And the pond is really, really frozen. Yesterday our two scoundrel fish-raiding cats (because of whom we have had to net the pond) were out there near the pond heater hole in the ice, and the ice was cracking under them—I watched them the entire time, really not wanting to have to run out there and rescue an ungrateful and very wet and cold cat who’d be tangled in our pond netting, but they managed not to fall in.
We have left the side garage door open because we have problems with a winter mouse infestation out there that has cost us a lot of work and nastiness, but I think as temperatures head for the single digits Wednesday, we should close that door to protect stuff in the garage, not to mention the cars.
Still a few lingering effects of the crud.
And I got half the copyediting checked last night while watching telly.
There is one copyediting tendency that drives me bananas. Say you create a name. Now, the first creation may be unstable. Second or third time you write it, you figure how it should REALLY be spelled, and you use it that way 300 times during a book. The copyeditor will, very reliably, take the first spelling and ‘correct’ all 299 correct forms into the initial ‘wrong’ form, so you have to, patiently, change them all back. Why didn’t YOU correct the first form? Because you couldn’t find the damn thing. There’s one instance that was earlier than you thought.
The copyeditor decided to use Shishoji instead of the proper form, Shishogi. God only knows what form the c/e used in the prior book, because there were so many other copyeditor-produced errors that that one could have gotten past me. I don’t give a damn (Lord, my language goes downhill when I’m doing c/e correction) what was in the prior book: the name is Shishogi, with a hard -g-. and accent on the second syllable. Aarrgh!
I also capitalize Earth as the name of the planet, with ‘earth’ in the normal other or proverbial uses, and the c/e ‘corrected’ all of those. And the East (capital) is Ilisidi’s province. The cardinal directions are not capitalized. The c/e ‘fixed’ all of those.
I tell them time and time and time again. I create style sheets for them. I add notes to the c/e on the title page. I advise them not to tamper with things in quotes because we are dealing with people who do not speak perfectly. I advise them stet all forms of earth or Earth and trust me. Does this make a difference? Only sometimes. By the time I get through fixing all this, the word STET has become STET PASSIM and then STET, DAMMIT! and sometimes one form beyond that, and my blood pressure is through the roof.
But as c/e goes, this is a good job and it is going fast.
“Look, I’m the author, I will tell YOU, the copy editor, how it is supposed to be written. You look for obvious misspellings, missing punctuation (don’t you DARE take out that Oxford comma), and possible discontinuity in plot or dialogue. Otherwise, take your copy of the Chicago Book of Style, sit on it and don’t touch it with any other part of your body. As for spelling, if it’s spelled one way 299 times, and spelled a different way 1 time, chances are very high that the correct spelling is the one used 299 times. Just because you see it one way the first time, and the next 299 times are a different spelling, perhaps you should send an email and ask me, if you’re not sure which spelling is correct. Don’t take it upon yourself to dictate my story’s style. Copy editors don’t get Hugo or Nebula awards, authors do. (Well, maybe that last sentence is a bit strong, but you get the point, I presume.) Perhaps if you had looked at the number of instances in the manuscript where a particular spelling or dialogue is used, you might get an inkling that I do know what I’m doing, thank you very much. If I get this manuscript back from you again in the condition in which you sent it to me, I will be sending a letter to your publisher demanding that you be removed from any further contact with my stories.” You’d think that copy editors, like test readers, would at least have the smarts to ask the author if the structure was intentional or a mere lapse in style BEFORE they take it upon themselves to change things. Their egos don’t enter into this, it’s not about them, it’s about what the author is trying to convey and how the author is trying to convey it. None of us in real life speak perfectly, I still use the word “ain’t” in conversation, dangle participles, split infinitives, and generally have non-sequiturs in my sentences. It’s only when I’m writing that I try to be as syntactically correct as I can.
Sorry, when I read for pleasure, I am in a different mode than when I read for corrections. Only the most annoying things penetrate the world of the book when I am reading. Not much story penetrates when I am correcting. Probably the best compromise would be a list of annotations sent to the author, but I suspect that you are the victim of computer life. Sorry, but that’s the world we cope with right now. I wonder how the Venerable Bede did it?
Supposedly, Theodore Sturgeon once wrote “STET” on the cover page of a manuscript which he was submitting to Galaxy. The editor, H. L. Gold, was a noted meddler, but he left that story alone. (Or so goes the story.)
