gwyn | Entries tagged with editor problems

Ricardo Tubbs says my subject line to Sonny Crockett in a Miami Vice episode, and my friend and I have been saying it to each other for what, like, 40 years now? It's the perfect retort for when someone is shocked that you know some weird fact.

Anyway, I read a book! You guys are probably thinking so what, big deal, especially those of you who post every Wednesday what books you've read that week. But ever since I went freelance full time, and especially so since my freelance work became 95 percent fiction editing, I have not been able to read for pleasure. It's worse than a busman's holiday, it's just been a mostly joyless experience when I tried to read any books, even nonfiction, just because I cannot turn off the copyeditor and worse, I can't focus on something that isn't work. So much of what I read for work, too, is really terrible garbage writing, which has sapped the pleasure out of the whole experience.

To be honest, I think it first started when my sister died--I found myself really struggling to do anything that required concentration for longer than, say, the course of a magazine article. For a few years, I couldn't write, either, and mostly seemed able to only vid or do something short for Yuletide. My focus was shot. Then the freelance meant my focus was like a laser beam on my projects, which often came in at the same time and I'd find myself editing a bunch of magazine articles or proofing a 128-page issue, editing a huge travel guidebook, and editing a romance book, and I'd be sick with overwork and my hair would be falling out from stress. Freelance is like that, it's the feast or famine thing.

Anyway, a few years ago, I was taking a bit of a break and I read Song of Achilles and The Martian over the course of a couple months, but that was it. I never got back in the habit of being able to switch off work and read again, no matter how many books I bought through my Nook app or at Powell's or whatever. I kept thinking I would buy them, and that would make me feel like I had to read them, but it didn't work.

You just get so tired of fiction when you literally read it for a job. Especially because the really good authors are far and few between, and I'd find myself having the will to live sapped out of me by some of the unadulterated, pure shit I was seeing daily. I don't understand how some of these writers get contracts. It was especially noxious that it spilled over to nonfiction for me, because that was always a refuge when I would get tired of fiction in the past.

A lot of my clients have either stopped publishing, or found someone (usually cheaper) else, or just plain disappeared, and I haven't been in the mood since my diagnosis to chase after new work. I should, don't get me wrong, but I just don't care much these days. So I started thinking to myself, maybe I should give myself a nonfiction book to read, just as a treat. I'd watched John Oliver's episode of Hot Ones and he had so wildly, enthusiastically recced a book called Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, that I went looking for it at the library, because I love him and I figured it'd be a safe bet to be good. I was like one thousandth in line but it eventually came up, right in time for the Hulu limited series of the story to show up.

And you guys, I finished it! I read a whole huge thousand-page book! (In my reading settings, anyway.) Well, about 350 of those pages were end notes, but still! I did it! And I'm now reading a fiction book I bought ages ago, The Golem and the Jinni, although that's definitely slower going and since I don't have a timeline, I'm reading less speedily. (That's my other issue--due to the nature of my work, I'm the slowest reader in the world. It's very hard to turn the dial up and remind myself I don't have to spot every punctuation detail.) Plus I still want to get back to the physical book I took to the Silent Book Group meeting, especially if I go to the meeting next month.

I know it probably seems silly to people who read all the time. I used to--my ex even commented on that, saying "you used to be a voracious reader" and it's true, especially when I was bus commuting to downtown Seattle, when I would read a book or two a week. But when I returned the ebook of Say Nothing, I felt so accomplished! Ridiculous too, but hey.

Current Mood: accomplished

Someone posted to metafilter the other day about the 30th anniversary of Laurie Anderson's Strange Angels album, and I've been listening to it on repeat for a while, being all nostalgic and remembering the fantastic shows I've been to and what an immense talent she is. I never knew that some people considered it too slick and commercial; their loss, I guess, because I thought it was beautiful and I liked that it made her more accessible to people who might not have come to her art otherwise.

I am ecstatic about my Yuletide assignment. I struggled with whether to sign up this year, because I really only wanted one thing that I felt unlikely to get--since I'd forked up and missed nominating some things I wanted otherwise--and really only wanted to write one thing which I felt absolutely certain that I wouldn't get assigned, because only once have I ever really had that happen. I'm usually going "oh god, how do I fulfill this?" and panic spiralling.

