Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

I hate editors

I was reading through my copy of the anthology that contains my novella, "Perfection", and realized the guy who edited it changed my style in a couple of places.  Sometimes I deliberately have sentences run on and on for effect...and the little shit took out my commas and broke the sentences up, lowering the emotional impact of the final words.  I hadn't noticed that before during the proofing and haven't read the story in the book, before.  I'm actually pissed off.

I mean, it's still a solid story and builds to what I think is a satisfying conclusion, and most of my points get made, despite the editor's messing with my work, but this is what I get for not double-checking everything anyone ever does in regards to my writing.  I have my style and that is that.  If you don't like it, don't read it...but don't fuckin' mess with it without my permission.  Shit.

But I get this crap from all sides.  My scripts -- everybody wants to change them.  My storyboards -- yeah, let's do this...oh, no, do that, instead...and on and on.  Even when I'm talking to a client on the phone at this job, I'm getting told not to be so forthcoming with the information, to the point where one of my bosses snapped at me that "the client didn't need to know we're doing that" when it was the CLIENT who told me we were.

I'm not making sense and I don't feel like trying to.  I'm a pissy-cat, right now.  Better to go lie on a heating grate and let the warm air soothe my foul mood until the next nap-time, or something.

Snowstorm's coming.  Should be interesting.

UPDATE:

Wimp of a snowstorm, but some nice heavy icing underway.

3 comments:

anivad said...

"Sometimes I deliberately have sentences run on and on for effect...and the little shit took out my commas and broke the sentences up, lowering the emotional impact of the final words."

This exact same thing just happened to me, and the editor in question has so far refused to change it back; what makes it worse is that the new sentences she created aren't even complete sentences, so she's basically turned my painstakingly-crafted super-long run-on sentence into a bunch of grammatically-questionable fragments completely lacking in the original's emotional build-up and impact.

I googled 'i hate editors' and found this old blog entry, so here is some belated commiseration.

anivad said...

"Sometimes I deliberately have sentences run on and on for effect...and the little shit took out my commas and broke the sentences up, lowering the emotional impact of the final words."

This exact same thing just happened to me, and the editor in question has so far refused to change it back; what makes it worse is that the new sentences she created aren't even complete sentences, so she basically turned my painstakingly-crafted super-long run-on sentence into a bunch of grammatically-questionable fragments completely lacking in the original's emotional build-up and impact.

I googled 'i hate editors' and found this old blog entry, so here is some belated commiseration.

JamTheCat said...

I feel for you. It's like they want you to write like they would write and never mind what you want.

Something weird I've noticed, also, is when I'e writing (I use Word for Mac) Word suggests grammar I know is correct needs to be corrected. It's pretty disconcerting.