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Death by DeadlinesApril 06, 2009 It's over. It's finally over. The goddamn month of March (extended) is over. Officially over. It officially ended when I delivered the second half of a Job from Hell to the Vineyard Haven post office in time for the Express Mail deadline. By the skin of my teeth, I must add; the UPS overnight deadline was already gone. Months where 90% of my attention is devoted to work almost aren't worth living. Copyediting isn't a bad way to make a living, but it isn't much of a life no matter how interesting the jobs are. When making a living gets in the way of your life, you're in trouble. So toward the end of February I was feeling broke. I'm always feeling broke, but these particular broke feelings were exacerbated by the strong hunch that I wasn't going to make my fourth quarterly estimated tax payment (big clue: I managed to pay the third around the time the fourth was due). And I'd just learned that Uhura Mazda needed an exhaust system transplant. So I was offered a big job with a rush rate, and it was about the Bauhaus, about which I have some interest and not much knowledge. Being an architect's daughter, I knew who Walter Gropius was when most of my peers did not. My father was a student of architecture at Harvard when Gropius was teaching there. Oh yeah, and I also grew up on Tom Lehrer's song about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel:
I just typed all that from memory. Even if some of the words are wrong, isn't that scary? And it's nowhere close to my favorite Tom Lehrer song. Anyway, I took the job. A few days later, and well before the Bauhaus book actually arrived, I was offered a job copyediting a book on contemporary Palestinian politics, since the death of Yasser Arafat. How could I say no? How could I say yes? When I'd committed to this Bauhaus job, which was close to 900 pages long and (reading between the lines of the production editor's description) a mess? Well, the Bauhaus job was a rush, with a rush rate, but it was also delayed, and the Palestinian politics job was less than 350 pages and ready to go . . . Road to hell, good intentions, etc., etc. Well, truth to tell, my intentions were marginal at best. To steal a Christine Lavin line, "What was I thinking?" The Palestinian politics manuscript wasn't in bad shape, but the author did tend to assume that his readers would know the chronology and the players as well as he did. The Bauhaus job turned out to be one of the most demoralizing jobs I've ever worked on. It wandered, it meandered, it went on and on and on. It read like a very early draft, where the author is still getting the hang of what he's writing about. Bad, bad sign, especially since the production editor (PE) had warned me to watch out for discontinuities because much cutting had already been done. The ms. had big structural problems, about which I could do nothing, and these, like the interminable meandering, followed directly from the book's fatal flaw: the author didn't seem to have an objective in mind. Unless you know what you're trying to accomplish, it's pretty much impossible to decide what belongs and what doesn't, what's relevant to the story and what isn't. As March wore on, I was more and more certain that there was no way in hell I could get both jobs done on time. (Editing is not the kind of thing I can do eight to ten hours a day for more than about three days in a row. That would be true even if I didn't have a horse and a dog to look after.) For a while there I didn't believe I could get either job done on time, then I got a grip: Focus, girl. Focus focus focus. The short version is that the Palestine politics ms. met its deadline. I kept the PE apprised of progress and frustration on the Bauhaus beat, so she wasn't all that surprised that it was going to be late. I got the first half in the day after the original deadline and the rest left Martha's Vineyard via Express Mail this afternoon. A moderate dose of desperation really does help you focus, and jettison whatever baggage is slowing you down. Among the things I tossed overboard with the Bauhaus job were my copyeditorial standards. My sober, rational self knows that you really can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or, in this case, a big hulking pig carcass, and that if I really wanted to make that deadline I couldn't fix every infelicitous sentence or check every name and date. Upstream from this job both banks were littered with cast-off standards; who was going to notice mine? Other than me, of course, and even I'm not all that bothered. Look at the gaffes I caught and the confusions I cleared up! If anyone looks at this miserable book and asks, "Where was the copyeditor?" I'm gonna let him have it with both barrels. Where was the author? Where was the editor? Where was the publisher? Ninety percent of the time I manage to avoid jobs like this by working for decent publishers. This publisher does mostly excellent work. I've worked on many wonderful books for them over the years, books that have given me a lot more back than just a check from Accounts Payable. Some convergences, however, aren't harmonic. Dreck happens. For a freelancer, dreck also passes, and pretty quickly too. By the time the check shows up in my p.o. box, the job will be a very dim memory. Why am I suddenly thinking of the three yellow rubber gloves that my dog has eaten, and the unpopped corn that passed uneventfully if undigested through his digestive system only last week? I'm grateful that nothing got stuck en route, and I shudder to imagine a life where making a living involves an endless succession of dreck and cast-off standards. An awful lot of people are living those lives. Without alcohol or drugs or depression how would they get through their days?
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