It always works out, though, but this year I saw someone's DYA letter and their prompts absolutely sang to me, and I wanted SO BAD to write for them and I just thought, there's no way. I knew some people try to game the system, and I was sort of trying to figure out how I could do that, but in the end, the weird thing is it sort of worked out for me. It's really hard at times, ever since they instituted the "must offer two characters" rule, for me to find two characters to offer, but in some cases, I think my strange two-character choices in fandoms where nearly everyone requesting wanted two other specific characters I didn't feel qualified to write, helped me even without trying to game anything. And choosing fandoms to offer where there were no requests also probably helped me here--because in one case, there was only one request with a couple offers, and in another, no requests at all (a fandom I perpetually love, so I'm sad it likely won't be represented in Yuletide this year).

But man, was it stressful. I just only wanted that fandom to write in, and at first I thought maybe it'd happen, but then at the last minute people kept requesting it! I was constantly refreshing the summary and the letters app, and

minim_calibre and I were texting till things closed at 1 a.m. here. So I was beyond thrilled when I got my assignment and it was the thing I wanted. The stars rarely align for me.

Now I just have to write the birthday-time fic for this year with enough time that I can fit in writing a longer story, otherwise it only gives me about 12 days for writing and I think this story might be a slow burn. I hope. I just also hope I don't get too much rush work in, which has been a problem lately. Rush jobs are so life-consuming.

My rush jobs have been weird, too. One was a book about insomnia, from a sleep specialist here in Seattle, and I'd never seen references and citations formatted the way these were. After poking through my books, I found out it was a legit style and asked on my copyediting email list, but I waaay underbid because I hadn't looked super closely at the bibliography and she needed the estimate asap, so there was no way I was going to track down every reference and fix it to Chicago style. Especially since it was just a proofread. Fortunately, since it was a reprint, the manager decided to leave it alone and just note it on the style sheet. But you learn something new every day, and even though I almost never do books with references/bibs, at least now I know how to recognize this style.

Then another one was a design-heavy journal with tooonns of swear words. That was actually fun, to read something where someone swears more than I do. A lot of the books I edit lately, especially romance, are so sanitized and marketed toward the middle-America audience of pearl-clutching ladies, and at times it wears on me, the bizarre substitutes they come up with for even mild swear words like dammit. But it's been nice to step outside of this box for a while; this production manager has also given me some great mainstream women's fiction that isn't romance, and that's been very nice.

We had some pretty disappointing and upsetting results in our elections yesterday; Amazon money being funneled into electing conservatives and shooting down affirmative action, etc. It's really depressing. There's a cult around this right-wing asshole who creates these awful ballot measures all the time, and they came out in force yesterday. My district choice is currently ahead in the city council race, but I am worried, especially because her opponent appeals to all the men with hate-boners for all the women on the council. I don't always love the council, some of their legislation is enraging, but overall, the incumbent is a way better choice.

I've been taking a Drawing for Absolute Beginners class for the past few weeks with a friend from the local slash gang, and I am just as terrible at drawing as I thought I'd be. I'm not gonna lie, I'm really discouraged. I see my friends who go out with Urban Sketchers and I will never be able to do that. I know, I know...practice, blah blah. But I just don't see that way. My whole work is about finding small details, corrections, and seeing negative spaces and stuff just doesn't work for me. I can't seem to judge widths and lengths, everything comes out distorted and wrong. We're probably going to take more of this guy's classes, but I'm not hopeful, based on my performance in this.

I guess that's all the news!

Current Music: Babydoll - Laurie Anderson

Someone pointed out to me that the first week of September was after Labor Day weekend in the States, so it'd be better to wait to start the Justified rewatch on September 10--so this is your one week and one day alert that we'll do the Justified pilot episode, "Fire in the Hole," on September 10! You can stream all six seasons in the US on Amazon Prime if you have that, as well as purchase on Apple and YouTube, and can find all of them on DVD. I'm sure they also probably exist on torrent sites, and if you know of outside-the-US sources for streaming, please let me know.

