Ain’t Technology Grand

My publisher may be switching to an electronic review of copy-edited manuscripts, and goddamn, am I excited. Currently we do things the old-fashioned way: They mail me a pile of steaming paper with handwritten edits and I stet away with my blue pencil until my wrist aches (bastards dare to edit my glorious prose). Now there’s a possibility that in the future I will get a nice tidy file in my email, and it’s about time. And not only because I can search-and-replace my name in place of the main character.

I love books, the printed, bound wonders that they are. I hate piles of paper, however. I have filing cabinets filled with my old manuscripts, tomes written back in the days before I caved in to word processing, and now I wish I’d caved a long time ago, as those brittle pieces of paper are either going to burn up in a blaze someday or simply bury me in paper, leaving me to tap out desperate sandwich orders on my Twitter account. Someday I intend to spend about 5 years scanning everything down to nifty PDF files, probably just in time for PDF to stop being a universal format and leaving them as useful as my old Commodore 64 Kwik Writer files (which I still have, for reasons I can’t articulate, on ancient 5.25″ floppies).

Forget eBooks and Kindles – this is what technology is going to change. The way we produce and work, not necessarily how we experience completed work. I remain unconvinced that anyone’s going to want to ditch printed books entirely – at least not in significant numbers – but I personally will ditch printed page proofs in a second. Faster, even. Eventually, I want my proofs and copyediting beamed directly into my brain. And then I want that Stephen King Typewriter of the Gods.

8 Comments

  1. Jayf

    Ah, I hear you, so to speak. As a freelance editor/proofreader I encounter publishers that like to work both ways, and I’m constantly shifting back and forth. As time moves along I’m getting more comfortable with online editing where I used to feel more comfortable with pen[cil] in hand.

  2. DK

    Just make sure you put that typewriter to better use than King did. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon fucking sucked.

  3. Damaso

    Dude, get an intern. I am sure you can get some sucker, um, I mean college student, to come and suckle at the teet of your wisdom, and scan in tons of paper.

    In the meantime, how about something like this:
    http://www.amazon.com/ScanJet-Flatbed-Document-L1940A-B1H/dp/B0007O983O

    many scanners now come with auto feeders meaning not only that you don’t need pants, but you can be fairly drunk while you do it…

  4. jsomers

    Damaso,

    Excellent suggestions, except I have an uncanny habit of breaking both interns (several buried in the flower boxes on the deck) and printer-scanners. We’re talking a LOT of paper to scan.

    As for being fairly drunk, I’m well-practiced in doing a lot of things that require coordination while drunk. Like writing blog posts and responding to comments. I got skilz.

  5. jsomers

    DK,

    Didn’t read that one. Always thought it was a bold but failed move to include a real-life sports star like that. In 10 more years, who’s going to remember Flash?

    J

  6. jsomers

    Jay,

    I’m down with the electronic editing. I’ve done quite a bit of it, and it’s soooo much better than piles of paper sitting around rotting.

    J

  7. Melanie

    “I stet away with my blue pencil until my wrist aches.” Hilarious.

    I edited my high school son’s report last week and scratched something by accident. He’s plugging away at the keyboard, sticking periods in the middle of fifty run-on sentences, and all of a sudden hollers: “What is a ‘stet’?”

  8. jsomers

    Ah, how I long for the days of innocence before I took my first editing job and learned what a stet was. And also too all those damn proofreader marks. I have nightmares about those marks.

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