Tag Archives: technical editing

Editing/writing life

Editorial maverick: carts and horses

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Some of you know I’m doing part-time office work that entails a lot of technical editing. I like it: It’s an excellent company high up in its field, treating staff well and producing work of which one can be proud. Half the staff have advanced degrees. For me, it’s a little steadier income without cutting into my freelancing work.

While they were excited to bring a pro on board, I think some aspects of the change took them by surprise. For one thing, I think they expected me to rip their writing apart a lot more comprehensively; for another, pretty sure they expected some debates about industry usages. The best handling of those situations brings with it some lessons specific to tech editing but also germane to other editorial work.

We come across it all the time: this idea that editors are the people who go in and dismantle your writing with ruthless precision. There are times for that…but not when one is already dealing with capable and very coachable writers. If one of my colleagues’ writing were weak, I wouldn’t hesitate to fix anything that needed it, but even our subcontractors write fairly well. My work as an editor is not to criticize or correct; those are just aspects of progress toward the goal. My work as an editor is to help the content become the very best it can be. If that means critique and correction, we do those. If that meant burning a photograph of a lemur over a purple candle flame at midnight while chanting in Old Slavonic, I’d be doing so. In this case, the best way to improve the content is to offer minor corrections with sound explanations. These are people of science and reason who expect me to know more than them about English, and to help them become more proficient. If a para needs a complete recast, I’m glad to do so, but more often the need relates to subtler acts such as changing phrasal order for clarity and flow.

I haven’t said a word about style guides: AP, Chicago, etc. That’s because I understand that these are not bibles unless the management says they are (and ours sensibly does not). Style guides are like military regulations: They are for the guidance of command, not as straitjackets to it. The idea of writing something in a way that fails to communicate, but conforms to the hallowed style guide, is idiocy. Our management knows this, as do our writers. So the writers will ask me: “What is the rule here?” If there is one that sensibly governs, I’ll tell them; in many cases the area is grey, often straddling the gap between popular imagination of the rule and its strict letter. Join an editors’ group online and you can see posts daily bleating for help with some arcane point of style guide nitpickery they’ve been agonizing over for hours. Okay, if it’s a mandated usage, very well…but if you’re an editor, isn’t it your job to make the damn decision? Whose, if not yours? People look to us as informed guides to quality writing. Someone’s saying they’re afraid to guide? This is like a professional taxi driver afraid to trust/deviate from a map or a navigation system. Decide, and use the comments to explain the decision. And if the style guide isn’t even mandated, there’s even less pressure to conform. Do something intelligent in furtherance of the original goal, and help your people understand why you felt that was so. If you can be a professional editor, you have the writing skills to persuade and explain.

The other side that surprised my colleagues was that I take a very relaxed attitude toward industry usages, even where the common presentation strictly speaking violates some basic guideline. Should it be “small diameter poles” or “small-diameter poles”? Objectively, the latter; but the industry usage most often omits the hyphen, and we are communicating with industry members. It’d be idiotic to die in a drainage ditch over a hyphen. I’m the industry newcomer and this is tech editing. It is my job to drink from the industry firehose and learn language specific to expected usages. We should be consistent and clear; we should sound informed and intelligent; we should convey the views of highly expert people with professional voicing and presentation. If that means we don’t write this item name in what I consider the obvious way, because one of our people learned in school that there was a specific reason not to do so, I can either joust with my colleague (and his MBA plus thirty years of experience) or I can accept that he’s using sound logic based in educated thought. I should worry far more about helping my people sound their brilliant best than about imposing a foolish consistency.

That’s why tech editing is an unglamorous but very necessary field. A percentage of editors simply can’t operate without some form of Scriptural guide, and will inevitably find themselves asked to make decisions for which there is no clear direction cited in Chicago, and concerning which they thus won’t be able to convince the subject matter expert without that biblical backup. And yet so many technical specialists, unlike my colleagues, just can’t write worth a damn. They starve for editorial support–not from style guide literalists, but from colleagues who make them better and help them grow.

