Did I imply that was all?

gnat on 2002-05-20T19:15:30

Today's todo list:

• Print and post blogging contracts
• Mail out Graphics review
• Finalize royalties for a completed book
• Perl and LWP marketing report
• Tell Sean about Perl and LWP QC1 (Hi, Sean, I'll send you a URL soon :-)
• Ensure Larry hasn't written anything slanderous about me into the perl6 answers
• Edit 200ish pages of blogging book into a single cohesive entity.
• Take kids for an hour or two so that Jenine can sleep.
• SLEEP

TODO lists are so handy. They keep one focused. Did I say focused? I meant to say guilty.

--Nat

---

I am reminded of the words of a great man,

belg4mit on 2002-05-21T00:16:17

"I love deadlines, I love the wooshing noise they make as they go by," Douglas Adams;
Started the "Salmon of Doubt", and it is good.

Best laid plans

gnat on 2002-05-21T08:28:02

Lingering image problems with the Perl and Graphics tech review (!). I'm out of O'Reilly letterhead so I'll have to find someone else in Cambridge to sign and send out the contracts. Sean was expecting printed copy instead of PDFs. I feel like I lost two hours to kids and another three to catching up to email from Friday. One of the blogging authors had Word die and didn't get his text to me. Oh, and it's 2:21 AM and I'm only up to Chapter 5.

On the upside, I'm learning a lot more detail about O'Reilly's style ("command line" is a noun, "command-line" is an adjective, "commandline" is verboten); "Enter key" not "Enter/Return" or "Return"; and so on). This is good because I will end up doing a lot of the copyedit myself for this book, so I need to be hip to it.

It's amazing how much becomes second nature. It's like when you get "its" vs "it's" worked out and suddenly realize that most of the people around you are getting it wildly wrong EVERY DAY. (I saw a fake subtitle in South Park with "it's" instead of "its" last night). Now continue and absorb the rest of the Chicago Manual of Style and you have a copyeditor. Aiee!

--Nat

Copyediting and second nature

yudel on 2002-05-21T22:14:11

Here's my personal "horror" story about copy-editing becoming second nature:

I once was responsible for writing headlines for a weekly newspaper. Monday night I would take the train home with a stack of stories; Tuesday morning I was expected to have headlines for them all. Our heds were either 51 characters by one line (deck), or 2 x 28.

Here's the scary thing: After a month, I started to think in 51 and 2x28 character phrases. It was a sobering lesson about the power of the human mind to acclimate to thinking in the strangest ways.