Lov’d I not sleeping more
Starting Thursday morning: 8 hours of work, 4 hours of play (no, not that kind of play), then home for 2+ hours of editing. Then 5 hours of sleep. 10 hours of work, then home for, what, I guess about 3 hours of editing. (Travel time and meals mixed in amongst all those, of course.) Now: time for sleep. In the morning: more editing. Also brunch.
Currently embroiled in that nitpicky-final-edits phase, when author and editor both express puzzlement over each other's linguistic oddities, while both trying to be flexible and to make the story as good as possible while still meeting the deadline.
I like editing, but sometimes I wish I were faster at it, and perhaps a bit less inflexible about certain points. Editing is one of the few places where my certainty in my own rectitude (grammatical and otherwise) really comes through; enough people have told me that I'm good at it that I sometimes get cocky and arrogant and have to remind myself that there are in fact other legitimate ways to phrase things than the way I would do it. (Mostly, this comes through in a certain bewilderment over an author rejecting one of my suggestions. I let drop a pearl of wisdom from my vast reservoir of knowledge (and mixed metaphors); should not all who behold it bow down before me?) "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." —H. G. Wells. But then, Orwell's lovely rules about writing (scroll down almost to the bottom for the six rules), and Chicago's dicta about clarity and style overruling formal correctness. et cetera. My goal is to help writers say what they want to say better; not to impose my own style. I only forget that once in a while.
Um, did I mention that my awakeness could probably be measured in milli-eyeballs along about now? I'm primary-processing. I'd best go to bed before this gets further out of hand.
A couple of similes from Wells, though, first:
[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.
And:
Queen Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men's minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow all over the place haphazardly.
Much like mine tonight. G'night!