It has been my experience that authors’ style guides are ignored and that the publisher’s overrode what they considered to be authorial “quirks”.
This was not true at Microsoft Press, where I worked as a proofreader/copyeditor. There, every book I worked on had different rules to follow, and it was a frustrating experience, to say the least.
So I’ve been on both sides of the fence and can categorically state without any sense of irony that when I am a copy editor, I want a single set of rules to follow, and when I am an author, I want the copy editor to follow *my* rules. 🙂
I have had arrangements in which the c/e would call me, but alas, nowadays the file comes as attachments to a letter; I correct it in PDF comments; and it’s overall much faster…but some of the communication we used to have has fallen by the wayside. WHY they didn’t contact me about 299 ‘corrections’ of the same name which *I* made up…that remains a question. A big one. When we finally get the Unified Field Theory, it MAY answer that question.
Off topic: John Scalzi is having his yearly ‘let people promote their own non-traditionally published books’ day.
He gets rather a lot of traffic of people interested in SF, so it might be worthwhile if you could put up a link to Invitations, and links to Jane’s new books on Amazon and/or Closed Circle.
This is the page:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/12/03/whatever-holiday-shopping-guide-2013-day-two-non-traditionally-published-books/
Thing won’t let me log in. ‘Account suspended.’
Topically to the title, I’m sitting here in bright sunshine watching a few broken clouds slowly drift to the west. We didn’t get much below freezing last night, but tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday the predicted high is only 32F. Lows at PDX: 20, meaning probably mid-teens in the protected Tualatin Valley. (In this sort of weather being “out of the wind” can make you colder.) All I’m really worried about is this year’s rhody seedlings that are still in little 4″ pots. Those are small enough to freeze solid and kill the plants. Brought ’em up to the patio slab, laid a ring of 2×4’s and 4×4’s around ’em, and I’ll overturn a concrete mixing tub from HD over the top–and hope. 😉
The “STET, DAMMIT!” seems to convey the most accurate emotion and there may have the best chance of being understood; such is my presumption.
I have often wondered what goes on in the minds of people who are supposed to proof / copyedit SF&F stories, because I see a few things clearly missed in most books. Because I read carefully and I’m a skilled proofreader, I notice things. Because I’m an SF&F fan, I’m used to made-up names, jargon, and special usage. I would think someone who’s going to proof/copyedit an SF&F book would have that skill set, but apparently, it’s the same person who proofs/c/e’s for everything else.
Heck, if the author hands in a style sheet listing things like why Earth or East gets caps or l.c., or a list of SF&F vocabulary (alien words, spacer jargon) as they should be spelled…that has just made the job ten times easier. …Dang, would they hire me to work from home? I can do this.
(Somewhere in the first quarter of Pride or Venture, there are one or more instances of Aia Jin for Aja Jin. On my first read-through of the books, and because by then I had a feel for your style, I wondered if they were two different ships, rather than a typo. A distinct possibility. It struck me as something you might do, for humor or for socio-linguistic reasons.)
Regarding the 1 versus 299 times, or Shoshogi versus Shoshoji:
I would tend to make notes on story-specific or “foreign terms.” While proofing, I can keep a number of things, like vocabulary or style trends, in my head besides (1) textbook English versus (2) author style, the latter being important.
So my initial reaction would be, I’ve seen one spelling before, and now I see this other spelling. Are they two separate terms, or is one a typo (or where the author changed his/her mind but missed the find/replace)? (Just as my reaction to the Aia Jin instance. I will hunt that down on my next reread.)
All it would take is to note the exceptions’ points in the text (chapter, page, paragraph, etc.) or mark it up in the text.
Then either contact the author and ask first, or correct the (infinitessimally) less common form and then contact the author to ask, or write a note to flag it for the author’s attention with the m.s. returned for the author to approve changes. Even with how fast and busy things get, how hard is it to write down notes in a file and send it to the author, either during the day or after the m.s. has been proofed, all in one go?
I get it about capitalization and most of the ways SF&F authors use words, jargon, and often for a particular story’s or author’s style, unless that style isn’t so distinct. — With your books, CJC, you have a distinct style for a given story-universe and an overall distinct style. I like that about your writing. Note that does not mean it goes counter to textbook English rules. It may bend the rules for specific reasons, but it rarely breaks the rules, unless again for specific reasons.