If I were starting as an editor right now, I would still set up a blog/website and I’d still take jobs involving manuscript fiction and non-fiction, but I know what my marketing would be. I’d imagine the industries I understood best and I’d start sending pitches to firms in those industries. I would invite them all to reach out to me with a page of text and whatever context they considered germane, and let me have a crack it it. I’d send back the samples in prompt fashion and see what happened. A good outcome would be a cost estimate query for a full report/manual/other doc, because then they’d be asking themselves whether this were affordable (and could they bill it out?). The secret of technical editing is that your client can usually bill their client for your work. If they find this to their best advantage, they’ll probably start sending you rush jobs with urgent needs (because they procrastinate or get swamped). Do them no matter how late you have to stay up. They’ll come to consider you part of the support system and they won’t want to deal with anyone else once they are comfortable with you. Nice work–you now have a client. Treat them right. Their greatest hours of need are your greatest moments of potential and value.

Editing/writing life, Technology

Editorial Maverick: tech editing

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My world is a diverse one, with wide variety between different styles as well as modes. By modes I refer to developmental, substantive, line, and other forms of editing. By styles I refer to the subject matter: fiction (with many divisions), non-fiction (same), screen editing (don’t look at me), and technical editing among others. Only some of the knowledge carries over from one style to another. One of my favorite people, the awesome and capable Maggi Kirkbride, edits only non-fiction. I know academic editors, self-help editors, and so on. I have acquired a skillset in technical editing.

Since tech editing involves reviewing and changing subject matter experts’ work (we call those SMEs to show that we’re in the club), the first thing that happens is that one drinks from the knowledge firehose. If one has little knowledge in a given field, the question is how one works into a level of competence. Much looking up of terms, asking of questions, and hesitation before barging ahead with changes. In this style, any reference that sounds odd could in fact be an industry term loaded with meaning. After a time, one gets a sense for these. I have tech edited roleplaying game rulebooks, engineering documents, and forest products analyses. In all cases, while I had some fundamental understanding going in (longtime RPGer; father was an engineer and I was a computer nerd; father was later a forester and I worked summers in a mill), there remained much to learn. Most tech editing work requires at least a good grounding in Word document formatting, unlike say fiction in which one can get by with saying “I’m the language jockey; formatting is up to someone else.”

How it’s different from, for example, travel editing:

You are less concerned with preserving style than with conforming the ms to a style guide. Most organizations have specific looks, styles, colors, and branding terminology they like to see. You mostly do not, for example, have to explain to sixtysomethings why they can’t use two spaces after a period just because Mrs. Blunthead taught them to type that way in the 1960s. Either the person in charge says one space is required, or mandates two, and either way, the tech editor can make a case but rarely gets to be the decider.

Your content is vertical in that it pertains to some particular field of study: agriculture, marketing, engineering, software. This requires you to drink from the proverbial firehose in order to absorb enough terminology and technical detail that you do not need to ask questions SMEs will find dumb and annoying. So if you’re editing timber industry documents and the term “board feet (Scribner)” means nothing to you, you must change that–your level of understanding, that is, not the meaning.

Rush jobs are very much the norm. People who write manuals, papers, analyses, and so forth usually take more time then they expected. Where is the shortfall made up? On the computer of the person with the red pen. What this means is that you will not always be able to make this a work of sweet perfection, and you must make sure the au (as we refer to the author when she’s not looking) knows this and has reasonable expectations. It will sometimes boil down to: “Look. You have given me three hours and there are eighty pages here, with captions, footnotes, graphics, and so on. That’s not long enough to do it right, but I will give you the best three hours I’ve got.” If the au doesn’t like that, then she needs to get it to you sooner.

There’s a lot of opportunity and retention. Tech editing clients are less concerned with price (they are typically billing the work to a client) and more with excellence and alacrity. Think about it. Suppose you run a demolition consulting firm. Companies commission you to tell them the best way to blow up stuff with the least impact on the surrounding area, best recovery/disposal outlook, and so on. You know secrets and they fuel your business. Your work product is the report and its supporting data. You can make it good, but you find an editor who can make it “wow”–and will, at need, make your report her priority. You love the new level of professionalism in the impression your product makes. You do not want to lose that editor. You do not want to try your luck with a new one, see how well they learn your business terms, or go without. You’re going to make sure you pay your editor. The cost is tiny relative to the benefit. You would be a ninny to do without that editor, or her equivalent, once you’ve had a taste of the good stuff.

