lying for a living

The Virginia Quarterly Review posts some editorial comments from its pile of rejected submissions: “I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible.”

• The emotional problems of clipping fingernails. Actually the best of his submissions.
• A bawdy limerick? Really?

And yes, these blunt, in-house editorial comments do get transmitted to rejected authors, but “presented in a considerably kinder light.”

“Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?” might become “we encourage you to read a few issues of VQR to get a better sense for the sort of work that we publish.”

(Via Bookninja.)

One tip I give people who are writing chapter one of their first novel: If you find yourself imagining how your jacket photo will look — or, God forbid, if you dress up and pose in front of the mirror practicing your coolest authorial look — it’s a rock-solid sign that you’re getting ahead of yourself.

Now Jessica Schneider takes it a step further, posing for deadly awful author pics so that we don’t have to: Bad Published Writer Photos.

There’s a punchline at the end, too.

A “grammar vigilante” heads to Seattle in his fight to make the USA “a safer place for spelling.”

The Typo Eradication Advancement League.

(Via Wordsmith.)

Don’t want to start a gender fracas here, but Rebecca Solnit rings a bell that chimes with my own experience. “Every woman knows what it’s like to be patronized by a guy who won’t let facts get in the way.”

“So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”

I replied, “Several, actually.”

He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s 7-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”

Or, in my case, “Have any of them been published?”

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”

… Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in.

In my totally subjective experience, men are also the ones who say, “Anybody can write a novel.” And: “Your book — what was it called again? — you want to know how I would have improved it?” Which is the sure lead-in to, “My novel would be about Kilimanjaro and war and existentialism — sort of Hemingway meets Immanuel Kant… but deeper.”

But women don’t get off the hook. They’re the ones who say, “You write violent crime fiction where women die. Is something wrong with you?” And, “Why do you like the idea of murdering other women?” And, “No, seriously, are you emotionally disturbed?”

Go on. Have at me.

(Via Bookslut, who links to the story with this awesome comment: “Last year a man corrected my grammar five minutes after the sex was over. I did not sleep with him ever again.” Damn, that’s standing up for grammar and for yourself. Represent, girl.)

How fast can you type — against competition?

Typeracer.

The fun comes not just from the chance to engage in addictive, pointless competition online, but because you test your skills by typing quotes from books and movies. See if you can recognize the source of each quote as you type, and as you watch your little VW Beetle avatar nudge across the screen toward the finish line. Watch out: typos are the equivalent of spinning off the track and running into a ditch.

UPDATE: Losing by 15 44 words per minute to a competitor named NotSober has dented my pride.

Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere.

A fully revised edition of Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller is about to hit bookstores, “Now with no factual errors.“

“It’s true that I let a few little mistakes go in the first edition,” said Brown. “Factual errors about Biblical history, early Christianity and Judaism, Catholic theology, Egyptian mythology, Mithraism, the origins and language of the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels, the Nicene Council, Emperor Constantine, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, the history and modern organizational structure of Opus Dei, the history of the Vatican, interpretations of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa…”

It goes on. For a long and very funny while.

The new edition will have “absolutely bullet-proof historical detail,” plus “some new characters, more chase sequences, and a completely revised conspiracy.” The publication date is April 31.

(Via Maxine Clark, who I blame for causing me to waste the last hour laughing at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. “5. I’ll just pad this out. ‘Padding: When you run out of ideas, but keep on writing. It’s also something insecure rockstars do to their crotches. The fluff covering the flaccid.’”)

New York magazine fake-profiles fake memoirist Margaret Seltzer.

“You write a memoir these days, and someone’s always trying to outdo you. It’s an arms race. Just when you outrun the tsunami, cradling a baby under each arm, you look back and some joker is surfing on that mother, with a whole bandolier of babies across her chest, and she’s juggling flaming torches and a chainsaw to boot. It’s mad crazy on these streets.”

