Editors used to be ordinary people?
Echoed from Words: the typings of a madman:
Voltraut von Prusser clacked her fingers over the key caps of her laptop. Clack, clack, and it was done-another chapter of Blood Slaves of the Ice Witch lay complete. Sighing, she leaned back and cracked her fingers. From outside, she heard the distant bleating of Steven Brust's goat. Naturally, her mind wandered from her masterful prose to the fresh goat cheese he'd given her on Tuesday, and decided it was an excellent stopping point for lunch. Editing could wait.
The better part of an hour later, her stomach had been bought off for the afternoon with a prosciutto-and-goat-cheese-on-sourdough sandwich and a salad made from the baby spinach that had been in her farm subscription that week. Sated, she popped a pair of Logix® and washed them down with crisp, cool water from the pitcher in her refrigerator door.
Returning upstairs, she noticed the steps were dusty. They would need to be cleaned when there was nothing of higher priority needing doing; 5:15 this evening would be appropriate. Sitting down at her laptop, she typed her password. It was really rather poor of a password, she noted, but her morning's self would have a hard time remembering anything suitably complicated, and sometimes one had to compromise, unfortunate though it was.
Her eyes scanned over her words from earlier. So many typos! Didn't she care about conveying her thoughts precisely? Still, it was a reasonable division of labor, leaving such tedium to the one who felt it necessary. Correcting the mis-steps as she went along, she began to ponder the chapter as a whole. Only ego could delude one into thinking this was "a liberating escape into the fantasy of desire" as she'd put it in her last interview. Truly, this was somewhere between turgid prose and utter crap, but turgid prose sold, so she did her best to move it towards the former and away from the latter. That had to go, as did that. What did she mean here? This gap needed another scene bridging it, so she made a note to add one after dinner, once she was creative again.
Hours passed as Voltraut massaged the text into a more practical form, taking into account the needs and desires of its intended audience. As the clock crept past five, she remembered the dusty floorboards. Somewhere, the goat was bleating again. It was awfully…cute…for an ungulate. In any case, with thoughts like those, it was clearly time to stop editing.
Voltraut von Prusser clacked her fingers over the key caps of her laptop. Clack, clack, and it was done-another chapter of Blood Slaves of the Ice Witch lay complete. Sighing, she leaned back and cracked her fingers. From outside, she heard the distant bleating of Steven Brust's goat. Naturally, her mind wandered from her masterful prose to the fresh goat cheese he'd given her on Tuesday, and decided it was an excellent stopping point for lunch. Editing could wait.
The better part of an hour later, her stomach had been bought off for the afternoon with a prosciutto-and-goat-cheese-on-sourdough sandwich and a salad made from the baby spinach that had been in her farm subscription that week. Sated, she popped a pair of Logix® and washed them down with crisp, cool water from the pitcher in her refrigerator door.
Returning upstairs, she noticed the steps were dusty. They would need to be cleaned when there was nothing of higher priority needing doing; 5:15 this evening would be appropriate. Sitting down at her laptop, she typed her password. It was really rather poor of a password, she noted, but her morning's self would have a hard time remembering anything suitably complicated, and sometimes one had to compromise, unfortunate though it was.
Her eyes scanned over her words from earlier. So many typos! Didn't she care about conveying her thoughts precisely? Still, it was a reasonable division of labor, leaving such tedium to the one who felt it necessary. Correcting the mis-steps as she went along, she began to ponder the chapter as a whole. Only ego could delude one into thinking this was "a liberating escape into the fantasy of desire" as she'd put it in her last interview. Truly, this was somewhere between turgid prose and utter crap, but turgid prose sold, so she did her best to move it towards the former and away from the latter. That had to go, as did that. What did she mean here? This gap needed another scene bridging it, so she made a note to add one after dinner, once she was creative again.
Hours passed as Voltraut massaged the text into a more practical form, taking into account the needs and desires of its intended audience. As the clock crept past five, she remembered the dusty floorboards. Somewhere, the goat was bleating again. It was awfully…cute…for an ungulate. In any case, with thoughts like those, it was clearly time to stop editing.