned to me with comments, queries and requests for rewriting.  Sample comments:

“Please provide more detail.  How does the widget actually work? Why is unobtanium essential?”

“Here you imply that he is a criminal, but you haven’t laid any foundation for what kind of crime.”

“Please rewrite this to give an idea of the worth and rarity of each item.  The reader does want to know this, at least an estimate, even if it’s a moving target.”

I have been told that work needs to be redone, and how it needs to be redone, but no editor has ever said anything like:  “This is abominable, a crime against literature.  Please tell me where you attended college, so I can make sure my children steer well clear of its liberal arts programs.”  Or:  “My dog did better than this claptrap when I let him out this morning.”  Never have I felt that an editor sought to offend me for the sake of doing so.  She may be very direct and frank about the problem, but she presumes me to be professional and cooperative, preferring candor, open to improvement.  If she thought I was a drama queen or a fragile soul, she wouldn’t want me around in the first place–nor should she.

Do I have a voice? Freelancers do not get much, but that doesn’t mean I have to be silent.  If there is a usage, term, or some other device I feel is crucial to the whole, I explain in the editor’s notes I append to most work.  If I can explain the necessity to her satisfaction, she generally goes along; however, I don’t often do this.  My deal is to write what she assigned me to write, and I have zero legal control over the end result.  I will be edited, and that’s part of the gig.  Even if I don’t like how she did it, or she actually inserted a mistake, that’s the breaks.  One must (wo)man up and live with it.  Anyone seeking any sort of literary career needs to get okay with editing, even embrace it.

The net result has been very positive.  Editors catch you when you get sloppy.  Some provide more detail, some less, but if I’m lacking in an area, I want to step up my game.  I have come to like and respect nearly all my editors.  Even those I wouldn’t say I liked, I nearly always respected, which is far more to the point of it all.  My goals are to be punctual, easy to work with, and do quality work to spec.  In return, I have found editors accommodating of life circumstances, conscientious about assuring that I get paid, and fun to work with.  Their goal is to assemble and print the highest quality work for a reasonable cost, and if I want to keep ‘lancing, I must further that goal.

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Penn State

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Well, that’s about as painful as it gets.  All of a sudden UW going 0-12 a few years back, and keeping Tyrone Willingham around purely out of Seattle racial guilt, doesn’t look quite as bad as it felt at the time.  I guess when they say ‘it could always be worse,’ this would be what they meant.

For those unfamiliar with the story, evidently a Penn State assistant football coach has been raping young boys at their facilities for a decade at least, and evidently the coaching staff and university knew to varying degrees that it was going on, and didn’t take steps to put a stop to it.  PSU’s head coach, Joe Paterno, was the longest-tenured and most admired coach in US college football, the symbol of Doing It Right.  So the idea of such an upstanding figure looking the other way, in a case like this, is something just about no one can feel neutral about.  The issue here:  while it happening is bad enough, people who know it happens–and allow it to continue–share at least some of the guilt.  In one especially bad aspect, an assistant (named, disastrously, McQueary) actually caught the rapist in the act at one point, and didn’t do anything about it so far as we’re aware.

Paterno, the AD, the boy-raping assistant, someone else in the athletic department and the president of the university have all been sacked, and several will face felony charges (not Paterno).  Look ahead to about ten years of litigation (probably longer than Paterno will live; he’s 84, had coached there since I was a toddler), profiting only lawyers.  The students are somewhat rioting in support of Paterno, and the country is taking sides.  You either want him and everyone involved hanging from a lamppost, or you think it’s a horrible disservice to the most visible symbol the school ever had.

My own take is that I don’t see either side doing a damn thing for the real victims, which are the boys who got raped.  I see all anger and recrimination, and I understand why, but I do not understand why no one can seem to spare some emotion for those who suffered most.  They certainly suffered more than a half dozen six- (in one case seven-) figure employees, though if a couple of those can’t buy their way into the nice jails, or out of jail altogether, those may get a taste of what the original victims experienced.  My dominant emotion here is not fury and punishment, but what can we do for the real innocents?

