Dr. Frank's What's-it

wow, sounds disastrous. i wonder if kerouac went through that kind of hassle? he claimed that he wouldn't even revise or change his work. he thought that it was in it's best, pure unadulterated form the first time it hit paper. he should have been the stet spokesman.

i have some of my photography on the url listed above.

luke black.

I was copy-edited a couple months ago. I don't know about you, but after I've seen a document about ten thousand times, I really really really don't want to look at it again, even if it is about to be published.

I don't remember that they checked my grammar or spelling (maybe they didn't need to), but they shrank my copy further (this was the major obstacle: the editor thought the paper was too long), missed an egregious typo, and introduced a new one of their own. I really wish I could feel sure someone was checking the math. Then again, we're supposed to be big boys and girls.

Florence King has a book called _Stet, Dammit_.

I must copyedit myself immediately. The title of the book is _Stet, Damnit!_, which raises the question of whether the word is damnit or dammit. I tend toward the latter view. Book for sale here:

https://www.nationalreview.com/store/book_group.asp#stet

Just don't miss the obvious. I once spent days copyediting a national magazine only to find the word "United States of America" spelled wrong in our return address section of the renewal card. Good grief!

Wow. A fellow MTX fan, my mother (a school librarian), and myself were discussing your book the other day, and it was brought up that, were I to pursue an editing career (as my mom thinks I oughta), I'd get to read books like yours before anyone else did. Which, on the one hand, sounds pretty awesome, but on the other, kind of bad for the soul.

Also: I agree with Angie. The superior spelling is and always will be "dammit", dammit.

Dear Kid Somnambulist:

The phrase "my mother and myself" is not correctly used. "Myself" is a reflexive pronoun, and should not be used as a subject pronoun.

Sincerely,
Your cheerful copyeditor.

Don't forget, Kid, that you'll also have to read the worst books in existence before anyone else. E.g., you might have to read tell-all books by washed-up celebrities who insist on writing their books themselves, instead of using ghostwriters. Now *that* would be pain.

Re: Angie- Good point, although I'm kinda impishly morbid when it comes to literary train wrecks, so you never know.

Re: Elizabeth- You're right. Dammit.

I don't suppose I could pass it off as a colloquialism...

"I Want To Hold You, Hand" is my favorite song from the Addams Family soundtrack - even better than that MC Hammer ditty.

"My editor and I did it over the phone, going over the four hundred or so marked-up pages one by one, saying "stet" back and forth to each other."

I've not worked in publishing for about a decade, which doubtless explains this new innovation I've never heard of, of going over a copy-edited book by phone.

Really, I've never heard of it. And, really, it's entirely possibly, so far out of touch as I am, that this has become not weird in the past few years. I guess. I can't see it as something not to wildly denounce, but there I am.

Both copyediting and author responses are pretty much always more rushed than any party, including the third party editor, and the assigning managing editor, and more probably the actual assistant ME assigning, would prefer. But tight turnarounds on the actual day of mailing, or most typically, the author not finishing, have been historically normal.

The phone? I never knew anyone who, In My Day, some years ago, who wouldn't have been fired for that stunt. A copyed who didn't turn it in completed was fired. An author who didn't return the ms in time was, alas, not able to make corrections. And that was that.

I am old, tired, and out of touch, clearly. But I'm not convinced that the ways I knew were worse than, sheesh, trying to correct a ms. over the phone, which is slightly insane and extremely, extremely, stupid. I wouldn't have believed anyone was trying, if you'd not written this.

Did I mention the part about extremely, extremely, stupid?

Garsh, in the Old Days Of Publishing, we used to work with "writing," as we quaintly called it.

(Not to mention "proofing," which is equally unlikely to prove satisfactory if one tries to put it through a voice pipe.)

Angie Schultz says: "I was copy-edited a couple months ago. I don't know about you, but after I've seen a document about ten thousand times, I really really really don't want to look at it again, even if it is about to be published."

And that's exactly why a written, competent, copyedit needs to be done, and responded to by the writer in, you know, writing. There's no possible way, I suspect, for folks to get it right over the phone. I simply find that almost impossible to believe.

But, hey, if your book comes out, and I can't nail it with various grammar, structural, puntuational, usage, and similar questions, I will be refuted and impressed.

(Not that I'd look to, per se; I even finally, having recently finally achieved a P4 computer, finally -- did I mention "finally"? -- downloaded some Mr.T songs, and they met with my approval, as I'm deadsure you've waited years to hear. More about that some other time.

Copyediting properly, though -- that's important, though not often enough treated as such.