Friday 31 December 2010

Meet the Bitch: My Inner Editor

She really is a bitch.  She's precise and cranky and perfectionistic.  I don't mind so much, cause I need her to be that way when she's editing what I write, but that Inner Editor, she can scare people away.

And that worries me, because I just handed off a manuscript to a great friend, one of the sweetest, kindest, loveliest ladies I know, and Miss Inner Editor had been having her way with that script.  She ran out two pens doing so.  She likes ink, Miss IE.

The first time I let Miss IE loose on a friend, it changed our relationship forever.  When I let her loose on my husband's writing, his reaction broke my heart.  I've tried to tame her, and I can rein her in at first, but that godawful honesty gets in the way sometimes.

I love to read as much as I love to write... maybe even more... and I tend to even get Miss IE's ire up when I'm reading badly written prose.  She was rewriting passages of Twilight madly, frantically, as I read that series.  Lately she's been getting all giggly over reading "Mahalo" being thrown around in a book I'm reading - "Spider Bones" - which is taking place in Hawaii.  It shouldn't be funny, it's just where I work, but for some reason, Miss IE is tickled by it.

So, you're wondering how things are going at Mahalo, are you? Me too, kind of.  I've been having issues with being sick with an unbelievable sinus infection, and it's made meeting my minimums a sketchy prospect at best.  So far I'm managing, though I find myself sometimes inwardly cussing at my outer editors - the ones on the site.  It's not really their fault, it's an issue where they may not catch everything they want me to change on their first read-through, and then on the second read-through, after I've made the changes they did ask for, there are more changes to be made on the second go.  Confusing enough for you?  Yeah, me too.

It's just frustrating, when I think I've fixed something to still have more work on it.  It makes my hourly wage go down (which is averaging at Mahalo something like $4 an hour I guess, counting revision work).  I haven't been sleeping much, which isn't helping the sinus infection, and have had a two day migraine, so I'm probably just cranky about it all.  These are two of the pages that required double revisions: http://www.mahalo.com/trenton-nj and http://www.mahalo.com/toledo-oh It was purely a matter of something no one had on the gold standard guide page, but that appeared on the gold standard page itself.  What I mean by that is, we have a page that lists what you have to do for each type of page, then an example.  You obviously can't follow everything on the sample page, because every city (or author or movie or whatever) is different, but you kind of have to figure out what's wanted.  If you can't, you'll be revising it once the editor lets you know!

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