If a cow ever got the chance...

I am pretending to work on a freelance thing (I'm supposed to be looking over the final edit and sending it back on Wednesday so that it can go to the printer on Friday). It is causing me some mental pain.

(That was the most interesting part of this entry, unless you are an editron or grammar nerd. If you are neither, please go read Vegan Outreach instead.)

This is my one and only freelance client, the cornerstone of my future Freelance Empire, so I don't want to bitch about them too much. And actually, their books are terrific in terms of content. (I bought at least three in the bookstore before I ever even thought of working for them...) But when it comes to layout or basic editing, they leave something to be desired... (I'm toning my snide remarks down quite a bit, can you tell?). Let me put it this way: if I got a manuscript at my real job that looked like this, I would send it out to a decent copyeditor and give her three weeks in which to do it. I can't edit this project because it's going to press in less than a week, so I have to go through and decide which changes are important enough to make and which ones are a result of my having been forced to read the entire Chicago Manual of Style last year. The problem is that I have to remember what I decided to do about each little stupid thing (em dashes--otherwise known as that double-hyphen thing, numerals that aren't spelled out when they should be, really messed-up word spacing) that my borderline OCD is screaming at me to change, and keep making the same decision throughout. I think it actually takes longer than if I were to just fix everything. But if I did fix everything, the whole page would be a solid mass of blue pencil markings, and they wouldn't hire me anymore because I really wouldn't be doing what they need me to do. (Some of the freelance proofreaders my sub-boss hires at the real job have that problem. They are so eager to show us all what great laser-eye grammar bitches they are that they change way, way too many things, and then I get yelled at for allowing their corrections to stand, because alterations in typeset pages are really expensive. There's a point at which you have to let everything go, no matter how messed up, unless it would cause someone to sue.)

So instead of actually working on this, I take my page proofs and blue pencil over to the coffee shop. I get through about twenty pages when I realize that the radio is playing a barking-dog version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and that I must therefore leave IMMEDIATELY. At home, the Internet clamors for attention. Then I must make salad dressing and spicy Dijon potatoes, because it would be awful to let a mealtime go by without making some sort of fancy new recipe that uses all my mixing bowls. (Plus, as my brother says, "If I stopped eating, I might get hungry!" Indeed, a terrible fate.) Then I feel guilty and actually work for a little while. Then C calls. Then I decide to go back to the coffee shop. Now they are playing The Doors, which is much better, but their non-dairy ice cream inexplicably makes me ill and I must return home, where the Internet once again requests my time. Repeat cycle, ad nauseam. Since eight this morning, I have managed to do about five and a half hours of solid proofreading. If I am ever to rule profitably over a freelance empire, this must improve. No wonder the big boss never lets me work at home.

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