It makes me wonder what such copyeditors would’ve done when handed LOTR or Tom and Huck or Lennie and George in Of Mice and Men. In all of those, both the dialogue style and the narrative prose style are “non-standard English” to some degree or more, yet if that was “corrected,” it would take away something crucial to the story’s impact, its feel, or even its point.
Really, in stories where the humans, aliens, computers, and “critters” may all have their own way of speaking (or thinking), why is it hard to notice and anticipate unusual usage and made-up words, and discern what’s correct and what’s a typo and what needs correction?
Dang. I should update my old resumé.
I seem to recall reading/hearing somewhere that Professor Tolkien had some rather bitter words with copyeditors over elves becoming elfs and dwarves becoming dwarfs!
Yeah, I remember that too. And he was the philologist!
Texts including non-English words, or specialized terminology that the c/e isn’t familiar with, are also dangerous territory. My c/e horror story is a nonfiction book that includes transliterated Hebrew terminology. First thing she did was remove all the emphasized words in our text, including italics for first-time introduction of non-English words… Of course I had to put them all back. Thank goodness she hadn’t yet gotten to the citations from Hebrew source materials, which have a very specific format including italics, boldface, and parentheses in odd places-and which would have made us look like idiots if we’d gotten them wrong.
Reading numbers like this makes me wonder how this Southern California boy lasted more than a decade in Michigan. Brr.
The name spelling issue makes me curious about something. CJ, what’s your process for developing the constructed languages that appear in your work? How much detail do you go into. I’m an amateur writer(hopefully not forever) and I went down the conlang rabbit hole a while back for an project I had. I had textbooks of phonology, wrote some software, used some software written by an actual linguist and spent a couple of months geeking out over Linguistics. The upside is that I now I have enough morphemes to believably name the population of mid-sized European nation and more than enough to give my fictional character names that sound like they come from the same place. Where do you draw the line? I imagine you have considerations such as deadlines and editors to take into account.
You know ETAISON—frequency of letters used in English? I revise that, develop a few unique phonemes as most common in the language, determine the consonant-vowel structure (in IndoEuropean it tends to be CVCV,) set the dipthongs, and create a number of particles that will be as common as, say, the, a, and an (but sometimes the language has articles and sometimes not) —in other words, I don’t do much detail: I fling open the tool box and grab the easy ones. And I don’t delay writing while I do it. I just make it up as I need it. All the definitions like noun, verb, adjective, tense, mood, number, voice—all up for revision; and I know the names of cases and tenses English doesn’t use.
Classic was the c/e who corrected every one of Altair Jones’ ‘ain’t’s. It really made the scene where Mondragon was trying to teach her ‘isn’t’ rather peculiar. The guy also told DAW he was my ‘regular c/e’. Fact is, Warner had had to throw out his c/e of Cyteen, which had stets so thick you couldn’t even read the original text. I finally called Warner and told them it was easier for me to report the 3 of 100,000 corrections which were accepted, and just go from my computer file. That was pretty well what we did. Then of course, the guy showed up to screw up the hardbound edition of Angel, which was my first hardbound at DAW, and which had gone to press without them giving me a chance to see the c/e’s. It all had to be corrected in the paperback. That was the last time that happened.
When a publisher does something like that, where they let a c/e screw up one manuscript, and then after you’ve gone through all that to fix it, and they put the same c/e on the next manuscript, can you refuse to have that c/e put on your project? I’d have been furious with Don Wollheim (or Betsy) if they hadn’t let you see the “emended” manuscript for Angel before publishing it. Perhaps demanding that they pull every copy off the shelves and reprint it correctly? Of course, that’s a loss for them, but it’s also something I’d think could come back to bite them, especially if you decided you weren’t going to send them another manuscript until they assured you (and kept their promise) that this c/e would be banned from looking at your manuscripts. Well, I’m sure there’s some legal thing that will say, no, the publisher and the author have a contract, and the publisher gets to decide who the c/e for this manuscript is, according to the contract. But the contract should also state that the publisher and the c/e don’t send the manuscript to the presses until it’s been sent back to the author and the author approves it.
It would bankrupt the company. They did it in a very urgent crisis, and it didn’t work as advertised at any level. The fallout was simply that after that I would always get to see it, and thus far it’s worked.
At the same time, actual mistakes are more and more uncorrected in books — either that, or I’m just more persnickety with age, but I think I’m right and they’re more prevalent.
