If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve just finished reading a whole book in a day and a half. I’m quite glad it rained too much to go out yesterday, although I’d have preferred to spend more than just a couple of hours in the sun this afternoon.

Still, it was an interesting exercise. I can’t reveal the title, and it’s not something I’d have chosen to read, but I was asked to step in and edit it at the last minute. The deadline is two weeks tomorrow, and I only finally got the raw copy yesterday lunchtime, so I wanted to get a good start on it, and at least be familiar with the text before launching into the next week of work.

For the most part it was fairly clean, although some sections did need more editing than others, and here and there I have yellow virtual stickies slapped over the top of more dubious chunks of copy and the bits where the author (who doesn’t know that companies are singular - my pet hate) outright contradicts himself.

They said they were after a ’structural edit’, which means they wanted some of it moving around, and other bits excising altogether. There’s also some rewriting to be done, which I can start on now that I know where it’ll all fit, but I don’t think I’ll get my name on it anywhere. Perhaps I ought to hide some subliminal messages in there, aux kalkaj vortoj en alia lingva so I could flick straight to the relevant page in bookshops and prove to people that it really was me.

Then again, maybe not. It was pretty much guilted into it in the first place and don’t like to think what the consequences would be. I had turned the publisher down, you see, but his reply made me think again:

‘If not, will run hot bath and gently open wrists.’

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.