To Hell and Back in 24 Hours

Received manuscript to edit.

First-time author.

Rife with problems. Unpublishable in my opinion.

Extreme angst. What to do?

Many emails and phone calls with publisher and managing editor.

Convinced them to hold or kill it.

Euphoria.

Managing editor: "I'll send you a 'pretty' manuscript."

Received it. It's ugly.

Nearly 2,000 end notes to deal with, among other issues.

Locked balcony door. Ten floors to ground level.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Part II

Yesterday I completed my edit of a particularly difficult manuscript (see 5/26 entry).

It pretty much took all the editing out of me, and I have struggled today to do any online article editing—my second gig along with book editing.

I believe I am suffering from a condition that the American Psychiatric Association needs to include in its DSM: PTESD, or Post-Traumatic-Editing Stress Disorder.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

I should contact the American Psychiatric Association to suggest they add to their DSM a disorder that I've experienced. Anecdotal evidence indicates this disorder is widespread.

The disorder presents itself when I'm working on an especially bad manuscript. When it rears its head, I can edit chapters only in very small segments.

The new entry in the DSM would begin, "WTDATDD: Willing-to-devote-attention-to deficit disorder . . . "

Today's Fantasy

Dear Stupid, Lazy Sonofabitch Author:

In your nearly 700 notes (which you submitted as footnotes rather than endnotes per our submission guidelines), you failed to enclose within quotation marks a single report title.

There must be close to a hundred of them. In addition, you failed to italicize perhaps twenty or so book titles.

Also, you evidently couldn't make up your addled brain regarding the military vs. civilian treatment of how to structure a specific date.

Finally, your clearly schizoid approach to hyphenation and capitalization would seem to indicate an immediate need for treatment.

In closing, I can only say that all of the above, and so much more, perfectly represents the focus of your book: the fight against terrorism. For this editorial effort, I am the good guy and you are the terrorist.

Forever disrespectfully yours,

One bad turn deserves another.

When I edit a manuscript, I normally turn off Track Changes when I do HTML-coding and formatting, and clean up the author's junk that is not related to content. I do this as a favor of sorts to make the author's review easier.

Those days are over. The manuscript I'm working on never should have been accepted in its current form, which is filled with more violations of submission guidelines than almost any I've seen.

Track Changes has been on from the moment I started this project and will never be turned off.

I'm going to fill this author's (and any of his kind in the future) world with every single change I make. His right margins will runneth over with the evidence of how much I had to do to bring his work to publication.

My Own Private Guantánamo

When an author submits a manuscript to a publisher, he is supposed to adhere to the publisher's submission guidelines.

For example, one area of those guidelines pertains to chapter notes. My publisher requests that all chapter notes be compiled in a separate file (which is placed at the end of the book), and thus the number signals in the text would not link directly to their respective notes. (Linking means that, during the editing process, when you place your cursor over the number, the note text pops up. This enables the editor to see if the note matches the respective text and can only work if there are footnotes.)

The manuscript I'm working on has footnotes and, therefore, linked numbers in the text. I can only guess why the acquisition editor in this case accepted the manuscript as submitted, in blatant violation of the guidelines. Most likely, it is related to the intense pressure that traditional publishers (and acquisition editors) are under as they compete with the emerging digital publishing industry.

What I do know, however, is that the mechanics involved (and the time required) to transform more than 600 footnotes with linked numbers into a new file, and replace linked numbers in the text with unlinked numbers are sheer editorial hell. I will spare you the details.

Today will be devoted to completing that task. What comes to mind is how we used to blast rock music as part of PsyOps torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Uh oh, here comes the warden, and I think he's about to crank it up.

If I ruled the world . . .

There would be much greater use of acronyms without the initial spelling out. After all, don't we pretty much know, for example, what NATO, CIA, FBI, and the UN stand for.

First on my Official List of Acronyms would be AQ. In a quick scan of a new editing project, I have already seen: al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, al Qaida, Al Qaida, al-Qaida, and Al-Qaida.

In case you're wondering, the book was written by one author, not a group of them.

Lazy Author Syndrome

I'm working on a manuscript that has 948 endnotes (68 pages long).

There is not a single note that contains the full reference for a work, that is, first and last name of author, complete title of the work, location and name of publisher, date of publication―all of which are included in the bibliography―and page numbers.

So I have to laboriously go back and forth between the notes and bibliography files to copy and paste the missing information.

This is yet another example of a manuscript that the acquisition editor should have returned to the author, for him to complete the notes in order to provide an acceptable piece of work.

When I ran this information past my managing editor, he referred to this author as one who suffers from Lazy Author Syndrome. I told him that we should refer to these authors as Lassies.

The Wall

As I'm wrapping up a book edit on the history of Major League Soccer, a very familiar feeling has crept into my effort. And it's fitting that a sports book has spawned that sensation, one I remember all too well from my personal sports experience.

Back in '83 I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in D.C. Like so many marathoners, I hit "The Wall" at the 20-mile mark and then hung on for the remaining 6.2 miles, somehow conjuring up some adrenaline for a strong finish.

The Wall came 76.3 percent into the marathon. It just occurred to me that I usually hit my book-editing wall at just about the same point.

So I'll keep scrolling through the MS, hit one key after another, and then dig deep within to find the energy for a sprint to the finish line.

Long-distance running and manuscripts into the hundreds of pages: no pain, no gain.

Relativity

Ten days is an eternity when, for example, you're counting down to the start of a vacation or the delivery of a new car.

Ten days go by in a flash as you frantically deal with all that remains to complete the editing of a 400-page manuscript.

One look at what remains on your To Do list in relation to the calendar begs the question, "What have I been doing for the past three weeks?"