(I'd love to add a photo from an episode each week, but I don't want to DL them to my extremely limited storage here, except that whenever I've linked to photos they come in on DW as enormous and I've never seen a way to resize them for my postings. Does anyone know how to do that, if it's even possible here?)

Other, non-Justified stuff: I've had lots of back to back work, which is unusual for summer. It's been nice because I've had a chance to work on some non-romances for a change, so been able to take a break from some of the tropes and cliches I dislike so intensely. But everything really needs good editing at a higher level than I'm doing, and I'm working way harder than what I'm being paid for because of that. I really miss the days when book editors edited, so the copyeditors or even proofreaders weren't expected to pick up such challenging slack that they really shouldn't be doing. I'll be interested to see how both of these more lit-fic type books do, though.

I've managed to watch a lot of stuff, though, in between--caught up on this season of GLOW, which based on Netflix's ridiculous business model may well be its last, and I'm preemptively sad about that. I haaaate the men on the show (well, a couple of them, not all of them are bad) and every moment taken up by Bash or Sam that could have been spent on someone like Carmen makes me actively resentful, but I'm still really loving the show, mostly, and I don't want it to go away. I want to know what happens with Debbie and the TV station, and whether Ruth will realize that directing would be a good fit for her, since that's what she does with GLOW all the time anyway. I desperately want Carmen back, because I love her so much. I wish the whole show was about her, sometimes, but I also love Tamme and Cherry and seeing Sheila come into her own as a person. Geena Davis was a great addition to this season.

I finished Travelers, which I didn't like as much as many of my friends did, but I love me some time travel, even if I can't ever write that sort of thing, and it will surprise no one who knows me that my favorite episode was the sort of time-loopy one, where the traveler kept getting rebooted into the parachutist to try to stop the massacre of the main Traveler team. The ending was tough, again because Netflix won't keep shows long enough, so I sort of felt like "wait, that's it?" A lot of people, apparently, thought it ended on a good spot, but not me. I'd have happily watched another season to wrap things up more--but if you enjoy Canadian actor bingo, you will love this show.

Red Sea Diving Resort is terrible (well okay, not terrible but not great either), but it's terrible in the specific way that I will still consume it like my cat with his 'nip addiction. It has lots of hot people, notably Chris Evans, and more notably long-haired, bearded Chris Evans in a wetsuit and little shorts and even briefly nothing at all, so they had me at hello. It's extremely white savior, even though based on a true story, and I kept grinding my teeth over the fact that I don't think many of the cast are Jewish and would it have killed them to cast at least a few of the damn roles with actual Jewish actors playing heroic Jews. Don't get me wrong, there are great actors, like Alessandro Nivola and Michael K. Williams, but yeah, problematic. And yet, sadly, I would probably watch this bad movie again just because it presses so many of my shallow buttons.

You know what does not hold up well? Adventures in Babysitting. I used to loooove that movie, and rewatched it a few weeks ago, and oh my god, it was so painful. The misogyny and racism are kinda horrifying (of course the white kids in the black blues club win everyone over right away with their spunkiness and talent!), especially the Playboy centerfold bullshit, and the view of life outside white suburbia is objectively terrible. But at least now I think I know where my intense hatred of Bradley Whitford comes from--I had completely forgotten that that was the first time I'd probably ever seen his awful backpfeifengesicht as the terrible boyfriend and it left a lifelong negative impression on me. (I have rarely been so satisfied in a movie as when Nicole Kidman beats the living shit out of him in Destroyer--it was so id-fulfilling.) Sorry, I know a bunch of you guys worship him, but I have never been able to stand him and now I know why! So, hey, at least you're good for something, AiB, as well as the big laugh I always get at seeing blond Vincent D'Onofrio as the Thor type guy!

