One Editor’s Work Space

What can you find on an editor’s desk? Depends on the editor. Who cares what you can find on an editor’s desk? Other editors, mostly, because we are an inquisitive (nosy) lot. You never know when you might see one editor doing or using something brilliant that would work for you too. After years of adapting myself to inadequate and uncomfortable work spaces, I finally invested in one that works for me. Here it is:

Photo 1. The general work area.

1. Dual monitors on fully adjustable monitor arms. How did I ever live without dual monitors? See below to find out how I use them.
2. Sit/stand desk. Expensive but worth it, because this is where I spend my life. It’s an UPLIFT Desk from the Human Solution, by the way. Love it, love it, love it.
3. Ergonomic keyboard. An absolute must. This one is a Kinesis Freestyle 2, plus the numeric keypad and an accessory kit.
4. Balance-ball seating. I find this much more comfortable—and fun—than a chair. No, I’ve never fallen off, though I’ve come close a few times due to too much bouncing and/or rolling.
5. Laptop stand that I use to hold books. I love this stand because it allows me to keep my style guide—usually Chicago—right at my side. It also has space below to hold my most frequently consulted sources.
6. Hot-beverage center. What office is complete without a Keurig? Coffee in the morning + tea in the afternoon = a happy editor.

Photo 2. The desktop.

1. What’s on the dual monitors? I keep Pandora on all day, usually minimized on the left screen (it’s on screen in the photo). The left screen is also where I view my active document and its style sheet. The right screen is for the editorial letter (always open so I can make notes on it as I’m editing) and my Internet resources. I keep at least three tabs open pretty much all the time: the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, the online Chicago manual, and a search engine.
2. Water.
3. Timer. I set this for 30 minutes, work until it beeps, and stand to stretch and move around a little. The timer reminds me to get up regularly if I’m sitting, and it also helps me track my time. No fancy time-tracking apps here; I just write the time in that notebook the timer is sitting on.
4. Things that make me happy. A Grumpy Cat mug and an electronic screwdriver. If you don’t watch Doctor Who, the screwdriver may not make sense to you, but I keep this little beauty on my desk to help me out in tricky editing situations. Not sure how to untangle a jumble of words that is supposed to be a sentence? Just point the electronic screwdriver at the screen and… Okay, it doesn’t actually do anything, but it’s fun.
5. Coffee and snacks.
6. TARDIS. Also from Doctor Who. Bigger on the inside. When things get rough, I can fantasize about climbing in there and shooting off to some other place and time.

What's on your desk top?

Word Histories: Clues from Clews

Sometimes, just for kicks, I like to browse through dictionaries and other wordy books to see what fun things pop up. There’s always something interesting.

Theseus and the Minotaur.
The hero used a clew to
find his way out of the labyrinth.

Illustration by Vasiliy Voropaev via Adobe Stock.

For example, on a recent dip into The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, I learned that the word clue comes from clew. These two words were once simply different spellings of a word that meant “a ball of yarn or thread.”

Now you may be wondering, as I was, how a ball of yarn morphs into something that helps a clever detective solve a mystery. Remember the story of Theseus and the Minotaur? Here’s the ultra-abridged version: The Greek hero Theseus ventured into the Cretan Labyrinth, unrolling a ball of string (a clew) as he went, slew the horrible Minotaur, and then followed the string to find his way out again. In other words, he used a clew to solve a problem. He also later ditched Princess Ariadne, who came up with the whole clew idea to begin with. Hey, heroes can be jerks too. 

A clew becoming a clue?
Photo by uckyo via Adobe Stock.

Later, the spelling clue came to refer to those bits of information used by detectives. A clew is something used by knitters (although I am a knitter, sort of, and wasn’t familiar with this meaning; I normally refer to my yarn as “that tangled mess at the bottom of my knitting bag”). Clew can also still mean “clue” or “a metal loop on a lower corner of a sail,” proving, as if we didn’t already know, that sometimes English is strange.

5 Phrases Guaranteed to Raise Your Editor’s Blood Pressure

I have high blood pressure. It’s controlled with diet, exercise, medication, and attitude, meaning I try to avoid overloading myself with stress. Unfortunately, sometimes editing is stressful. Wait…that’s not quite right. Editing is a joy. I love editing. When you’re bookin’ along through a manuscript, checking the dictionary, poring over entries in Chicago, updating your style sheet, hitting your keyboard combinations to insert autotext…Oh, yeah. Ever heard of flow? Anyway, the stress in editing doesn’t come from editing; it comes from people.

Before I proceed, I want to state very clearly that most authors and other folks I encounter are a joy to work with. But...