Are they relying on computerized assistance more and more? I can see that causing situations where the first spelling of a name ‘sticks’ and subsequent occurrences are corrected automatically, without the copyeditor even noticing how many had been flagged as wrong. I’m also seeing a lot of the kind of error typically caused by automated spellchecking; wrong but correctly spelled words.
Global corrections are a boon and a bane. If you have a variant spelling, these programmers [who are not good at listening to people who USE the wp programs] have never given us a ‘fuzzy logic’ tool to pick up variations, they don’t give us adjustable search tools, and they don’t give us user-made dictionaries [Old Volkswriter used to—and made user-defined macros an on-the-fly cinch.]
These publishing companies only computerized in the 80’s. They made crazy choices to protect their company info, not necessarily knowing much about encryption, and it’s just crazy, the things that were done. DId people learn? No. When e-books arrived, a few companies believed that, indeed, it was just a button-push to run the conversions and they could shove the job off on a junior editor. YOu may now take a breath from laughing: it produced amazingly gappy, symbol-ridden e-books which got out there on sale, yes, from major companies, and nobody even looked at the result, assuming that, by the advertising on the conversion program, of course, piece of cake.
Obviously a project for after your proofing rush, but Word Perfect has several of these features. The have both PerfectScript macros and a version of BASIC (though I have used neither). It can add a word to its dictionary, so you could put in all the words (and names) for Foreigner. The more difficult question is whether you can switch dictionaries, so you can use a different dictionary for Chanur. I suspect there’s a way to do it, though it might require creating a Windows account for each universe.
Hm. I started looking in wpuniverse.com/ and found this: http://wptoolbox.com/tips.html#5
“words can be added to the user word list (wt11us.uwl)”
“You can check the words in the UWL by doing Tools, Spell Checker, [then answer] No to the ‘Close [spell checker]’ message, [Then click] Options, User Word Lists. The words you ‘Add’ed should show in that list along with the QuickCorrect pairs.”
So, it appears relatively easy to have multiple dictionaries just by swapping wt11us.uwl files. You might start by reviewing spelling in multiple books just to add the English variants you like, and save that in something like std_wt11us.uwl. Then go through the Foreigner books and save that off in frnr_wt11us.uwl et cetera.
Bonus: it may be easy to print the dictionary for your c/e. Or add a dictionary and/or character list to the book itself.
You might use multiple accounts if you commonly work in multiple universes. I suspect the user dictionary would be unique to each system user name.
Unfortunately, compared to volkswriter, the WP functions of that ilk are like driving a tank through grocery aisles…I’ve tried them, repeatedly, but they’re so much trouble to set up, and not project-specific, that I just give up.
Walt, can a user have multiple word list files, all active, in the same directory (folder)?
That is, given, for example:
cjc_wt11us.uwl // CJ’s overall user word list
frnr_wt11us.uwl // Foreigner series word list
Jane_wt11us.uwl // Jane’s overall user word list
chanur_wt11us.uwl // Chanur series word list
fish_wt11us.uwl // Fish and Aquarium word list
// Any other story-universe or author’s word list as needed.
Could all these be in a folder and active during a session, or does WordPerfect limit this to only one user word list / dictionary active at a time?
Since it’s for a given user, perhaps so. But since WP (presumably) has multiple language dictionaries available, such as English, French, Latin, Spanish, etc., then I’d wonder if multiple user dictionaries (word lists) are available in the same session.
If it’s only one at a time, then either keep everything in one file, regardless of story-universe, or as you suggested, separate files per project.
I could see how it would be eminently useful to have per-project files, not only for an author writing on different subjects (or story-universes), but for a contractor working on multiple clients’ projects, or very diverse projects.
* I wish WordPerfect and CorelDraw were available on the Mac! They tried, briefly, many long years ago, but stopped development. It would be good to see these for the Mac again.
(This reminds me to reinstall WP on my Win7 laptop.)
Keeping in mind my assessment is from a quick look at an old copy of WP I have (which I don’t use) and a quick browse of some user forums: the base dictionary is in one file, named by language; and one “user word list” (.uwl) is in force, wt11us.uwl for US English. So, that’s why I suggested building a vanilla .uwl with English variations, saving that off, then adding to it with the Foreigner series.
