For You, The Stars
Chapter Thirteen: Installment 3
We lay awake talking quietly long into the night. I couldn’t avoid reopening the topic of her repeated rejection and abandonment of me back in school. She apologized. She cried. I cried. She still couldn’t explain it. I tried to give her words, I suggested that maybe she felt too strongly about me, but she didn’t bite. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe,” but she sounded dubious. Somehow we got to talking about other flings and affairs she’d had during that same time. She mentioned one guy, an athlete, whom I knew another friend of mine had slept with once. I told her that other friend had remarked on how muscular he was. “That’s true,” said Maura, chuckling. None of this made me feel any better.
Why had she made such a big deal out of our flirtation, and continuously drawn me in and then backed off, while having a series of hook-ups with other guys. “Those were meaningless,” she said. “It was always just sex, with all those guys,” but this also didn’t satisfy me. “I would have taken some ‘just sex,’ I said. “No problem.
“You should never have made it out to be such a big deal. I know I wasn’t a jock. There were much better looking guys hitting on you, but how hard would it have been to just sleep with me a few times, or even once?” I said. Hearing myself whine like this felt pathetic. I could feel her body stiffen as we lay there spooning. I knew she didn’t take criticism well.
“Why do we have to talk about this anyway?” she said. “All’s well that ends well, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry,” but the spell was broken.
In the morning we had brunch at PJ’s, a seafood restaurant on Irving, another New Orleans influenced place, and then she took off for her friend’s house in Berkeley. She gave me her number there, but I let a few weeks go by without calling, and then I felt kind of sheepish so I waited for her to call me, but she didn’t.
I started moving up at my job. First they promoted me from editorial assistant to assistant editor. There was no pay raise, but I went from being a glorified gopher and filing clerk to a sort of apprentice editor, working mostly on revised and updated editions of classic stroke books. After I had seen a few titles through the process - from updating the library of congress and R.R. Bowker ISBN information to gathering the post-publication proofreading corrections from the production files and getting the updates made, to in one case having a new preface added to one particularly popular book and then making sure that the files and bluelines made it off to the printer on time - I was given another promotion, this time to full-fledge copyeditor, with a tiny bump in pay.
Now I had the opportunity to take a few titles from the acquisition process into production, with the help of a developmental editor. I worked on two different series. The first dealt mainly with naughty schoolboy themes: boarding schools, librarians, teachers, and the occasional stepmother. The other was actually a series of how-to books, somewhat facetious guides to experimental or deviant sexual practices ostensibly written for couples. The former series of titles were called Bad Boy books and the latter were called …For Lovers, as in Menages a Trois …for Lovers or Fantasy Roleplay …for Lovers or Sadomasochism without Pain …for Lovers. I actually learned a thing or two reading these books, although I also took a lot of what I read for granted.
One thing I learned was that the writers Climex contracted to write these books weren’t very good. The first drafts were generally a mess. Climex used this accelerated “parallel” publishing process wherein the author would submit the first few chapters for development and copyediting and then work on the next few. In traditional publishing, a writer submits an entire manuscript and then waits six months or a year through a period of review and revision before seeing the book go to a printer. In this process, chapter one could be in proofreading while chapters two and three were in typesetting while chapters four and five were in factchecking while chapters six and seven were in copyediting while chapter eight was in development.
Generally, before even the first chapter was written the developmental editor would make the author work out an outline and get the sequence of chapters sorted out, as well as helping the writer think through what would happen or be explained in each chapter. Still, by the time a chapter landed on my desk, it was usually still in lousy shape, as the few developmental editors were overloaded with two many titles to manage as well as acquisition responsibilities - they had to find new authors and keep the hopper humming.
Now I was able to apply a lot of what I’d learned in my copyediting class at Berkeley. I had had a good intuitive sense of what was correct grammar and syntax and diction and what as not, although I wasn’t always sure which mistakes were syntax and which were grammar, but now I knew what symbols to use to indicate transposing the word “only” to after a verb, and when to change which to that and when to leave it alone, and how to indicate a hundred other necessary changes in the margins of a manuscript page or in the lines between the double-spacing.
It was tempting often to just strike through long sections of awful prose and rewrite it, but I knew that the true challenge of a copyeditor is to figure out what the author is trying to say, or what he or she would have said if they had been able. This led to a dialogue generally, becaue sometimes you’d have to offer choices and ask “Are you trying to say this or that?” The answers could lead to more questions even though there wasn’t a lot of time for additional rounds of revision before the next chapter would land on my desk, and the author would be getting more and more stressed by the time the parallel process was sending multiple chapters back to him (the writers were actually almost all men) for review along the various stages of the editorial and production processes.
I got better at forcing the issue, divining the writer’s intent, and then carefully recasting the tortured prose into a credible simulation of the writer’s voice if the writer had been smarter and more talented. I also started to resent the writer for making me do all this work and for getting their names - or rather their usually jokey pseudonyms - on the covers of the books when I knew that I was sometimes contributing more to the final product than they were.
I started thinking maybe I should just go ahead and write one of these stupid books myself, but the truth was I stil had a lot to learn about how to write a good dirty book.