Every once in a while, an editor will run into a client who is demanding, overbearing, and/or just plain rude. There’s even a specific term for this kind of client: pita (“pain in the ass”; not to be confused with the yummy flatbread that goes great with hummus). These clients seem not to understand—or care—that the person on the receiving end of their e-mail is, well, a person. From some of these unfortunate encounters, I have put together the following list of phrases guaranteed to upset an editor’s equilibrium.

1. You left an error on page 97.

Of course this client won’t bother to mention that the rest of the book is perfect…and there is usually a good chance that the “error” is not an error at all.

2. I don’t think you read my book. You just ran some kind of spellcheck on it.

A client actually said this to me in an e-mail once, and it absolutely sent me into orbit. Maybe I should have been more, um, diplomatic, but I severed our working relationship immediately. Some things I just don't put up with.

3. You ruined my masterpiece!

If by “ruined” you mean “corrected the atrocious spelling and put the commas in the correct places,” then yes, I did, thankyouverymuch. Thankfully, I’ve never been on the receiving end of this particular insult.

4. Why did you change X, Y, or Z???!!! I demand that you change it back!

This came from an author who was absolutely outraged that I corrected the improper use of “lie” and “lay” throughout her book. By the way, I did not change it back, but I was very diplomatic in explaining why.

5. You want how much to edit my book? Pretty good money for just reading.

Sigh…For the umpteenmillionth time, editing is not “just reading.” This little comment was especially annoying because it hit my in-box on a beautiful Saturday afternoon when I was stuck in my basement office—working, all the livelong day, after having worked all week and the previous weekend.

If you want to insult and/or anger an editor, try one of these phrases out on him/her. Or, if you would prefer to have a productive working relationship with your editor, try a different approach. There is absolutely nothing wrong with disagreeing with your editor or asking questions about something the editor changed or didn’t change. Just remember: Editors are people too, and some of them already have high blood pressure.

Photo credit: Stock image via Adobe Stock.

Editor Fails Grammar Quiz, Doesn’t Care

Several months ago, I—middle school grammar nerd, lifelong avid reader, editor for over a decade—failed a simple grammar quiz. And I don’t care.

What really happened

Okay, I did not “fail”; instead, I got what you might call an “interesting result.” And it wasn’t a grammar quiz, exactly. It was more of an “Are you a grammar nazi?”* quiz—you know, one of those things you stumble across on Facebook and click on because you think it’ll be an excellent way to waste ten minutes of your life? Yeah, you should just steer clear of those quizzes. Life is too short.

Anyway, the quiz comprised ten or so questions, each of which presented a sentence containing a possible error. The quiz taker’s task was to decide how to fix the sentence, or whether to fix it at all. The possible errors were things like use of ain’t in a sentence. They were things that, in the context of formal prose (e.g., for your dissertation), would be problematic. But in another context (e.g., fiction narrated by a character whose grammar is more, um, casual), they might be fine, and the suggested fixes would be stilted and would suck the author’s voice right out of the piece.

Ten out of ten, I chose “The sentence is fine as is.” The final result said something like this: “Your thoughts about grammar are basically, ‘Whatev’, dude.’”

“Whatev’”?

After a moment’s panic over the future of my editing career, I took stock. I care about grammar. I love grammar. Diagramming sentences on the chalkboard with my eighth-grade English teacher remains one of my fondest memories. I impose strict rules of grammar and usage every day. My attitude toward grammar is hardly “Whatev’.”

An inaccurate representation of an editor at work.

See, the problem with the questions on that little quiz was, there was no context. And editing without consideration of context amounts to nothing more than a thoughtless application of rules that (in my humble opinion) are not necessarily about “right” and “wrong” to begin with. Grammar and usage guidelines exist to ease communication, to smooth the way between writer and reader, to ensure that the meaning of any given sentence is clear. They’re not commandments from on high, and the thoughtful editor’s job is not to impose them arbitrarily. The thoughtful editor considers both the guidelines and the context. My job is not to slash through sentences with a red pen, declaring with each stroke, “The rules say it must be done this way!” My job is to make sure that the author’s intent comes through clearly and the finished piece speaks in the author’s voice. Sometimes I let “wrong” things be because, in their context, they’re not wrong at all.

To the prescriptivists who get all stiff and sniffy over the mere thought of doing such a thing… Hey, like, whatev’, dude.

*Not the actual quiz title. And no, I can’t remember the actual quiz title. As I said, it’s been several months. The Internet has moved on.

Photo credits: Stock images view Adobe Stock.

Authors, Back Up Your Books! Please.

This is the face of a writer whose book files have just gone Poof!
Don't let this happen to you.
Back up your book.
Stock image from Adobe Stock.

The following histrionic announcement is a friendly reminder to authors everywhere:

Back up your book files!

