Updates on the Kids

I’m frequently surprised at the things that come out of Lego’s mouth. Today when I got home from work, he informed me, “I got my sleeping bag out, in fact.” In fact? Seriously, where did we get this kid? He’s a veritable verbal sponge. It makes both the linguist and the editor in me proud. And I can’t believe how big he’s getting. It’s weird to think that in just a couple years he’s going to be in school.

Duplo is learning to talk, but he still isn’t saying much yet, and it’s hard to get him to perform on cue. Also, for some reason he thinks “Dad” and “Daddy” refer to him, not me. Whenever I ask him, “Where’s Daddy?” he points to his own chest. It’s okay, though. I forgive him ’cause he’s so stinking cute. And to illustrate his cuteness, here are a couple of pictures.

Here he is learning the fine art of automotive repair. No, son, that’s not how you remove the brake caliper! Use the 18 mm socket!

Aww. What a sweet boy he is.

Updates on Me

I haven’t really been up to a whole lot lately. I’m just working for the summer and will be starting classes again in a few weeks. However, I’ve been pretty busy at work, and I figure here’s a good opportunity for some shameless self-promotion. Two of the books I’ve worked on lately have just been published. I typeset this one and did a fair amount of editing and proofreading on it as well. On this one I designed and typeset the insides and did some revisions on the cover. Check them out.

As you can imagine, this is not the best attitude for an aspiring writer to have. If I spend so much time avoiding writing, when was I ever going to become a writer? Surely novels weren’t going to spring fully formed from my forehead. About the same time, I also realized that most of the ideas bouncing around in my head were highly derivative—they were all not unlike other stories I had read. As you can imagine, this is also problematic for an aspiring writer.

What I was really doing was taking other ideas and tweaking them a bit; in other words, I was editing. The good news is that during my freshman year, I had gotten a job editing for Independent Study, and not only did I love it, but I excelled at it. Here was something that was perfect for me: I was able to work with words and make them better, but I didn’t have to do all that tedious writing-from-scratch stuff.

It wasn’t until I learned about Peircian semiotics, along with its accompanying personality paradigm, that it finally made sense to me. As a purple with green undertones, I love systems. I especially love fixing things to make them more correct and systematic. To me, a well-written story or poem is a beautiful thing, and I love to sit and think about what made it good and what could make it better. But writing something myself? That takes a lot of work, and it doesn’t come very naturally to me.

It’s a lot easier when I’m writing personal stuff like blog entries, because then there’s not so much pressure to be creative—all I really need is an opinion or an event to write about. I’m still not a very prolific blogger, of course, probably because I don’t have a lot of blog-worthy opinions or events in my life (in my opinion).

The problem is that most people see no real difference between writing and editing. Many people—including writers and editors—believe that if you’re good at one, you’re good at the other. To some extent this is true. What is apparently not true, though, is that someone who finds editing to be easy will also find writing to be easy.

Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for a decent editing job for over a year now, and the only jobs anyone ever contacts me about are writing jobs—proposal writing, copy writing, technical writing, it doesn’t matter—and I don’t want those jobs. I don’t like them. I’m not good at them. And I wish there were an easy way to communicate that.

I faced this problem every summer when school ended and my job went to full-time. I enjoy editing and I do very well at it, but editing for forty hours a week makes me want to stab my eyes out sometimes. I realize that work isn’t supposed to be fun, but I think it should still be fulfilling in some way; however, even during those periods of full-time work when I’ve enjoyed my work the most, I’ve felt like a large part of my brain was atrophying.

You see, even though I find a certain amount of pleasure in storing half of The Chicago Manual of Style in my head and pulling it out at will, I find a lot more pleasure in more scholarly or creative pursuits. I used to think it was weird and nerdy when my older brother would come home from his computer tech support job and do calculus to unwind. Then I found myself coming home from my editing job and reading up on Indo-European linguistics to unwind, and suddenly it seemed less weird and nerdy than it had before.

So I think I’ve mostly made up my mind. Now I just need to figure out (1) where I want to go, (2) what exactly I want to pursue, (3) whether I want to get a certificate in something like scholarly publishing just in case I want to go back into editing after all, and (4) how on earth I’m going to pay for the whole ordeal.

Advice is welcome.

Let’s also overlook the fact that it’s not much of an article, weighing in at approximately two pages. It started off as a short paper that I dashed off one day for a writing class after feeling for some time that no one had any idea what my major was. I titled it “I Am Not an English Major” and proceeded to whine about trials of being one of those tortured, misunderstood types. Then I transitioned into a more angsty “What am I going to do with my life?” section and wrapped it up with a moving statement about the joys of being an editor.

So, of course, what’s the first thing I notice about my article? The editing.

I should’ve known there’d be problems. I have very high standards, and I’d been in the program long enough to know that many people who fancy themselves editors are in fact terrible at the job they hope to do for the rest of their lives (see this recent post for more on that).

Fortunately, they sent me their edit of my article so that I could review it before it was published. Unfortunately, they made far more mistakes than they caught, and apparently stetting their changes and citing appropriate references in The Chicago Manual of Style was simply not enough to alert them to the error of their ways. It seems like they made most of my changes (or unchanges, as they were), but they were resolute in their belief that the names of academic fields should be capitalized. Thus “I’m an English language major” became “I’m an English Language major.”

If it had been something petty like a comma or a particular wording, I wouldn’t mind so much. This error, however, simply makes me look stupid. How can I claim to be an editor in the same piece wherein I appear to demonstrate my ignorance of a very basic rule of capitalization?

Ah, well. It’s only a student journal, after all. Hopefully no one will think less of me for it. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that most of the readers won’t even notice the problem at all.

Update: You can read the article here.

• Project management of editorial projects in the fiction, non-fiction, and children’s genres: includes working with authors, contractors, and in-house production personnel on directing rewrites and revisions, editing, source checking, copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, and checking bluelines
• Doing copyediting, proofreading, source checking, and blueline checking for full-time editors
• Doing some editing

So let me get this straight: the job involves project management of projects, editing, copyediting, copyediting, and some editing. Sounds right up my alley.

Hi! I said I would email you if I ever got wind of a job opening here, so now I’m emailing! We (at [blank] Co) are looking for a new Electronic Layout and Pagination person for the Paste Up department. Both [blank] and I work currently in Pagination, and we both graduated from BYU with a degree in English and a minor in Editing.

Sounds like these two stayed home the day they went over capitalization in class. Maybe the problem is that they have one degree and minor between them.

And best of all, from the the student editing association itself:

If you don’t desire to get job announcements from [club], please notify us by replying in the Subject “NO JOBS PLEASE” Thank you, and sorry for any inconvenience these adds may bring to you. [club]

This seriously breaks my heart. And then, when I’m done drying my tears, I start scratching my head; if these are the people that I’m up against, why am I still out of work?