I also rewatched The Good Place because I've been listening to The Good Place the Podcast with Marc Evan Jackson, and it made me want to see everything again. I never used to be able to listen to podcasts, because I hate disembodied voices and would always punch buttons in the car whenever people started talking, but I listened to the outstanding Chernobyl series podcast and it made me want to try this one. Marc Evan Jackson has the most amazing voice ever, and because they started it after season two had aired, there's a lot of really in-depth discussion with other cast and crew, and of course, Mike Schur. It's so informative, and fun to listen to behind the scenes stuff, and when Season 3 finished, they picked up the slack by talking about stuff like Brooklyn 99 or having Good Place fans like Lin-Manual Miranda come on and "shoot the shirt," as they always say, with Jackson. His voice is like like buttah, I swear. (It's hilarious to hear him try to wrap his head around fannish things like head-canons; I really hope by now someone on twitter or whatever has helped him understand that.) Highly, highly recommended, especially because he ends every cast with a "what's good" question, and people talk about stuff they support or love, and it's really uplifting. (ETA: One thing that came up in the podcasts about Jackson is that he married his vet! How can you not love a guy who loves animals and marries his vet!)

Current Mood: tired

Way back when I had my surgery, I was talking with

killabeez about Justified, and we were considering a rewatch and posting about it thing. But of course, for the past couple years, I've basically kept forgetting to post about it and see if any others would be interested in doing a rewatch with us. I was thinking of doing it the way killa did for the Highlander rewatch: doing a couple episodes at a time, and then starting a discussion post in my DW that people could comment on. Or if people would rather have a dedicated community that they could subscribe/watch, we could do that--I'd love some input on that if you're interested.

All 6 seasons of Justified are available with Amazon Prime in the States, and are also available on DVD, so I imagine they're at libraries. I don't know about countries outside the US, but it was successful enough that I imagine there must be some options out there (and if you know of some, let me know!). I think there were 13 episodes per season, so it shouldn't be a super long rewatch if we do two episodes per week, although I could certainly base that on majority input. I definitely don't have a ton of followers, so if you think someone you know might be interested, pass this post info along!

I am struggling with my

intoabar fic, for sure, but it's also hampered by the fact that I've had some pretty egregious work coming in from my music magazine, more egregious than normal. I've told this story to a couple people, but I initially left out the funniest part so I'm going to tell it again, you can't stop me.

So, this magazine I work for is pretty cool, but a lot of work, and unfortunately most of the articles are written by nonwriters--subject matter experts, musicians, fans, gearheads with archaic knowledge. In every issue, I'll get a bunch of articles where the writer clearly never paid any attention in school and has no idea how to/if you should punctuate, how to spell, how to organize thoughts. Starting their articles is clearly beyond them--sometimes I have to really struggle to find whatever point they're trying to make and tease it out in the piece so readers will have some understanding of why they should read it.

I was working on this one article that was actually somewhat decently written, but the author never explained who people were beyond the guy the piece was about, a bass player who was in the King Cole Trio back in the days before Nat "King" Cole went solo (so, late '30s and '40s). And all these people keep popping up in the story, although I have no idea who they are and their presence in the subject's history isn't explained, and we get to a line about George Barnes, and I laugh. I have to go fact-check this, like everything, because I know that George Barnes is canonically in comics the father of one James Buchanan Barnes, but I have no idea who he is in this context. But I keep laughing and working on the article, and then like a paragraph later, there's a mention of a guy named Bucky and how amazingly he could bend notes and whatever.

To myself, I actually blurt out, "Who the hell is Bucky?" because as usual, the name suddenly pops up but there's no mention of who he is. Other than, you know, George Barnes's son in my fandom. Once I finished the article, I sent it to the publisher and asked who Bucky was (turns out that was the nickname of one of the other guys the article seemed to be about) and could they please add some sort of identification for readers who'll be unfamiliar with his work, but I couldn't even make jokes about Marvel because they are completely focused on music geekery and just really don't know anything about my corner of fandom trivia. It was so hard.

(It's also one of those things about being in a historical fandom that makes me seethe, because so few people ever bother to learn anything about the time period they're writing in and things like names or speech patterns, etc. I see this over and over in Cap fanfic, that they're convinced Bucky is a stupid and unusual nickname, and that he's ashamed of it or has "outgrown" it, often as a way to justify using James or something the fan finds more palatable. But Bucky has long been a common nickname, and there are still people with that name--right now there's a couple well known athletes with it, and even a woman editor at a magazine I used to get. It's not all that rare, particularly back then, it's not embarrassing for them, obviously, since they use it, and it's not just a kids' name, ffs. I'm losing so much tooth enamel over the stupidity in this fandom, I swear.)

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Long Hard Times to Come