The compare-write helped maintain my sanity. I’ll send them in multiple e-mails to NY: the file-size is in megs, multiple, because it’s 241 images.
What is not in dispute is in black type. Where it is disputed, what I wrote is in struck-out blue, what she wrote is in red, and what she wrote that I don’t approve is circled (most); and what I do approve is in yellow. Most every page of 241 has about 8 circles and maybe one yellow blotch. Not to mention the stupid compare-write program, otherwise excellent, strikes out in blue and renders in red letters ANY hyphenated word. It’s a real nest of snakes.
I have told Betsy I am going to send her also a) a completely clean file b) a completely clean file with the acceptable changes already inserted. There exists a massive distrust between editors and writers about control of that input process: but as I told Betsy, when I have said I am GOING to put in changes she knows I routinely don’t like (gray for grey, etc) I will do it by the style sheet, and if there were any instance I wasn’t going to do it, I would tell her, specifically. We’ve worked together since the ’70’s, so she knows I’ll do as I say. My editor doesn’t have that length of experience, and so I imagine they’ll talk about it, and I hope they’ll just use what I send rather than trying to input it: the potential for mistakes is huge if you don’t know your way through that manuscript, and I do.
So…….nearly done. What a week!
Advanced technology does have its perils! Computers can make all one’s work disappear in an instant, as only a major fire could do in the Good Old Days. But there’s no way anyone in those times could have prepared anything resembling your multicolored point-for-point rebuttal! Nor have it delivered as near to instaneously as matters. 😉
Oh, is that ever going to be a bear to go through on the other end too. Images instead of text, no less? Eek. Best wishes that they get it right.
I’m glad you survived the galleys. (Next time, ask to get the copy edit returned in Word – the content would be just as infuriating, but it’s easier to deal with.)
I hear stories like this all too often, and they make me angry every time. Not just that writers have to go through this – but here I am, a genre-experienced copy editor looking for more work, and people who seem to not have the faintest idea of what a fiction copy editor should be doing get employed…
Apply to DAW—they may be looking for one.
I work in Word Perfect, which is natural as breathing to me, and offers all options. I convert it to Word to send to them. They decided to use PDF, which prevents a writer making changes. This was not, this time, a good choice.
Plus—it was really fortunate what happened—I caught a major event fallout which I cannot describe here, but shall we say—it was really major, and I had to do some new paragraphs.
I’ve got that situation e-mailed to them. I expect some very early e-mails tomorrow. So maybe we should all be grateful this happened so that I had to take a real close look.
Congrats on getting through it, and making that catch. Hopefully things are better all around for the holidays and the new year.
*Snort* I imagine its the sort of fallout we’d have caught for you… a bit late though! Sounds like its time for a night off… kick back, watch a movie, have a brew, go to bed early, then get up and attack it all again in the morning!
Tonight, I thought of something I had read years ago, so I went and dug it off the shelves.
One day not long after Allenby had captured Jerusalem, I happened to be in front of a bazaar stall on Christian Street, remonstrating with a fat old Turkish shopkeeper who was attempting to relieve me of twenty piasters for a handful of dates. My attention was suddenly drawn to a group of Arabs walking in the direction of the Damascus Gate. . .
My curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin, who stood in sharp relief from all his companions. He was wearing an agal, Kuffieh, and Aba such as are worn only by Near Eastern potentates. In his belt was fastened the short curved sword of a prince of Mecca, insignia worn by the descendants of the Prophet . . .
It was not merely his costume, nor yet the dignity with which he carried his five feet three, marking him every inch a king or perhaps a caliph in disguise who had stepped out of the pages of “The Arabian Nights.” . . .
But this young man was as blond as a Scandinavian, in whose veins flow Viking blood and the cool traditions of fiords and sagas. With Lawrence in Arabia by Lowell Thomas (Published in 1924)
Is it a surprise I was thinking about Bren when this came to me? I’ve always been fascinated by the accepted outsider in a culture. I just thought I would share a bit. (Of course, I’m also thinking The Faded Sun Trilogy, which were the first Cherryh books I read. All three, in a row in two days.)
zette, that gave me shivers down my spine …
Someone should invite DAW into the 20th century. There is no reason why you should have to break your files down into nibbles that can pass through email servers. They should have an ftp server that you can log into and send all of your complete files to them in one swell foop.[sic] I certainly hope that this was a one-time psychotic event for the copy editor. Otherwise hse may be applying advanced language skills to “Dude! You want fries with that?”
The thing is that some of my ‘colleagues at self-employed’ are perfectly good non-fiction copy editors – particularly in corporate areas where editors are expected to apply a uniform style to a text and render it more accessible by standardizing it – they just make lousy _fiction_ copy editors, because the CMOS is not meant to be a rulebook, much less applied to novels.
I’m glad you’ve withstood and corrected all of this. I’m also surprised Betsy didn’t warn your editor to warn your copy editor that if she was making lots of changes, she needed to check back. It’s not as if you were a neophyte, and this is an ongoing series. Hello! (sarcasm duly noted, right?)
In other news, please hug/pet the kittehs for me, and hugs all around for you two, for above-and-beyond!
Now that the initial shock has worn off, and the desire to defend a favorite author, I have to think the copyeditor is perhaps skilled at non-fiction editing, which tends to require Standard English (the textbook, business flavor) and has too little experience with editing fiction. I do wonder why, somewhere in there, it did not dawn on her that for there to be so much she was “correcting,” and for it all to be in a particular style/voice/flavor, that perhaps there was a reason for the usage. Thinking on it, I’d say perhaps the copyeditor might be a recent graduate? While our high schools, colleges, and universities have many good points, they tend to focus on a standardized textbook and business style of language usage, at the expense of fiction. This is something prospective authors and editors alike have to unlearn out in the real world. Now, to be fair, English and other literature professors certainly do discuss matters of style, manners, word choice, nuance, philosophy, and more, as they should, still, in students’ own writing, this usually is set aside in favor of that business/textbook standard. Editing is not much taught at all, unless perhaps in Journalism, if even there. I have noted that students and graduates (all levels) typically either have very poor written English skills, or very good, and that even if talented, some have the bad habit of rushing through so fast that they will miss important things: typos, wrong word but properly spelled, American versus International spellings as appropriate to the author, bad or incorrect coding or junk coding left in, all sorts of things. These do show up, when you’re on a team with others, amateur or professional. Just because one can read and process quickly does not mean one should proof and edit in a rush. It sounds as though the copyeditor’s problem was one of overzealous use of standard English, and inattention to an author’s storytelling voice, the style inherent in a piece. How a decent editor could fail to pick up on that literary voice, I don’t know, however. The Foreigner series purposefully uses CJ’s usual strong style, and adds the alien touch specific to the atevi, along with occasional nods to the manners of, say, Europe and America in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, and Japan in the Meiji era and afterwards, of a new level of contact with Western culture. An editor with any grounding in English literature should’ve picked those up, I’d think. I hope the young lady does well in future projects or jobs. Maybe she’ll learn big-time from this one. She needs to, or her fiction editing will suffer the same fate as her performance on this project. Ouch, indeed. Luck on her, for that.
I hope things are looking up for you, CJ!
Brennan is quite right about the FTP dropbox instead of email, for transfer of large files such as novel-length manuscripts, images, audio, and video.
Huzzah! A ‘grey’ kindred spirit. I was electrified at the With Lawrence in Arabia quote — I have that book, the treasured inheritance from an uncle. Now I’m going to have to get it down and read it again.