cellini's Diaryland Diary

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My Editor is a Fucking Retard

I have fucking had it with my editor. I just want to fucking slap her. At least 60% of these requested edits are retarded idiocy. She has no idea how to edit a book like this. The woman does how-to books and this is a fucking adventure travel narrative.

She's wasting monumental blocks of my time on this shit.

You know what, lady, I get to use colorful metaphors that aren't literally true. Its not a fucking text book. I get to make occasional pop culture references. I get to insert personal style and turns of phrase that aren't exactly the way that you would phrase something. Because this is a narrative and not another book about how to pickle eggplants or massage organic chickens or whatever the fuck you were last editing.

And when I say that being under a particular grove of banyan trees felt like being in a 'great leafy cave', I mean that it felt like being in a big fucking leafy cave. You do not get to insert an edit request saying "Don't you mean a leafy tunnel? This should really say 'tunnel.'"

Because I was fucking there and you weren't and I think I know what it fucking felt like. It was a fucking leafy cave, not a fucking leafy tunnel.

Bitch.

The whole thing is just a barrage of this shit. And she is so schizophrenic about it. Pulling out my citations in some places and then whining that I'm not sourcing more specifically something that I say very clearly is unproven local lore, when the information needs to be in there to understand what is happening.

ITS AN ADVENTURE NARRATIVE, YOU CUNT.

Or questioning me again and again on anatomy issues. Like doubting that the brain in one animal might be situated in the cranium differently from that of another animal. How many fucking heads have you had to shoot from your cubicle? How many skulls have you dissected? Oh right, a big fat zero. You wouldn't know a sinus cavity from a frontal lobe if it bit you on the ass.

And it would be one thing to ask a question like that in casual conversation, but it is literally hundreds if not thousands of them that all need to be addressed in writing. It is the creation of hours upon hours of pointless work for me, responding to the idiotic queries of an editor who doesn't know what she's doing.

I am never giving this publisher another one of these books. I might do another how-to book for them, but all of my travel adventure and ecology stuff is going to another publisher from now on. These people are wasting my time, ruining my book and not even paying me especially well for it.

Right now I'm working on maybe 2 or 3 hours of sleep and it is so depressing thinking about the all-nighter I need to pull and about all of those hours of precious sleep that I will be missing in order to answer questions that never needed to be asked and to refuse edits that should not be made.

9:20 p.m. - 2011-12-04

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