So a little awkwardness will remain. Oh, it’s doesn’t like “leapt”; I’ll have to write that down to add to the base user word list in addition to adding it to the list in current force. Or you just run through the book using the base list and don’t add anything but vanilla words. Propagating idiosyncratic English across all dictionaries will probably remain a problem since the alternative is that you have to choose dictionaries every time you add a word–and you want that to be painless. You will have to change lists when you change universes, but this might be accomplished by PerfectScript or multiple Windows accounts or .BAT files–many possibilities.
I suppose another possibility is that you might copy the US files renaming them from xxxxUS.xxx to xxxxFN.xxx and just use WP’s native ability to change languages.
One concern is if it’s truly a list, it may get slow when it has hundreds of words in it; still, the whole system is quite old, so modern-speed computers will probably not have a problem, even laptops. On the other side, this is the quick and dirty way to do it, and cleaner methods may exist that I didn’t find in my very brief exploration.
The huge advantage of going to the work of setting this up, is that you can tell the copy editor, “Do not change spellings of my invented words–ever! They’re all checked by my own spell check list.” Or if they use WP, you can send them the .uwl file.
Thanks, Walt. Hmm, it’s probably a binary, proprietary format file, but if it were some form of XML or plain but delimited text, then it would be possible to edit or merge the files simply. Yeah, dream on, probably. :-/
Separate UWL files per story-universe, then, is likely the way to go. — I may get curious and see if that format is some plain, human-readable, easily modifiable file. … This will mean firing up the old Win7 laptop. Slowness.
My impression is that it’s literally a User Word List. Plain text. One word per line.
Concerning the consistency of name spelling, I am pretty certain I saw several versions of the spelling of “Wi’itikiin” in different Foreigner books. Having regular expressions might help a little, but I think you will find that mostly in programming editors or stuff running on Linux. If only someone would finally invent indexical derivability, then it would be a snap to implement really helpful spelling checkers.
That’s why I do most of my writing in programming text editors, not word-processors.
Even for fiction.
Actually there are a bunch of reasons:
* Text editors don’t mess with things to “fix” them unless you tell them to
* Powerful commands and macro systems (in fact, often programmable commands)
* Removal of all the ways to play with and/or break document formatting instead of getting on with writing
* Compatible with version-control systems to keep a revision history of the thing in an orderly manner
* Saved files can be loaded in ANYTHING and don’t have complicated, breakable structure
* Can automate the production steps to turn the document into ebook format (for instance).
* Last but not least: as a computery programmery type of person, I already understand them.
Not to turn this into a review site, but what editor(s) do you favor?
Who’s c/e-ing changes so fast it’s hard to track from book to book.
Re the programmers—if they’d talk to a linguist, as well as a writer, they’d get some help. And if they’d just take a look at the logic/code in outmoded old Volkswriter, which was so much better and more pliable than what we have since the 80’s—it’s gotten measurably more stupid, not better—it would help a lot.
And if the companies would adopt Word Perfect’s flexibility. That program can ‘read’ an amazing array of things over which Word just (by design) goes into catatonia—and why can’t Word read (and write) those? Because Microsoft prefers that all these other formats die, and therefore, if you have an archived document you can’t read, you may well be SOL with Word. And WP just might get it.
When I was in college for my second degree, this time in Business Administration, my major was Information Systems. Our Systems Analysis instructor told us that programmers, who are Computer Science majors in the School of Engineering, don’t interface with the users at all. It would be our job as Systems Analysts to interview the users, find out what they wanted, how they wanted it to look, and then translate that to the programmers. Unfortunately, not every business thinks that way, and productivity of their employees suffers as a result of sloppy, slapdash, or misunderstood programming. If you tell a programmer that you want a particular interface, chances are you’ll get what the programmer finds the easiest to program, rather than the most efficient. They aren’t taught business models, they’re taught code, and that’s all they do. So, you end up with stuff that is so bloated and has such arcane features that you wonder why you even started using it. Too bad I wasn’t able to find a job as a Systems Analyst, but then, not everyone even knows what a Systems Analyst is or what the job entails, so I’m not surprised.
Mine ran CS through the math and science school – engineers had different computer classes (I took one). One of ours had as a project one or another kind of documentation (choose one from a short list). I built an error manual for a small language, where I took the error messages from an actual compiler, and wrote up probably causes and corrective actions.
(I didn’t graduate, but that’s due to (a) not being able to write a compiler and (b) not being able to pass diff equations.)
Any good computer science program includes linguistics. Noam Chomsky is very well known to computer scientists. Unfortunately, that kind of linguistics doesn’t have much connection to natural languages.
