Authors come in a wide variety of flavors. The most common is Artorius generis, of course, who is largely innocuous and mild-mannered; they get back to you, eventually, with answers to most of your questions, and when they override one of your edits, they do so with a modicum of grace (and sometimes even an explanation). They’re just people with jobs to do, and they recognize that you’ve got a job to do, as well; they seem to think, “It’s all good, I guess, but why bother to get excited about any of it?”*
Less common is Artorius angelius, who are responsive, thoughtful in their replies, and a sheer delight to work with because they realize that your job is to make their writing better (admittedly, sometimes for only a given value of “better,” such as making different people’s contributions to a group effort into something within spitting distance of stylistic cohesion). A. angelius can, many times, be recognized by their geek factor: regardless of what their area of specialty is, they instantly light up when you mention it — and if you express an interest in their pet subject, then they practically levitate with joy. They love what they do, they love talking and writing about it, and they will often call you up to chat about their thoughts on your queries, or even extend invitations for you to visit their research facilities if you’re ever in the neighborhood. They often even recognize and acknowledge the amount of work that their editors have put into a chapter — fact checking, math checking, and rewriting so that their words have as direct and immediate an impact as possible. They are darlings, one and all.
Then there is the thankfully rare subspecies Artorius mephitis snippiipantius, who appear to be convinced that their editors are meddling busybodies who exist only to thwart the authors’ brilliant and divinely inspired afflatuses (afflati? what is the correct plural? Merriam-Webster only defines the singular) by daring to touch their sacred words, which were accepted and approved for publication — albeit often by people who haven’t bothered to read the actual text with any level of criticality. They apparently think that editors exist only to run spellcheck, and then ship the files directly to the printer; they also seem to exist in a Bizarro-like world, in which redundancy is in fact merely a bare sufficiency, good chapter-writing and good speechwriting are exactly the same, and any statement of fact can be irrefutably contradicted by a simple incantation of the words, “No, it isn’t.” Any besmirchment of their words, any passing thought that you might not publish them in their virginal and untouched state, and a holy war is declared and all the high muckety-mucks get cc’ed on the flurry of e-mails of outraged virtues; to listen to them, editors are the centaurs, but in comparison to their manuscript’s fate, the Sabine women got off lucky.
Not that we have any of those sort, of course. ::cough cough:: Seriously, almost all of our authors range from “nice enough” to “absolute darlings,” but every single year, there’s at least one set who are just complete and utter hounds from hell. (Please note that, not being above ranting a bit myself, I do not include people who have heart attacks over something but then can be talked down off the ledge and made to see reason; these are people who get it fixed in their mind that editing is sacrilege and forever after will not agree with you if you say that, for instance, spinach is green or soap makes you clean. “What? Soap is the spawn of the devil! It tastes terrible, you can’t cook with it, and lather is Beelzebub’s sputum!”)
Artorius mephitis snippiipantius thankfully makes up only about 1 to 2% of our author base, but they are probably responsible for at least 90% of the insomnia and 95% of the premature aging of our editors.
*** ***
*The answer is that your editor remembers you, particularly if you’ve been a complete sweetheart or a complete stroppy pain in the ass (PITA). Assuming that your editor is not throwing his or her weight around and is willing to work with you, it strongly behooves you to be at least an Artorius generis or better, because you never know when you’ll need reprints sent to you on short notice; or research materials from 1963 located, scanned, OCRed, and e-mailed within a day; or a copy of the CD you worked on comped and overnighted to you because you’re working on a job in the Amazon and a giant snake just swallowed your only copy and you hadn’t installed it on your hard drive because the DRM wouldn’t let you. Nice authors get these things done for them promptly and with a big editorial smile, because we like you; grumpy-pants authors — well, they get the same things done for them, but more slowly, and with a helluva lot less efficiency and smiling. Plus, we’ll send that CD snail mail (bulk class) rather than overnight it.
It’s been a long, long day. Our print deadlines are looming — in fact, we found out today that the files are actually due to the printer and CD compositor a whole week earlier than we’d thought, which I can tell you brought untold amounts of hopping-around joy into our lives. An author who got his proofs today wrote me snippily that he wouldn’t even look at them for another week and a half (why? no reason was given), which would basically mean he wouldn’t respond until after we ship; when asked politely if he could recommend someone else from the group who might answer our queries, he basically said, “Well, yes, I know lots of people who could do it, but we all have lives and can’t be bothered so I’m not going to tell you anything. So there.” (Keep in mind that this guy actually volunteered to review the proofs. It’s things like that that make me want to publish chapters in their completely raw, unchecked, and unedited form, and send all the complaints directly to the authors.)
Seeing Nigel when I finally got home was good, but then on our walk he discovered a rather messily dead squirrel lying on the sidewalk; most of the rest of the walk consisted of me trying not to throw up on someone’s front lawn.
Still, there’s always dinner, right? It was late and I was not feeling up to creativity, so I heated a veggieburger and thought I’d do a summer squash medley to go with it — and use my brand-spanking-new, swanky-as-hell eight-inch (um, roughly 200 mm or thereabouts) chef’s knife that my wonderful parents gave me for my birthday. It’s all pretty and pointy, with a really good balance, and I’d spent the hours I wasn’t working this weekend admiring how well it fit in my hand, and how sharp the edge was in comparison to my aging four-inch paring knives (which had been, except for a cheap but sturdy breadknife, my entire kitchen arsenal of sharp thingies).
And yes, that was foreshadowing. I managed well enough while slicing a crookneck squash and zucchini, though I did get rather overexcited by the fact that this knife is actually big enough to do the whole fancy speed-chopping bit, in which the point stays on the cutting board and you simply rock the blade up and down while scooting the food along. Surprisingly, though, no injuries there. My downfall came when I was washing the knife — as is my custom with my other knives, I ran a finger along the side of the blade to check that the soap was washed off, and stupidly didn’t angle the blade down when I turned it to face me.
On my regular knives, this would have had no effect, because although I sharpen them at home, they haven’t had a professional edge for years.
On this knife, it nearly took off my fingertip.
On the whole, I think I’d rather cut myself than burn myself. I still have very faint pink scars on my hand (same hand — in fact, the same finger) from last year’s Great Mutant Pepper Boiling-Oil Incident. (Almost exactly a year ago — well, plus about two weeks. Same finger, same time of year. Must be something to do with all the pollen in the air, or maybe I’m just more distracted when I’m under deadline.) The oil burns hurt like hell on a jetski for quite a while, and started hurting again every time they were exposed to water for ages after that. At least with the cut, there was basically no pain, just a little twinge. Both incidents involved a lot of swearing, but today the air turned blue because (1) I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, (2) I was getting blood all over the kitchen (at least burns generally don’t ooze, at least not immediately), and (3) Nigel kept thinking that I was holding a treat instead of applying pressure to the cut, so I kept having to put my hands down where he could reach them so he could see I wasn’t trying to tease him by keeping a biscuit just out of his reach.
I think the cleanup afterward is the most annoying part. I did my best, but I know I’ll be finding crusty red droplets in odd places for a week. Bleagh.
