tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 07 23:51:35 1994

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apology

charghwI'vo' GuidovaD:

Since I was enough of a jerk to broadcast my discontent with my
experience thus far trying to edit Guido's Hamlet, I should go
at least as far to broadcast my apology. One does not need to
be 17 to have hormonal problems...

Causative factors in my response:

1. Certain aspects of my current life have left me feeling
discontent to the point of wrestling with a global sense of
mysanthropy. Leaving work day before yesterday, I could have
used a good Uzzi... I'm having to face the fact that while for
nearly 40 years, I've been a very patient, kind, nice person,
now I go through spells of being very short tempered and nasty.
I fear I am becoming a mean old man before my time.

2. My experience with authoring professionally has been a book
(The Guitar Owner's Manual - How to Buy, Maintain and Repair an
Acoustic Guitar, published by John Muir Publications in Sante
Fe, 1982) and a magazine article published in Guitar Magazine
resulting from that book. For the book, the editor modified
more than half the sentences in the manuscript. About half the
time, his changes neither improved nor worsened anything. They
just made the text DIFFERENT. About a quarter of the time, he
made improvements. The remaining quarter of the time, his
changes were definitely worse than the original. He would
replace my runon sentences with his incomplete ones by
arbitrarily placing periods in front of words like "and" or
"but". I hated the hassle he caused me, essentially making me
write the book twice, since I had to accept, reject or modify
each of his edits, and then, without my review, he was written
into my dedication statement for the book, and you can believe
that I in no way dedicated the book to HIM.

Oh, and I should mention that he decided to drop half the
manuscript, deleting about three months of work. It was also
supposed to have a section on how to play, but that was
abandoned.

The magazine article was worked over by two editors (one at my
publisher and the other at the magazine). I was not allowed to
review it before publication. I could neither recognize nor
understand the article as it was published. I swore I would
never write under those conditions again.

3. When I sent Guido my first small list of suggested edits, I
tried to be less of an obsticle for him than my editors have
been for me. While a later message tells me that he apparently
has adopted a couple of my suggestions based upon grammatical
considerations, the message that I initially got from him
contained nothing that I recognized at the time as an accepted
edit. Instead, I thought that it consisted completely of
explanations as to why he could not accept each of my
suggestions.

Among the explanations was one in which he said that he thought
that my suggestion was better than what he had written, but
that he would never be able to look at the finished work
without that change glaring at him because it was clearly not
his writing. That was the trigger for me.

While I know that the process of translating is far more
tedious than the process of reviewing and editing, the latter
is still a chore best done slowly, meticulously, with both
skill and dedication. It is not quick or easy.

I felt like that if my best efforts were to be ignored because
they were not his, then it seemed like there was little sense
spending that much dedicated time and effort at the editing
process. Add in that I felt like I had already been
significantly less demanding as an editor than I've already
been treated, myself, and toss in my mood of general
mysanthropy, and, well, I lost it.

Instead of getting back to him personally and awaiting his
response, trying to work it out with him, I sent him a response
personally and then, while answering Nick's post, broadcast my
complaint to the entire list.

That was not reasonable. I hope that it might be considered out
of character for me, though evidence is mounting that perhaps
this may simply be my new personality. I sincerely hope not. I
like the person I was before all this mess.

Anyway, I do intend to get back to the task and work things out
with Guido on just how much I should be trying to accomplish in
going over his work. While I hope that I can do service to the
group in this, I'm less sure now that I'm the best choice for
this task. My strength is in recasting. That's how I solve
problems. It seems that the editor's role here is to avoid any
recasting and just stick to checking grammar, spelling and
punctuation. I neither like this role, nor do I suspect I'm
very good at it, since these are the kinds of errors I still
make, myself, perhaps more often than Guido.

charghwI'

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