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My New VestFebruary 09, 2010 Yeah, I'm still here. I've got too much work. I overbooked myself because last fall writing was more interesting than editing and as we all know writing doesn't pay. I took on a lit crit book that I didn't really have time for because the subject was science fiction, then I figured that if I hustled I could do a 1,000-page biography of a twentieth-century fellow I didn't know much about. Trouble is, I hate to "hustle." Hustling means editing eight or nine hours a day instead of five or six, and that leaves precious little time for anything else -- or little time for anything more precious. And the lit crit book turns out to be abominably written. Like if an academic has been immersed in the works of (among others) Chip Delany, Octavia Butler, and Robert Heinlein, shouldn't some of their feel for the English language have rubbed off on him? Guess not. Part of this guy's problem is his weak vocabulary, which is not to be confused with the penchant for jargon that afflicts so many professorial types. If a writer doesn't have the right word ready to hand, he uses a not-so-right, if not an outright wrong, one, and the result is sentence after sentence that isn't clear or doesn't make sense. Editing books like this takes longer not only because you have to puzzle out the meaning of a sentence before you can tweak it, but because when you can't intuit what the author meant you have to compose a query more tactful than "WTF? I have no idea what you're trying to say here." I also waste time fuming at the book's in-house editor, who may or may not have actually read the thing line for line. When the in-house editor falls down on the job, the copyeditor has to do a lot more than copyedit. Here there's an upside to having other jobs to do. When I get too pissed at the lit critic's incompetent prose, I can go work on the 1,000-page biography, which is in much better shape. I'm also writing a Mary Daly obit for the Women's Review of Books and my first One Wired Sister column for the WRB blog. Anyway, that's why I haven't posted anything here since the January license plate report. It's also why my Lands' End order arrived Saturday, courtesy of eight-year-old Ava because it had been delivered to my neighbors' house, and I didn't get around to opening it till last night. The gray down vest is quite stylish -- it's got lighter gray trim on the shoulders -- and much, much cleaner than my old red one. I loaded the left pocket with dog treats, slipped my clicker into the right pocket, and wore it this morning when Travvy and I took our usual walk and stopped to play/train on the (fenced-in) school tennis courts. Temp was in the low 20s F. The vest was plenty warm. It didn't clash with the tomato-red thrift shop sweater I was wearing. In fact, since the sweater has gray and gold bands at the cuffs, the vest even looked intentionally coordinated with the sweater. It's a keeper. So are the new on-sale turtlenecks, one in "Aztec gold," the other a satisfyingly loud "garnet paisley." I'm not 100% committed to the spice brown chinos: they were described as "boot cut," which I like, but the boots the copy writer had in mind must have had a circumference of at least two feet. Which is to say that they're a little too bell-bottomy for me. The upside of that is that I won't wear them to the barn, and it would be nice to have one pair of pants that doesn't have barn stains and horse smells and hay pouring out of the pockets. I'll probably keep them and get used to the bells.
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