What kind of editor can be a tech editor? I find it’s mostly the same properties as make a good editor of other material, but with an emphasis on adapting. Eloquence is less important than communication flow. You aren’t asking whether readers will like this story arc; you’re asking who your audience is and how to help your au convey information as concisely and professionally as can be done. You can’t go on anti-adverb and anti-passive voice crusades because technical writing often creates situations where the surgery is worse than the injury, if you will. Your reader will be in one of two categories: She either knows what makes good English (rare), or she does not (the norm). If the former, she will see that you could not recast those passives because there was no non-cumbersome way to come up with a subject to perform the action. If the latter, she just knows it reads real smooth and the au gets props for clear information delivery. You win either way.

It’s a useful skill to build, because some types of non-fiction mss involve tech editing skills. Textbook editing is a perfect example, its vertical market being very specific to a discipline and audience type. There will be descriptive paras to check for common writing flaws, but there will also be examples to check; sidenotes to review; ever the question of clarity. Will our audience understand the au here? The au engages you because she thinks you can make her book better. You adapt your work to what will serve that end.

Adventures, Married life

Driving from Boise

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I drove down to Idaho’s capital, where we anticipate we will be living before 2013 is out, to visit Deb. She has completed her first week of work at a new job and we miss one another keenly, though we have a plan that depends upon me not just ripping up stakes and moving quite yet.

Boise is a 4.5 hour drive from here, if one wants to avoid falling foul of the Oregon State Police. When you have any tags but Oregon on your car, you very much do not want to make yourself an interesting person to pull over. The trip is mountainous, winding and beautiful. Reunion was joyful and came just in time for us to find a fun Lebanese place in Boise. Tried my limited Arabic on the staff, but none would answer in it. One may take that as a sign that my pronunciation was atrocious, or that they kind of try not to be too conspicuous–I don’t know.

The next day, we wandered around to some specialty stores related to hobbies of mine, which was quite fruitful, then headed to the Basque Block downtown. About the only place in the world with more Basques than Boise, we are told, is Euskadi itself (Spain’s Basque country). Stopped in at one of Boise’s more storied Basque spots, a tiny corner pub named Bar Gernika. (Accent on the second syllable–and yes, the name refers back to Guernica, of Spanish Civil War tragic fame.) I liked my paella and croquetas, and Deb enjoyed her selection as well. Lots of Basque flags there (looks much like a Union Jack but with a green background). Did not try my Spanish there; one suspects it is widely spoken, but as the language of what Basques would consider an oppressor, might be a real bad start with people.

Headed out earlier today, and decided to describe the travel, for those who have never been to this part of the world. A trip from Boise to the Tri-Cities of Washington mostly crosses northeastern Oregon on I-84, which can be formidable in winter even though the summit of the Blue Mountains is only just over 4000′. From Boise to Ontario, OR is fairly flat past croplands and medium-sized towns like Nampa and Caldwell, enjoying Idaho’s 75 mph speed limit. (I could not stop calling the former ‘Nampon’ in my mind. I may one day blurt it out.) At the Oregon line, speed drops to 65, shortly after which comes the climb up to Baker City, and the trucks begin slipping back shortly after crossing from Mountain Time to Pacific Time. Soon one sees the first of many breathtaking vales and valleys, which almost become dull: the majestic turns commonplace. One eyesore: an old lime plant in full decrepitude, looks like a lot of kids go where they would be wiser not to and mess around in the ruins. I guess kids need to do stupid things in order to adventure and learn.

At this point in late winter, the road is clear but the mountains surrounding are still quite snowy where one can see that the sun doesn’t strike directly for long during the day. There is usually a river near the freeway, or a snowy field, or a herd of cattle, often all three. Snow drift barriers are rarely out of sight; these look like fence sections leaning over, and exist to control the heavy drifting of snow–presumably onto the freeway, since most are close to it. North of Baker some miles, a sign announces that you’re crossing the 45th parallel. It feels compelled to explain that this means you are halfway between the Equator and North Pole, which says a lot about the state of geography education in this country. From Baker to La Grande is more very empty and pretty country, where the freeway sides are often far apart and many steep descents and climbs show up. In numerous spots, wide roadside areas advise that one may use them to chain up–indeed, in winter, carrying chains or having traction tires is the law in this stretch of the Blues. Even though it’s in the 40s, the wind at a rest stop is punishingly hard and cold, a reminder of what it’s like to make your living up here.