I wish I heard more of that, and less rioting and screaming and such.  We get so angry in these situations we forget to invest some energy in support for and kindness to the most damaged.

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Behavior vs. character

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Some people judge and react to you mainly by your behavior.  Others react primarily to your character.  Is it about doing, or being?

In the case of children at nearly all times, the primary reaction is to behavior.  (Not always.  We’ve all known children with character way beyond their years.)  In adults, behavior is usually the first evidence we have of who they are, so there it begins–but typically gives precedence to character in time.

This is why a child will try to rack up some good deeds to cancel out the bad deeds, or presume eternal forgiveness for all errors and misbehaviors; life is a ledger to them, gold stars and black marks, reward and penalty.  An adult–at least one who thinks like an adult–will seek to correct wrongdoing going forward as well as making amends or atonement.  After paying the bill, a child looks forward to getting by with the deed (or one like it) again.  Plenty of adults in relationships lapse into child thinking, or never actually grow out of it.  Entire segments of society have it as their foundation.  Most families would have no idea how to intrarelate without it, because family is most people’s refuge for bad character.  If you have people who will never reject you for lack of character, why bother to show them good character? For many, that really is what family boils down to.  Paradox:  that’s the low character response anyway.  In short, if one is of low character with family and high character with non-relatives, maybe it means one is of basic low character and just puts on a better front to the world.  Maybe it also means character can be situational, and that the entire subject is more nuanced and complex than I have thought through.  You tell me.  I don’t pretend to be an authority on this.  Dissect the fallacies in my thinking, and I will thank you.

Does behavior reflect character? Not always, but that’s really the fundamental question, is it not? If my wife says something cruel and unjustified to me, does that mean she’s of low character, or that she’s simply having a bad behavioral lapse? If she is of high character, such an utterance is out of her character, and doesn’t reflect who she is.  Of course, if she is of high character, it won’t be long before she’s pretty embarrassed by it, because it is not who she really is.  But while her words may have offended me, my fundamental reaction to her is to her character, not one action.  It would take more than one bad behavior to convince me her character had altered.  Hope she sees me the same way.  She must, because she has self-respect and she stays married to me.  Surely there’s something about my character she likes, because it certainly isn’t because of my mighty deeds (or mighty misdeeds never committed).

What got me thinking about this is a period of watching a child in an adult body, experiencing the world from one unsustainable pleasure or toy to the next, seemingly contrite over black marks and happy over gold stars, happy to do the minimum to get by.  The individual never fully grasped that it wasn’t about bookkeeping good and bad acts, but the development of personal character. And when it became clear that this person’s priority was not the same as my priority, there was nothing left to do but turn her/him loose to find it as s/he might.

Or might not.

Looking back at this, I am alarmed how much I sound like a mediocre Andy Rooney knockoff.  But I’m posting it anyway.  The disappointment hurt, and maybe talking about it will help.

Adventures, Married life

Attending ye Renaissance Faire

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Deb and I like to go to whatever events are happening around what one Portland sophisticate termed “the famously dull Tri-Cities.”  The logic is simple.  If your community doesn’t supply a vast surplus of toys for you to play with, when it does, one had best play with them, lest said community cease to supply any toys.  What is more, at least in the Tri-Cities, whatever the event is, it’s not a struggle.  It might be smaller than the big city version, but it’s doable and affordable and safe.  There will be parking, it won’t be horribly expensive, and the crowds won’t be too big a battle.  We don’t have enough people to create that large a crowd anywhere.

So we went, to ye land of ye guys fighting and ye minstrels and ye blacksmiths.  I always love to watch the latter because there is a strong attraction in the combination:  scent of burning coal and iron, sight of hammered metal and fiery glow, and the ring of the hammer.  I like splitting obstinate pieces of wood just to swing the sledge from the end, and to hear it ring on the wedge.  It’s almost as musical hearing someone else pound away.

