In the land of the blind...

So, I've been on hiatus, but I think the hiatus is going to end soon, mainly because I'm getting kind of bored. (And yesterday the hiatus consisted entirely of barfing, thanks to something I caught cleaning my niece's barf out of my car. Childcare is always a joy.) I actually interrupted a home-improvement project back in January when I started all this, so I'm going to make myself actually finish it (or, you know, most of it) instead of interrupting it again.

In the meantime, I've been proofreading the better part of a novel for someone in the writers' group--his response to my being nit-picky with the chapters I read for group was to be delighted and want more. So you can chalk that up to his masochism, or you can chalk it up to what I personally consider one of the harder parts of being an indie author--the lack of contact with editors, copy editors, and the like. I mean, when you write for a publication as a staffer, you literally sit in the same room as your editor, so you always have that guidance and support (at least you do if your editor is any good). Even as a freelancer you get a lot of guidance and feedback, but nowadays in book publishing it seems that all editors get to do is to say "yea" or "nay," and in many cases they don't even get to do that--the marketing department does.

The irony is, I don't consider myself a good proofreader/copy editor. At my first job in publishing, I was actually skipped over the copy editing job: Typically the promotion trajectory was editorial assistant -> copy editor -> assistant editor (unless you were such a superior copy editor that you'd stay in that department), but I just went editorial assistant -> assistant editor. I'm sure some of my co-workers thought that was meant as a big compliment, but I regarded it as recognition that 1. I can't spell 2. I was never taught any grammar in school and had to learn it on the job (that job, in fact), and 3. I used regional colloquialisms like "made hash" without any notion that they were not standard English.

Many years later, when I was in journalism school, I was proofing a student publication, and one of the journalism professors said, "OK, we've got our ringer." So at that point, I was clearly better proofreader, but I was also being compared to other journalism students and not to professional copy editors. The personality attributes that make someone a good journalist (think: Foxes. Hyperactive foxes) are pretty much the opposite of the personality attributes that make someone a good copy editor (HEDGEHOGS). And copy editing is just taken much more seriously in the publishing world--a newspaper will throw a reporter onto the copy editing desk when they get too old to run around like a hyperactive fox, regardless of the person's suitability for the job.

Now, of course, I'm dealing with writers in a writers' group that is not based in NYC, and the members of that group pretty much all make a living in non-writing fields, so now I guess my copy editing skills are quite exceptional. And when I mentioned that I laid out Trang by myself, one of the group organizers immediately asked if they could pay me to lead a seminar on layouts. I laughed, and she said, "No, I'm serious." I said I'd do it, but they don't have to pay me. I mean, for God's sake, I never was remotely an art person! But I suppose in a way that's an advantage: A real designer would tell you to buy Quark XPress already--it takes an amateur to do a book layout in frickin' Word.