Areas of Unrest

3 August 2001 - Editor-ial

QOTD: "Originality is the art of concealing your sources." - Franklin P. Jones

Reading: Janet Gleeson, The Arcanum

Listening to: New York City Global Beat of the Boroughs

As I predicted, there were more travel changes come Monday morning. The meeting on the 14th moved to the 22nd and, just to make it more complicated, the meeting on the 23rd moved from Sunnyvale to Boulder. The latter completely confused my poor overburdened secretary, but it's straightened out now. I don't even want to think about the hell that September and October are going to be, with the prospect of spending pretty much all my time in Boulder. At any rate, I've figured out that I have about 3 actual days in the office this month during which to get work done.

The constant cycle of change has prompted me to come up with a proposed law for meeting scheduling. If a meeting is scheduled N days in advance, then N/2 days notice is required for a change. I know that nobody cares about my opinion, but I enjoy my "if I ruled the universe" proclamations. I also spent a lot of time I didn't really have designing a sort of Rube Goldberg-esque process for scheduling meetings. It includes things like a golf ball striking a specially designed lamp, which turns on to summon trained moths. I need the right graphic of calendar pages flying around in a breeze to complete the cartoon before I send it out to the rest of my group.

In between that, I reviewed documents and bemoaned the effects of word processing on editing. Humans used to read and correct documents. Nowadays, people rely too heavily on spelling and grammar checkers. They are fine for what they are, but spell checkers won't catch it if you write "there" for "their" and so on. I usually don't comment on these problems, but one document had some sentences which were so awkward that I felt compelled to suggest changes on grammatical grounds alone.

Anyway, it hasn't been all work. I've been making progress on household odds and ends, though it will still take a lot of work before things are presentable here. I made a lot of assorted personal travel plans, leading me to speculate on why hotel web sites usually only let you see "all available rates" after you already click on "best available rate." Particularly since the "best available rate" was not actually the lowest rate they had, prompting me to speculate about for whom it was best. Wednesday night was storytelling in Long Beach. We met at the Nature Center, instead of the library, which makes for a nice atmosphere. Unfortunately, there were a lot of youngish children, prompting everyone to make quick mental reviews of their repertoires to find anything suitable for the crowd. I told "The Neglected Princess," which went over the heads of the younger kids, but was a big hit with the parents. We barely filled 40 minutes and needed fillers, so I taught the origami frog. It was still pretty dreary. We should really have advertised something like ages 10 and up.

I also wanted to mention how annoying it is that authors can ply their success to get earlier works back in print. I refer to Laurell K. Hamilton's Nightseer as an example. I like Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series a lot. Anita is kind of an R-rated Buffy and the series is witty and original. (And has great sex scenes, but that's another matter.) This book, however, was entirely unoriginal. Standard sword and sorcery fare, of the sort where the author thinks that making up elvish names can substitute for a plot. It could probably make a decent computer game.

I don't mean to pick on Hamilton, specifically. Her publishers knew that her name would sell the book, no matter how dreadful it is. This sort of thing seems to happen all the time with genre fiction and is rarely a good idea. One exception I can think of is Kathleen Taylor, who had the sense to realize that the first two (previously unsold) Tory Bauer mysteries needed some rewriting to match the quality of the ones that had made it. But a lot of authors don't seem to realize the need for revision and it appears that editorial standards have vanished from many publishers. (There's a good example in one of the Anita Blake books, actually. At the end of one chapter, Anita totals her car. In the next chapter, she gets in her car and drives to a job. Any competent editor would have noticed this. Particularly since the next next chapter has Anita renting a car until she can replace the wrecked one.)

Word processing is nice and I don't really want to go back to the days of handing my scrawls to a secretary to type or doing my own hunting and pecking. But please please please have intelligent people read through anything you want people to take seriously.

Before somebody asks, I don't really take this journal seriously, but I do try to do a modicum of proof-reading. Anyway, without computers, you would have to come over here to hear my rants, which means I'd really have to clean the living room. Hmmm, not such a bad thing, perhaps. Just bring me chocolate or good micro-brewed beer or Schweppes Bitter Lemon and I'll rant all you want. Call first, since I'm traveling a lot over the next few months.