Past La Grande some miles, one begins to descend out of the Blues, and one sees those signs that are the clearest signs that one is in a mountainous part of the West: RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP 5 MILES. Other signs set aside areas for trucks to check brakes, give speed guidance based on gross weight, and otherwise make absolutely clear that everyone on the freeway knows the danger. This is when it hits you. If in your rear view mirror (which you should check frequently), you see a semi barreling down on you at what looks to be 90 mph and accelerating, he hasn’t gone crazy or decided to bully cars (as trucks sometimes do, in my experience). He’s lost his brakes, is hoping not to roll his rig before he reaches a runaway ramp, and he can not stop. You can get out of his way, or die. The runaway ramps themselves are steep tracks into the mountainside located at bends which a runaway truck could not hope to survive at those speeds, paved with loose crushed rock (probably a couple of feet deep), to soak up the speed in conjunction with the steep climb up the slope. The first one I passed had numerous ruts, some all the way to the top of the ramp. If you weren’t checking your mirror before seeing that, you would start. Deadman Pass is along this stretch, and it’s not inaptly named. Just a couple months earlier this winter, a busload of Korean exchange students going to Canada from Las Vegas went down a steep embankment at Deadman Pass. Nine fatalities, dozens injured. To stay alive up here, one best look alive.

For my trip, happily, everyone’s brakes were fine. Coming down toward Pendleton (yes, home of the Roundup), one crosses wide farming areas on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. On the way there, I had seen a tribal police speed trap, and watched my speed carefully this time–but the only speed trap on the way back on Umatilla land was an OSP van hidden in a clever defile. From Pendleton to the Columbia is rolling high desert, heavy with sagebrush and offering the turn onto I-82 north for home. I pass at one point the hundreds of bunkers in which the nation once stored enough nerve gas to wipe out a fair percentage of humanity. I always feel happy when I’m onto the bridge and the sign welcomes me to Washington. I feel a little less happy when other signs start to harangue me about various laws, but I guess we need them. Limit is 70 in Washington on this part of I-82, which seems kind of symbolic that we’re partly like Oregon and partly like Idaho. Of course, as always, the Oregon license plates will tailgate one even more readily in Washington than in Oregon–they take deep personal umbrage at being impeded in any way, even if there are four other cars ahead, and will come up within a yard of your rear bumper. I’ve never figured out why they do this, but it got old a long time ago.

These drives used to be worse before the Ipod came along. I got four and a half hours of Viking metal quality time, though my truck is noisy enough that I must jack up the volume in order to hear anything over the background road noise. Pick up the dog from Rich and Betsy (bless them), drop off some Basque sausage for them (Rich is Pennsylvania Polish, thus the perfect tidbit), and home to some cold beers.

After four and a half hours in the saddle, with only one ten-minute leak break, I need them.

Investing, Social comment

Why I don’t believe in ethical investing

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Considering how I feel about many major corporations, it might be shocking to hear that I have zero compunction about profiting from their stock. None. Monsanto, Wal-Mart, AT&T, Toyota, whoever–I don’t care about their sins in this context.

Why? Because my reason for investing is to make money.

I believe that investing to bring about social change is just fine, if you think it through; however, then acknowledge to yourself that this abandons moneymaking as the primary purpose, and don’t complain when you take a bath because your eco-friendly investment rolled over and threw up again. Personally, I think you could do more to bring about social change by sending charitable contributions to well-investigated causes, but hey, it’s your money.

Mine will be invested for profit, and for no other purpose. That is the game as defined by the market, and the laudable goal as defined by our broad social consensus.  I did not design this game. Were it up to me, a whole lot of corporations would be running very scared, but it isn’t.

The individual investor in the marketplace, which is heavily rigged by the big guys, is like the new and friendless inmate in a major maximum security prison. He did not design the prison, with its gangs, variably-ethical guards, drugs and hazards, but it’s where he is. He can either spend a lot of time trying to effect ‘change’ against a tide like they get in the Bay of Fundy–and get nowhere–or he can figure out how to find some comfort, learn to do time. He may have to do things he’d never have considered on the outside, associate with the worst scum in society. He may have no choice. As with combat veterans, it’s not sensible to lecture him on morals if one hasn’t been there, felt what he felt, seen what he saw.

