Caught up!

[susandennis]

I finished the editing. Well, that's not exactly true.  I finished my first run at the editing.   The expert is supposed to send him his comments today and then I'll have to go back in and make the changes he suggests THEN I 'll be finished enough to send it in.  And I even did an edit on another piece destined for website content.  So, now I'm caught up for the time being and feel like I have some time for a little LJ entry.

Editing is such a weird job. So much of it is so subjective.  And the rest of it is just overwhelming.  I don't know how book editors do it.  How do your remember on page 147 how how you handled the same thing on page 4 or even that you had the same situation on page 4.  I do have wonderful magical tools like spell check and grammar check and the Good Fairy of all editors - search and replace.  Doing this job in the age of carbon paper and typewriters must have been excruciating.

In the newspaper world we had glue guns.  You need to redo a graph?  Type it up and glue the new bit over the old.  Plus the glue was kind of a cousin of rubber cement so when you were bored you could make really annoying little rubber BBs to throw at the reporter on the other side of the desk.  Probably they all have cube walls now anyway.

My Mom, this morning, said that she got me my first real editing job. 

My father's father had a rich and fascinating life.  He was born and raised in Germany and was a bit of a bad boy.  He ran away from home, lied about his age and joined the British Navy.  His ships has real sails.  He spoke no English but did manage to get a bad whiff when England broke out in war against Germany.  They were at port somewhere so he jumped ship.  Turns out that 'somewhere' was Galveston, Texas.  He pulled himself together and carved out a career as the only engineer without a college degree working for the Frisco Railroad.

When he retired, he turned his energies to letter writing and he wrote everyone all the time.  I was in college and his letters were always wonderful treats. Plus he sent me carbon copies of his letters to others.  He wrote to Sonny and Cher explaining that while he and my grandmother loved their tv show, Cher needed to be wearing more clothes, please.  My personal favorite was to then Senator Eugene McCarthy during his run for president.  It began "Dear Senator McCarthy,  If you should win (God forbid)..."  He was seriously pissed that he never got an answer to that one.

Anyway...  my Mom suggested that he use his typing fingers to write the story of his life for his grandchildren and he agreed but only if she promised to clean it up before handing it out.  300 pages.  Now my grandfather never lost his German accent and we were very used to his color phraseology. But he always apologized for not speaking American.  

He died relatively soon after finishing it and Mom sent it to me and told me to make it sound American. It was impossible. I tried.  I'd do 10 or so pages and the reread them and realize that I had stripped my grandfather right out of his own story.  So I put the pages back into their box and put them away.

About 10 years later (early 80s), I pulled them out again.  I rented an IBM Executive typewriter (the one that was a bitch to use but had nice proportional spacing) and retyped it all into readable form.  My typing sucked but I didn't change a word.  It took me forever.  But it was so worth it.  When you read it now you can hear my grandfather's voice as clearly as if he was sitting right here. Daddy had it bound into books for each of us and I've always treasured mine. 

I reminded Mom this morning that I failed at that editing job and she allowed as how, I'd had time to learn since then.