Well, countdown is less than 2 days. Anxiety, excitement, readiness, etc etc etc
Courses lie in French, Education, Philosophy, and, er, a spare half credit in Writing.
How I wish I could be paid to philosophize, or write, without having some more tedious and useful backup ...
(On doit avoir une raison pour parler français -- plus forte que `je peux l`enseigner`)
I`m starting a new job copy-editing for the Erindale campus`s student newspaper, The Medium.
(If you don`t happen to know what copy-editing is, it`s
1. Fix basic grammar and spelling mistakes
2. Make formatting and style conform to Canadian Press Style
3. Make sure no words or sentences are excruciatingly bad.
e.g. from `It was reported by the Huffington Post that the Clash will prefrom on Thurs 7:00PM.`
to `The Huffington Post reported that The Clash will perform at 7 p.m. on Thursday.`)
You might think it`s incredibly boring, but for someone whose one area of expertise is the particulars of written English, it`s actually quite stimulating and -- dare I say it -- enjoyable. And the hours fit in with my schedule wonderfully. And the pay is fair, and heaven knoweth I must pay my tuition somehow...
Nice people, too. I don`t know if I was slightly less introverted than usual, or if they`re just great people (or both), but I feel like I`ve made at least 2 or 3 `coworker` friends so far, and everyone else seems nice.
There is a yellow truck beside me. A plushy yellow truck
One story that I had to edit was absolutely brilliant, and I mentioned this to one of the editors over Pad Thai. He said excitedly, `Oh yeah? You liked that??`. It turned out it was his own story, under a synonym [sic]. He was thoroughly pleased -- I couldn`t just have been complimenting him out of niceness, since I didn`t know it was his -- and I convinced him to use his real name. If I can get the story next week (once the current issue of The Medium is outdated) I`ll post it for you here...
Anyway, tomorrow I think I`ll get together with an old friend, maybe help out finishing the deck on the last day of summer (our family`s on-and-off project these last few months) and listen to Beethoven`s 6th on my mp3 player in the hammock, if the weather will grant us a genuine send-off for the summer...
I`ve rambled a bit. But anyway, I hope your summer has been as simultaneously relaxing and productive as mine, and have a good school year, my dear friends. I`d love to hear from or see you whenever there`s time!
Glad to hear you've had a good summer! Best of luck this fall.
ReplyDeleteThe "etc etc etc" and the bit about the "plushy yellow truck" reminded me of RotF. Has her writing style rubbed off on your own? ;-)
Copy-editing sounds great, and I'm not surprised to hear about it since it seems like exactly the sort of thing you'd enjoy doing! I've wondered a couple of times about doing that as a career, but I just worry that it would drive me crazy.
&
On an ironic note, when describing your friend's story, you used the word "synonym" instead of "pseudonym". Just sayin'.
Oh my goodness, so I did make that mistake. I think I'll leave that in there, just for fun. (I was editing for many hours straight today. Two other mistakes tonight that, luckily, I caught before they were sent to the finalizing stage were "devestation" (I fixed it from "devistation", but forgot to actually spell it right) and "stories that been have come to light".)
ReplyDeleteYes, the great secret about RotF is that her voice is the epitome of what mine turns into when I am so tired of perfecting my or others' language that I lapse into semi-nonsense. :D Actually, the fact that you recognize it as RotF-y is heartening; are you still reading it?
So far, copy-editing itself hasn't driven me crazy -- it's not what I have to do, but what I have to give up, that does it. Consider a story submitted to the Features section which, because he needed to fill space, the section editor accepted. It's hard to tell if this story was once coherent in another language before being sent through Google Translate, or if it was just generated by some sort of Free Surrealist Nonsense Generator. Editing it was like trying to patch up a black hole. With duct tape. The last line of the story -- which was, by the way, about half a page without a single paragraph break -- was "Can I consider time is irrelevant to where I here am?" The fact that as a copy-editor only I have to let that sort of thing through is what kills me.
I'll be sure to save any more tidbits of amusement I find. By the by, with all your semi-free time, you should be updating your blog more often!
Similarly, the first line of that story ran "The graveyard was unkempt with steam elevating from the graves below."
ReplyDeleteGood luck with that one!
ReplyDelete