But how can you stand to own stock in Unislime (NASDAQ:UNSL), which treats its workers like Michael Vick treated dogs, pays them almost enough to buy one Taco Bell meal a day if they don’t pay rent, and last year gave the CEO a $4 trillion bonus while laying off the entire populations of five impoverished Appalachian cities? I won’t say that I feel moral joy owning UNSL shares, though it makes me economically joyous if it’s up 14% this year and coughed up a 3.5% dividend. (Once I sell it, it’s welcome to jump off a bridge, so I can buy it again real cheap.) Remember: there is no such thing as shares which are sold but not bought. I could dump UNSL, and someone else would own it. My selling would have the infinitesimal impact of driving the current share price down a tiny notch for a brief half-second, it is true, but the share price overall is based on market perceptions, the greatest percentage of which come from mutual and hedge fund managers. If a $12B mutual fund owns 5% of UNSL, and decides the stock has reached its target price, it will start selling and the stock will go down. Whether I own fifty shares of UNSL, or someone else does, will have no measurable effect on anything.

Haven’t you ever heard of shareholder activism? I have not only heard of it, I have engaged in it with some malicious glee. It works like this: every year, corporations hold shareholder meetings. Inevitably, some shareholder proposals make it onto the ballot for voting. Management invariably recommends a vote against all shareholder proposals and in favor of all its nominees, policy changes and so on. You can bet that if I get my UNSL shareholder ballot, and I see that a coalition of nuns has proposed something deeply idealistic and completely loopy, they have my vote just because that’s fun for me. I myself do not take shareholder activism seriously, because the only reason I own the stock is because I think it will make me money. Others feel differently, and consider it a powerful weapon. Good for them, but that is investing for social change. I’m investing for profit, and profit alone. Any satisfaction I get from doing something management won’t like is a minor bonus.

But you’re supporting Unislime by owning its stock! Your money is blood money! Eeeeeeeeeeeek! Icky! In order: not true, just sounds like it should be; yes, as is most of the money made in the market; stop screaming; no money is icky.

As mentioned before, someone’s going to own UNSL. Might be Unislime itself, using its cash reserves for a big stock buyback. My ownership or non-ownership is not itself support; that assertion is mindless and disintegrates under scrutiny. My ownership just means I own some phantom pieces of paper representing a little chunk of UNSL. Voting for Unislime’s paid Congresspeople–that is support. Did you stop to check on that before you marked your November ballot? Also, do you own a 401K? Does it own mutual fund shares? Do you check rigorously to see if any of your funds own UNSL? Do you even know how to find that out? If you have an employer-sponsored retirement account, you probably own UNSL shares indirectly, or stocks of even more odious corporations. Most of the large ones are so unscrupulous that ‘ethical investing’ would be problematic anyway, especially considering how much we do not know. Most of them would be out of bounds. CEOs are paid to increase shareholder value, not be ethical.

It’s much easier for a corporation to be ethical when it’s not publicly traded. A very good friend of mine works for such a firm in Portland. He tells me, and I believe him, that his company has very high ethics toward the communities in which it does business. Fantastic! I’d want to work for an outfit like that, and I’d love to own stock if it would make me money. But I can’t buy their stock, and unless I need teeth for my earthmoving equipment, I’m not in a position to steer them any business. I respect them and their business practices, and I hope they prosper handily, but they are not germane to my own investing.

So, it’s pretty hard to do any investing at all without profiting from the profit of a company who earned it by working to someone’s disadvantage. It is to the company’s advantage to sell goods and services at the highest possible profit, which usually means paying employees less, offering fewer benefits, and gouging consumers to the highest possible degree. Publicly traded companies answer to shareholders, and shareholders demand value. That’s just how the game works. And as before, if you buy mutual funds, unless you do a pretty thorough walkthrough of their portfolios, odds are you are building your Sun City sunset years nest egg on ‘icky’ blood money. You can face that with eyes open, or pretend it’s not so, or choose to invest for social change rather than financial gain. We all have to be comfortable with our financial plans. Mine are to make money, and devil take the hindmost.

This all sounds like a big rationalization to liberate you from ethical considerations. For starters, I don’t believe I’m obligated to ethical considerations in what is essentially a free-for-all where the biggest players just laugh at the concept of ‘ethical considerations.’ I’ve never seen evidence that my owning or not owning a stock affected the business outcome. My stance is that the vast majority of people invest for the same reasons I do, deep down, but that some are not self-honest about it. If you do not believe in owning certain types of shares, and you fail to review the portfolios of all the mutual funds you profit from, you aren’t self-honest about it. I prefer to apply my ethical considerations in areas where I feel I make a true difference: recycling, shopping local, supporting deserving causes. I have never had a charity interrogate me to ask whether my contribution was ‘blood money.’