Any programmer gets his nose rubbed in every mistake he makes. Not all ways of coping with this make for a better programmer. One is denying all mistakes exist, which makes for a very arrogant programmer who pays attention to no one. I’ve only rarely seen the analyst/code monkey model used, though I’ve stayed away from big corporations, and thus really big jobs. Programmer-analysts, people who can do both jobs, save an enormous amount of miscommunication. Many programmers get into habits of using the “best” algorithms–except, they aren’t the best in all situations. They also tend toward really arcane user interfaces.
Microsoft. Sigh. They think changing the interface on their products is the most effective way to differentiate them from previous versions, so (the theory goes) they sell more. Look at the chart types available in Excel–it was so-so in the ’80s.
I’ll be interested to see what text editors get recommended. Emacs? TECO? 😆
Walt, unless the programmer has some business understanding,i.e. business classes like accounting, finance, economics, etc., which most do not,then they’re still going to do what they think is the right interface.
Most programmer-analysts that I’ve come across now are people who do have those business classes as well as coding.
I think we’re coming from different viewpoints/worlds. My focus (in that I have one at all, as I try to be a generalist) is systems software, and I’ve only occasionally done business programming. I expect you’re the reverse. When I have anything to do with business programming, I’m usually down in the guts, making the tools that let business programs run. COBOL was a great motivator to stay far, far away from business programming.
I’m with Walt (for some reason couldn’t reply to his response). I started life programming in GECOM (General Electric’s modified version of COBOL) and then went down into Assembler Language, specifically the constraints inherent in writing system code for TPF (the system that underpins airline reservation systems). And also occasionally the microcode that controls the specialised disk controllers in that environment.
We were a long way from the end user although it was our job to somehow provide them with the underpinnings, no matter how idiotic the request. Generally we were the people in the hole in the ground, far away from most folks.
Tulrose, I think the comment system has a limit of three or four levels of reply, depending on how you count.
Even assembly looks good after COBOL, eh? 😆
I like CoffeeCup Software’s CoffeeCup Editor on the Windows side, and BBEdit’s Bare Bones Editor on the Macintosh side.
I really liked HomeSite, which ultimately was gobbled up by DreamWeaver. HomeSite was a very good editor.
Way back when, (the 80’s!) I liked the Turbo Pascal Editor, which I think was based on WordStar.
I also have fond memories of the old AppleWorks program from the 80’s. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very good back then for what it did.
—–
I would LOVE to see a good word processor that produces clean HTML+CSS output, perhaps even as the source file. Come to that, why not, these days, have a word processor that produces an EPUB package as its default? It would allow whole book projects and other niceties. But for clean HTML and CSS and possibly EPUB, I’d be very happy with that.
(IF there’s a word processor out that does that, for its native format, I’d love to know it. — I’m still new to doing ebooks, not new to doing HTML and CSS.)
I’m currently reviewing SVG to get back to where I’d last left studying it. — I’ll be self-teaching EPUB2 and EPUB3, and soon PHP and MySQL, to get my skill sets current. I *need* the new skills for myself, not only for the job market.
I have Homesite 4.5 – whether it will run with Win7 is something I’m about to find out. (new computer! squee!)
I have a friend who builds web sites, mostly for Windows, and she uses UltraEdit, AFAIK.
Yeah, I remember Test Editor and COrrector, and the set of macros that I’ve heard became emacs.
It’s still available. You can get to it via Wikipedia: Pete Siemsen’s downloadable files are linked, and so are Tom Almy’s.
That’s one reason why I also have LibreOffice available – it’s capable of handling more formats than word, although it doesn’t handle some things as well as Word. (I’m one of the weirdos who does find-and-replace with tabs and paragraph marks.)
I use LibreOffice on Windows and NeoOffice on Macintosh. — Mac users should get NeoOffice; neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice can handle the Mac’s font system, which is, IMHO, very strange and a serious bug.
Having done quality control, where I sometimes had to explain how it should be done three times to the same person before their mental lightbulb went on – I sympathize. (I also point out that it’s Shishoji in Protector.)