While it’s hard to see myself deeply attracted to medievalism, there’s a lot to like about it.  People make stuff.  They make yarn, they make cloth, they make clothes.  Candles.  Daggers.  Beads.  Beverages.  They work damn hard at this stuff, and a lot of it is pretty impressive.  It suggests a self-sufficiency that resonates.  What if all the electricity went out? Some people, at least, wouldn’t be utterly lost.  What is more, the majority are really quite pleasant folk, ready and eager to hold forth on their fields of expertise, or help the mundanes (that would be us).  It’s not like golf, where the visitor or newbie deals with impatient scowls and haughty disdain.  (Do golfers not understand that this is killing their sport? I swear, the only athlete more shortsighted than a pitcher toeing the rubber is a seasoned golfer.)

It also makes me realize, from an editing perspective, how much esoteric vocabulary got left behind in the Middle Ages. Just all the parts of a suit of armor, or of a castle, or terms for long-faded occupations and tools have caused thousands of words to slip into disuse. A medieval fair is heaven for places who know or want to learn all those.

When I go to these events with Deb, I don’t really take in most of the event because her sort of random wandering style and my systematic canvassing don’t really harmonize that well.  I usually yield to hers unless the event is something in which I have deep and specific interest, with the result that I don’t really see or take in most of what is going on, and that’s fine.  It’s more about just being out and about as a couple, doing what there is locally to do and enjoy.

Plus, there was a male belly dancer.  He was actually pretty good, rocking it.  I respected him.  And as Deb pointed out to me (as if to a slow child), he was flirting with me.  Ha!  I always attract the bear lovers.

Just call me Yogi.

Adventures

It’s only a fish wound!

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Well, not a bad one.  How do you get cut open by a fish on land? Well, suppose you are bumbling through your local antique store, and they have just set down a big swordfish (heavy sucker, like 5′ long).  Not being real bright people, they put the fish diagonally, so that the tail fins stuck right out into a walkway.  Unfortunately, they didn’t contrast much visually with the linoleum.  Thunk.  While I’m not the type to run around blaming other people or institutions for my poor navigation, it probably wasn’t their smartest move to put that there, either.  I mean, you wouldn’t put a pitchfork down there with the tines sticking out into the walkway.

I was surprised how sharp the fish tail’s tip was; went right through my skin along the top of the kneecap.  The woman operating the place showed zero concern, even when I said “I guess there isn’t much blood.”  That told me she wasn’t the sharpest business tool in the shed.  She did offer me some coffee.  Did I retort:  “Why, is coffee good to put on a bleeding gash?” No, I did not.

The post’s title, of course, was that quick comeback that we think of later, the one we never think of at the time. At least I don’t.

One reason I like editing is because I always have time to think of what to suggest someone should say.

Technology

software updates

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Have you noticed, folks, that when you just automatically go ahead and update a piece of software to a newer version:

  1. They moved everything around, apparently for no logical reason other than it looked cuter?
  2. They added maybe one thing you cared about, and twenty you didn’t care about?
  3. The things you liked most about it before, now no longer work the same?
  4. It’s slower and clunkier?

The problem is endemic to software and has been with us for a long time.  I think it must have its roots in the way software designers think, because it is very consistent.  Most ‘upgrades’ are in fact downgrades.  And these days, it seems, that most of them lean toward letting more and more companies poke around on your machine, with nothing preventing them from phoning home with information that is none of their business.

It gets worse if you depend on software to enable you to work. What if it introduces complications in the middle of a huge editing project? “Dear Ms. Client. Sorry I am going to be late. I upgraded my software and now my life sucks.” Yeah, they’re real understanding about that.

There are a few updates that nearly always make sense, namely those to do with security.  If your Windows wants to download a security update, you should.  If your virus scanner wants to update itself, by all means.  If you use a spyware/malware package, definitely keep it current.  But anything else? Faaaaaa.  Just don’t update it until they force you at bayonet point, or give you some compelling reason in terms of features.

Ignore the constant pleas and pressure.  You’ll be happier.

Adventures, Married life

Whitewater rafting

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I haven’t done this in so long, but a WWR trip is one of my presents to my bride for her 50th birthday (at which time, in April, it was a little cold for that most places).  We’re going to take along a couple of dear friends.

Currently we’re deciding between the Methow (north central WA), the Deschutes (central OR) and someplace else.  If anyone has any recommendations within 4-5 hours of Tri-Cities, WA, by all means please advise.