• home
• writing
• editing
• Mud
• about
• photo gallery
• the bloggery
• the vineyard
• contact

Return to Archives

Egoboo!

April 08, 2007

This arrived in the mail last week, forwarded by the production editor for my most favorite copyediting job of the last few months:

Dear Copyeditor,

First of all, thank you for a perfect job of copyediting -- precise, sensitive, thorough, and witty. It was just what the manuscript needed. I've stetted a few quirks of punctuation you wanted to eliminate and a few words you queried, but have followed most of your suggestions.

The following paragraphs discuss specifics of the job that fascinated me but will bore you, so I'll jump to the end:

Again, thanks for a superb job.

The letter has occupied pride of place on my fridge for several days now, along with my invite to the Boston Fiction Festival. Both are magnetized held in place by a magnet that says "How come I can't meet a girl like Xena?" and underneath that great photo of Audre Lorde with her words: "When I dare to be powerful -- to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

It's not all that often that someone gets exactly what I'm trying to be as an editor, and just about never do they write it down. "Precise, sensitive, thorough, and witty"! All is not lost! My time is not wasted!

It'll get me through the homestretch of my current job, in which I can't be too precise without making the author (and the book editor) look bad, or thorough without taking another two months -- and how sensitive can you be when you're laying about with a blunt broadsword? As to wit -- what little wit this job has elicited so far is so snide I'd never write it down.

Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact

Copyright © Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved.
web site design and CMI by goffgrafix.com of Martha's Vineyard