I’m a Muslim. I invest only in funds that are consistent with Islamic principles. Some years, that’s turned out very well for you financially. I’m not a Muslim, and I considered buying a couple of the Amana funds myself–because I don’t care what the fund stands for, just whether or not it makes me money. There are plenty of funds whose charters are based around ethical notions, be they Islamic, Christian, environmental, fair trade, no sin stocks, no defense/guns, what have you. Sometimes you’ll do pretty well. But tell yourself the truth: You are investing with a social (religious) agenda that trumps the profit motive. If that’s how you must invest in order to feel okay about your money, as before, best of luck. I don’t think less of you for it, unless you get self-righteous with me without being self-honest.

This sounds so Randroid. Haven’t I heard you say more than once that you find her ridiculous? And you’ll hear it again. Here’s a logic trap I believe in avoiding: eschewing an idea because some jackass also happens to share or advocate it. I can’t say whether Ayn Rand would approve of my investing notions, but I’m not investing to annoy or please a dead priestess of avarice. I’m investing to make money. No matter what your idea or view is, on any topic, you can find a complete scoundrel who advocates the same. Stalin had a draft; if you support conscription, does that associate you with Stalin? Jefferson owned slaves; if you admire his Constitutional concepts, does that mean you advocate slavery? It’s silliness to think so.

This whole greedy attitude is what’s wrong with America. Be the change you want to see. Nobly motivated, but you’re spending too much time addressing the wrong person. I didn’t design this prison; the gangs and the hacks have all the power here, and I have to live in reality. How about instead asking your legislators to be said change, since they’re the prison guards turning a blind eye to real wrongdoing? As demonstrated before, what I do with my investment capital will effect no social change, because what shares I do not own, someone else will. I can make my way within reality, or let it crush me without even noticing or caring. If I do, of course, I have less ability to effect other change. Take a look at Bill Gates, who made most of his money providing uncreative bloatware while assimilating or destroying most of what was better (and nearly everything else was). Now he’s giving most of the icky money away. You can argue that all of his money is filthy, if you believe there is such a thing. You cannot successfully argue that he is misusing his gains. He’s using them so honorably that Warren Buffett is just going to send all his money (a great buttload) to Bill.

Furthermore, this greedy attitude is America. Has been since the first Europeans showed up. The modern nation’s vast wealth was created through grants and exploitation of free real estate by pushing aside, confining or killing its original owners, whose descendants still aren’t getting a fair shake. Much of the initial labor was provided by slaves or indentured servants, many of whom shared in none of the rewards during their lifetimes, and whose descendants likewise still aren’t getting a fair shake. You may like this truth or loathe it, but it is reality. Unless you own nothing in the United States, or are prepared to surrender all that you own here because its economic base was gained through injustice, you’re a participant at some remove. Greed, and taking from others, made it all possible. Either none of the money is icky, or it’s all been icked out for centuries.

I don’t believe in small feelgood gestures that do no good. If you want to do some good, get out there and do some. You don’t need money to do that, but if you invest purely for profit–even in UNSL and its ilk–you may obtain greater means to do that.

Plus, look on the bright side. How good will it feel to make a bunch of money off UNSL, then dump it, and wait and watch smugly as it tanks later on? Even the ethical investing crowd has to like that.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Current non-read: The Land of the Painful Shame

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Okay, the real title is The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel. I am going to link you straight to the reviews, just so that I’ll never stand accused of encouraging anyone to buy this.

Like many of you, I loved Clan of the Cave Bear. For its flaws, it presented prehistoric people as…people. Good, bad and somewhere in between. It painted credible cultures based upon significant archaeological research. It took some liberties with SoD (that’s a cool kids’ acronym I learned at a Radcon panel about Suspension of Disbelief), but none so grotesque as to detract from a fun story. Over the years, it turned into Cro-Magnoporn, getting progressively worse. Lots of tasting her ‘tangy salt’ (I always wondered if Jondalar actually brought a primitive herbal salt shaker to his oral sex sessions) and homing in on her ‘nodule.’ (Anyone ever heard a woman scream for some hot nodule attention?) Nodules and prehistoric condiments aside, it was never this bad.

