Author: Linda M. