Age Ain't Nothin' But a Number
One of my policies as a young editor has been to avoid all contact with my authors until after I'm done with their books. I once met an author before I started working on her manuscript, and as soon as we were introduced, she got all huffy and bent out of shape at the prospect of some twenty-three-year-old kid being put in charge of her great masterpiece of scholarly literature (which, by the way, it decidedly was not). From that inital meeting, it only got worse from there, and she argued with me about every little word I wanted to change, comma I wanted to add, dash I wanted to delete. She thought I was ruining her perfect piece of work (which, it decidedly was not) and refused to believe that I was actually making her book better, i.e., accessible and enjoyable to all the people who don't happen to live inside that very thick skull of hers. Not that I'm bitter...
Anyway, lo the past two years since that debacle, I've preferred to exist to my authors as nothing more than red scribbles on a page, little notes in their email inboxes, and padded envelopes containing their galleys, which I take special care to wrap neatly in brown paper, tie with twine, and top with a nice card telling them how important and/or touching and/or beautiful their book is going to be and what a pleasure it was to work on it. Then, when I finally meet the authors in person, after the finished book is in our hands, I get to just relax and enjoy the looks on their faces as I assure them that yes, the pig-tailed girl in the dirty tennis shoes is indeed the one responsible for all of those sophisticated editorial decisions. (I will admit to having dressed particularly youthful on the day that I met a Stanford professor emeritus with whom I'd worked on a particularly intense collection and critical analysis of some of the densest poetry I've ever come across. The look on his face upon our meeting was priceless, I tell you.)
Right now I'm wrapping up the initial pass of corrections of a really sweet and skillfully told memoir written by a Very Important Person. She has been an absolute delight to work with so far; she has met every deadline I've set and she hasn't objected to any of my changes (and there were a lot: three-quarters of a red pencil's worth!). Clearly, she has tremendous confidence in the work we do, and I think that's mostly due to the fact that she's met our editorial director--a fifty-something woman who's worked for my company for fifteen years and is super smart and competent and a master at making authors feel comfortable leaving their books in her care.
Anyway, the author of this memoir hasn't yet met me, but she loves my work. Last week she sent the following email: "What a tremendous editing job you did! I feel truly blessed to be working with editors like yourself and [your editorial director]. Your kind comments about the book are very encouraging and deeply appreciated." Isn't that nice? Now, I imagine she thinks the person primarily responsible for all that fine work is someone much like our editorial director, that being old(ish) and experienced, etc. I'm sure she has no idea that I'm a twenty-five-year-old punkass with a bad attitude and a collection of plastic toys on my desk that actually get played with.
It is from this point of view that I found the following episode laugh-out-loudable. Last week I sent this author a query because I was confused over her description of encyclopedias that could be bought in grocery stores. She wrote about reading them cover-to-cover when she was about ten years old, when she was still fairly new to the English language, having immigrated from Mexico when she was five. To me, the only encyclopedias I've ever known have been massive tomes--sometimes volumes and volumes of them--that even a ten-year-old Ken Jennings couldn't read cover to cover. Think as-seen-on-tv Encyclopedia Brittanica. "What are these 'grocery store-bought encyclopedias,'" I asked her. "Were they big? How could you have read them cover to cover?"
Her response: "Girl, how old are you?! Selling encyclopedias in the grocery store was very common in the early sixties!"
I was born in 1979. Duh.
I will probably meet this author sometime in the next few months, and I'm already planning my extra-special outfit just for her. The question is, do I go with the kneesocks and lollipop schoolgirl look or the ripped jeans and wifebeater angsty teen look?
Anyone who points out spelling mistakes in this entry shall be smote by the mighty hand of Jove.
Angsty teen! Angsty teen!
so silly. i am only two years older than you, and this may be regional, but i wasn't sure where you were going with that. i remember encyclopedias being sold in kroger. maybe it was winn dixie. not sure... but i remember that. then again, in the south it takes 30 years for anything to reach us.
i vote angsty teen just to really freak her out. and you have to say "like" at least once every sentence.
I enjoyed reading this!
In addition to selling encyclopedias at grocery stores, they also used to carry WHOLE SETS door to door!
I read an entire set of encyclopedias (The Encyclopedia Brittanica in fact) cover to cover the summer of my 12th year... I also moved to the US when I was five, speaking nary a word in English. Maybe it is a Mexican thing?
LOL!! What a great post! (not that they all aren't, but this one really made me smile and think, "If I worked with her, I'd totally wanna hang out with her but think she was too cool to approach, too.") ;)
And I vote ripped jeans/angsty teen look. And maybe a (clp-on) nosering.
Angsty teen! Angsty teen!
I've been talking to a lot of people about this encyclopedia in the stores phenomenon, and apparently, I grew up in a bubble. Not that I'm surprised by that, having lived in SLC, Utah, until I was 22. My guess is that they kept encyclopedias out of the stores because they didn't want the kids to get too ejamacated and then get all uppity and then leave the state and the stranglehold of their religion. I knew a girl in elementary school whose parents actually used white out on the dirty parts of the encyclopedia. Crazy.
At least you didn't ask her if the encyclopedias were on CD-ROM or something!
you know, you either know English or you don't. i know how it is, being young. i sometimes have to act the part of a happy-to-be almost-engaged woman. when the truth is, i'm thinking about taking that step but don't need it to be grown up.
regardless of age, you're either a good editor or you're not, ya know?
what kind of co do you work for? they just edit scripts? how much does that sort of thing run\ for, say, 70,000 word script?
I'd be careful letting blogland know what it is YOU do! There are way too many wannabe writers floating around. (Myself included, but no worries, as I have never actually written anything! HA!) I say go with the schoolgirl look since you like her. Had she been bitchy to you, I would say angsty teen all the way!
Angsty teen with black eyeliner!
definitely angsty teen.
When I was younger and got my first job (at Intel, when no one knew what that was), I was amazed at how willing people were to listen to a youngster like me. I was respected for my brain and people didn't really seem to care how old I was. Of course, all my co-workers saw me face-to-face all the time. No one was 'surprised' by me.