One might also consider what it means for me to write this. I may be only the bathroom attendant in the writers’ club (‘here’s your towel, sir…ah, very generous, sir, thank you kindly’), but my badge at least gets me in the servants’ entrance. Consider, please: what if I were to one day meet Jean Auel, whose latest book I’m impaling with one of Ayla’s atlatls? I once came close to that painful experience, sitting in a panel where one of the panelists seemed familiar. Finally remembered that, on Amazon, I’d given her book meh out of five stars. Squirm, squirm, squirm. No one, therefore, can imagine me fundamentally eager to alienate Ms. Auel without good reason; that would be insane. If I thought I could do the book justice with kindness and tact, I would.

Can’t. This is just bad. It’s so bad, I don’t think it’s Jean Auel. I could not force myself past page 73.

It is mostly tell rather than show, one of the most amateurish bugaboos that editors have to beat out of writers. We get paragraphs of “Ayla felt….” No, no, no. Don’t tell me “Ayla felt…”! Don’t! Show me how she feels and what’s on her mind through her actions, her dialogue, others’ reactions to her. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care if you establish that when Ayla is nervous, she has a bad habit of inserting a finger up each nostril. “She eased two fingers into her nostrils” beats “Ayla felt nervous” every time.

Then there’s the dullness problem. Now, I grant that if you love herbalism and scenes about making tea, this might not be so dull. If you like long rehashes of past events, maybe it’s not that dull. And I recognize that after waiting ten years between books, some backstory is needed because we’ve forgotten some of it (or perhaps never read those books, never slurped on their tangy salt). We don’t need this much. The dialogue is wordy and uninspiring, with everyone spelling out everything, leaving nothing for the reader to infer/discover. It often feels like expository or technical writing.

There, that’s the big problem. It doesn’t feel like fiction. It feels like expository writing. It sometimes feels like a software manual. I can take some guesses as to what might have happened:

Guess #1: Auel, being contractually shackled to the publisher for X number of books, was required to write another one before she could be manumitted. No one said it had to be a good book, and she realized full well that her name guaranteed a certain number of sales, thus automatic profit, and that’s why the publisher insisted on it. That’s what publishers do with big names: once it’s clear that the Name guarantees a profitable release, they get it locked in for a series of books. You owe us one more, bucko, or you can retire, but you can’t write anything else until we get it. So she phoned it in, getting it over with, and trying her best to make sure they wouldn’t want any more.

Guess #2: she somehow ran out of money and had to do something. I find that highly unlikely, as Auel has made enough money on the series to buy me and sell me into slavery, but folk have written books for stranger reasons.

Guess #3: she got real offended by all the readers who threw tomatoes at her Cro-Magnoporn, and decided to torture them. (Laurell K. Hamilton seems to be doing it. You no likey my porn? Okay, you get twice as much, that’ll learn ya.)

Guess #4: she forgot how to write good fiction. Kind of hard to imagine, because we don’t really start going backwards until our minds start to turn to muesli, and even then, usually that shows up in other ways. Very rarely does a capable writer suddenly revert to second-year college English student.

Guess #5: it got farmed out to ‘lancers. I am sure that’s what happened with Herbert and Anderson’s latest Dune monsterpiece and it wouldn’t surprise me if several other big names/franchises were also doing it. A lot of stuff gets hired out to freelancers. We work cheap, and a lot of us make real livings as tech writers, which makes our writing sound like vacuum cleaner manuals. It is not inconceivable that they just paid someone, or someones, several grand (no royalties, bucko) to write this. I suspect this because the writing is too amateurish to reconcile with what we know Auel is capable of. Well, maybe it ain’t her at all. I can just see it: “Look, you owe us another book. You don’t want to write it. Fine, so don’t write most of it. Write the parts you like, sketch a storyline, and we’ll hire some literary mercenaries for flat fees. We’ll sign them to NDAs that will allow us and you to confiscate their duodenums if they talk. Win/win/win. Oh, sure, the readers will be hosed, but they have no taste anyway.”

You don’t think the publishing industry would do that? If so, you do not know them. Some publishers would not, and those I respect. Some would, faster than you can say ‘slurp her nodule.’ Never underestimate what someone will do for a guaranteed income stream.

I can’t say with certainty what happened here. All that is mere speculation. What I can say is that 73 pages left me wanting less. Life is too short to finish this book, but it’s not too short to warn others away. The kindest, tactfulest, mercifulest thing I can say is that I don’t think Jean Auel really wrote this.

Gods, I hope not.