Author Colson Whitehead also gets a brief audience with raised-by-wolves memoirist Misha DiFonseca, currently writing a prequel “about her time on the run from the Armenian genocide, when she was taken in by ferrets.”

And as hard as I laughed while reading the story, I laughed harder reading the comments.

(Via GalleyCat.)

In a Times essay on crime writing, Jeanette Winterson says she’s gotten over an early prejudice against genre fiction. But she still manages to sound cynical and weary about both writing and life.

Let’s say there are only three endings to any story, discounting happy endings as too Hollywood: Revenge, Tragedy, and Forgiveness. Crime writing feeds our feelings for tragedy and revenge, and we can fool ourselves that there is also such a thing as justice - that the end is just or that justice has been done, or that justice has been avoided, but we know what it is.

Ah, yes — all those Shakespeare comedies and Mozart operas: the endings are just too Hollywood.

Unwords.com.

Invented words, for hard-to-express ideas. Examples:

Sarchasm. (sär’kăz’əm) (n.) The abyss between the creator of witticisms and the intended recipient who does not find the humor in it.

Sassitude. (săs’i-tüd) (n.) A position of the body or manner of carrying oneself in a fashion suggestive of arrogance; cockiness; superiority.

(Thanks to Dan for the link.)

UPDATE: If you have unwords, post them in the comments.

Melanie Gold is a freelance copyeditor, and recently worked on NAL’s U.S. edition of China Lake. She’s been talking about copyediting on her blog, listing her top five reference books and telling what it takes to get a job as a copyeditor.

She sums up her work this way: “[t]he publishing freelancer must love looking for needles in haystacks. That’s essentially the job. To find the typo that everyone else glossed over, to notice when a novel’s character has blond hair on p. 5 and brown hair on p. 105, and to know how a little tweak here and there will make a sentence ping.”

Melanie has generously agreed to answer a few questions for me.

What background (education, etc.) did you need to become a copyeditor/proofreader?

It’s really hard to short-answer that, but this is what I tell people: First, you need to be a “word nerd” and know Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. (If you don’t love words, you’ll be found out quickly!) You need to know the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), the copyeditor’s bible, or possibly the APA (American Psychological Association) style, depending on what areas you’re interested in (commercial, scholarly, educational).

A proofreader also has to know typesetting no-no’s, such as ladders, bad breaks, loose lines, widows, and orphans. (There’s a joke in there somewhere, but darned if I can think of one now.) So a proofreader is essentially cleaning up after everyone else, including the typesetter–but the good news is that usually it’s just fine-tuning at this stage.

Most community colleges offer courses on the basics for not much money. The most important skill you have to have, in my opinion, is a joy for details and wanting to find needles in haystacks. Because if we don’t find the mistakes, a sharp reader will. And our job is to present the author’s work in the best light possible.

Can you define those typesetter’s no-nos?

Ladder — when three hyphens or dashes appear at the ends of three consecutive lines of text.

Widow — when the last line in a paragraph appears alone at the top of a page.

Orphan — when a very short word (like “it”) appears alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph.

These are all no-can-dos because they are thought to be distracting to the reader, though rules may differ from one publishing house to another. For instance, one publisher may not mind a widow if the line takes up more than half of that line’s space on the page. Another publisher may not allow orphans in a hardcover book but will allow them in a paperback.

What’s the best part of your job?

There’s a lot that I love about what I do, but I’d have to say being my own boss is the best part. I say when, I say how much–just like Pretty Woman, minus the pretty.

What do writers do that drives you crazy when you edit a manuscript?

It irks me that some writers think copyeditors are just failed authors who want to sabotage others’ work. It’s true that some copyeditors are writers too, but writing and editing are two very different skills.

On the other hand, it drives me crazy when copyeditors try to make authors feel foolish (by writing things like HUH?! in the margins) when they find mistakes in a manuscript.

Many thanks to Melanie for taking the time to answer my questions. Playing turnaround, she asks me a few questions herself.

For typeface addicts, word nuts, and trivia obsessives.

The Rather Difficult Font Game.