All of them!

In multiple places!

Preferably places where you’ll be able to find them again!

I offer this reminder because, over the years, I have received a disturbing number of e-mails from clients that go something like this:

I just got a new computer and accidentally deleted my book off my old one before I could transfer it.

Or this:

Don’t laugh, but I can’t find any of my book files.

Or this:

My hard drive crashed and I lost my book!

In all cases, the clients contacted me to see if, by some miracle, I had a copy of their book. In all cases, I did not have a copy hanging out on my hard drive. However, I was usually able to help by going into my e-mail archives. (Note to clients: This trick won’t work any longer because when I switched computers last year, I thought I was backing up all of my e-mail from forever ago, but in reality I only backed up two weeks’ worth. Yes, editors have technical screw-ups too.) In one case, I was able to download a pdf file from the client’s self-publisher. I dread the day a client contacts me in desperation to find a copy of their book and I can’t help. That book, all that work, will just be gone. Poof.

On the one hand, on the other hand

As a rather ordinary human person, I can see how files get lost. You always meant to back stuff up to the cloud or an external hard drive or something, but you just never got around to it. Stuff happens. I get it.

But, as an author myself, I cannot imagine not keeping backups of my books. When I’m working on a new book, I back everything up to a thumb drive every time I make changes. I back up every file on my computer to an external hard drive once a week. I back up to two places in the cloud every day.

If something happens to the main file on my computer, I want to be able to get to it through another source. I don’t want months of work to just go poof!

(Another note to clients: Yes, it may be possible for me to find a copy of your book from four years ago somewhere among my backups. Just don't expect the search to be free.)

Back up your baby

When it comes to protecting whatever files you have for your book, no one can do it as well as you can. Because no one on this earth loves your book as much as you do. Not your spouse, not your mother, not your editor. You. You, you, you.

Your book is your baby. Back it up. Please.

How to English, According to the Local Television News

Let me begin this brief post by saying that I respect our local television news, and my day feels incomplete if I miss the evening newscast. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I can move on to my main point, which is that you can’t necessarily rely on your local newscast for beautiful—or even correct—use of the English language. Here are two recent examples:

A few weeks ago, our local news sent out this text alert:

No explosives found on woman who threatened Joint Base Andrews. Situation diffused.

Can you hear me sighing? If not, I can do it louder. Because the situation was defused (made “less dangerous, potent, or tense”), not diffused (made “widely perceptible, known, or familiar”). Yes, defuse/diffuse is one of my “things,” just like, you know, spelling stuff right.

More recently, one of the weekend anchors began a sentence like this:

The woman, named twenty-year-old Sue Smith…

I haven’t fact-checked it, but I doubt that the woman’s name was actually “Twenty-Year-Old Sue Smith.” I can tell you that her name was certainly not Sue Smith, because I made that part up to protect good ol’ Twenty-Year-Old’s true identity.

And then there are the dangling modifiers. But I’m not allowed to say anything about those because other people in my household are just sick of hearing about them. Some other time, perhaps.

Stock image by Kakigori Studio via Adobe Stock, with some modifications.

Why Editors Should Always Proofread Their Comments to Authors

This post contains exactly one instance of profanity. If you don’t think you can handle that, please go read something else.

Editing is so much more than correcting spelling and inserting commas. Part of the job involves communicating with authors about changes you’re suggesting or questions you have, and that means writing effective comments and queries.

Fine…no problem. I enjoy commenting and querying, adding the occasional What if you…? Several clients have told me that my comments are right on target and offer insightful suggestions.

Great. Excellent. Fantastic.

But the most insightful query is just so much poo if it contains misspellings or other unintended things. Editors must take care when querying, because one sure way to turn a client off is to offer crappy or just plain mean comments. With this in mind, I try to be constructive and helpful, even when I’m offering criticism. Instead of writing, “What on earth is this supposed to mean?” when I come across a passage I just cannot decipher, I write, “I’m not quite sure of the intended meaning here. Can you clarify?” Or something like that.

That’s all well and good, but I have a problem: I can’t type worth a darn. I learned to type, more or less, on a manual typewriter back in the eighth grade, more oodles of years ago than I care to mention, and I can muddle my way through most things (with frequent use of the backspace key). Every once in a while, though, my fingers do something my conscious brain did not tell them to do. For example, I’ll think “ephemeral,” and my struggling little fingers will punch out “emphatic.” You get the idea.

Sometimes authors mention names or events or what have you that readers aren’t likely to be familiar with.  When I come across such an item, I usually mean to write, “Perhaps you could explain this a little further.” Every once in a while, though, my sneaky little fingers will type, “Perhaps you could explain shit a little further.”

And that is why editors should always proofread their comments to authors.