Doesn’t only happen in SF&F books, or even only in fiction. My wife’s next book is Circle Solutions for Student Wellbeing, a textbook (recipe book?) for teachers and educators wanting to change student behaviour. The key pedagogy is working in a Circle. Sometimes, life being what it is, the book mentions other circles. c/e changed lots (but not all) of the ‘Circle’s to ‘circle’s – but also in a couple of what looked like completely random places to me, capitalised some correct ‘circle’s. Likewise, the publisher’s style guide says that numbers below ten are spelled out, e.g. ‘five’ – but in one paragraph c/e had changed ‘5 minutes’ at the beginning of the paragraph to ‘five minutes’ – and ‘after five minutes’ to ‘after 5 minutes’ at the end of the para.
The first proof we returned had 500 changes, 400+ of which were undoing the copyedit. At least that’s relatively easy in Acrobat – beats red ink and PostIts!
Then Shishoji got past me in that one, which had such massive errors that whole paragraphs and pieces were corrupted, that little thing just got through. With paragraphs screwed, little things like spelling get past you.
Well, we’re going to fix it in this one. Thanks for that note, PJ. I am armed and prepared to fire bullets.
God, Daze, once upon a time we had two colors of ink and no Post-its. And they’d ship me the thing and give me 3 days to round-trip it. Then we went through the phase where they’d run the corrections into the text and do a galley-print with NO marks, on which I was supposed to spot the desecrations in a week. Fortunately I have a good memory of what I wrote.
Struggling mightily to stay on topic: only 22F this morning. But OT: This is not going to turn out well–somebody stole a truck carrying a hospital’s Co-60 source!
That’s right up there with the idiots who stole a van full of Toys For Tots out of a supposedly secure. Never underestimate how crass some people can be!
No, you don’t understand! (Understandable unless one has studied nuclear science.) 😉 Co-60 is a hard gamma-ray emitter, i.e. very high-energy X-rays. That the sort of thing they use to X-ray weldings in steel bridges, the Alyeska Pipeline and the like.
If that lead “pig” gets loose, somebody in Mexico likely to die!
If they knew the Co-60 was in there, they likely stole it *for* the Co-60. (I’m presuming it’s a cube or cylinder of Cobalt radio isotopes. Not healthy to have that nearby unshielded. Not the sort of thing you’d want to get loose unlabelled where most people wouldn’t know it’s dangerous. (I doubt I’d know what it was, other than an obviously machined hunk (OK, cylinder, block) of hard substance. Dark grey?) If they stole the truck for the truck, that’s one thing; for the Co-60, that’s another kettle of don’t-eat-those-fish altogether.
The small Co-60 source we had in college half a century ago for our Nuclear Science class was in a lead “pig”. The base was cylindrical, if memory serves a bit under a foot in diameter and nearly that tall. The “source” was (presumably) a little ways down in a shaft, which gave it a bit of an unfocused “beam” when opened. The top was bullet shaped, hinged, hasped, and locked. It was kept in an unidentified, unremarkable, locked cabinet in a locked, brick walled, windowless room. Inside, a wall of lead bricks was built around it for shielding, which was also built-up again around the pig when it was brought out for the evening’s experiment, the Inverse Square Law. Nobody but the instructor went beyond the pig! And he “reached in” to position the Geiger Counter. And of course we all were wearing dosimeters!
Oh, that’s not good.
I also had a STET, DAMMIT! day….
Oh the lighter side, I’d like to read your c/e’s blog. “I have this author, she uses the most complex language ….” LOL
Heheheh. Uh-huh! :rotfl:
Must chime in on the programming stuff! Like Joe, my degree is BSI in CIS. We had Engineering students who switched to Business. It was not pretty. Different mindsets. Not customer interaction.
They couldn’t handle the business classes.
Interface? Does the customer know how to describe what they want? This has changed, but still an issue and how will it effect everything else?
Old saying: When you make it possible for customers to program in English, you’ll discover they can’t describe what they want in English either. That was the idea behind COBOL, but the most it ever did was give some vague reassurance that the programmers weren’t dabbling in the Black Arts.
A lot of users expect magical results from computers; part of the job is managing those expectations. Some want something they’re used to, even when it’s inappropriate, awkward, or overkill. And some are happiest with the simplest of functions, bless them.
Say what you will about M$’s legion of software failings, they do or did have a reputation for user testing their UI’s.
And if Win 8 is any indication, ignoring the test results. I recently got a banner across my Win 8 system screen asking me to upgrade to 8.1. Interrupted my work and took some time to kill the process that hijacked my computer. “No” was not an option, not to mention “Hell, no!” That Steam is moving to Linux should tell M$ something.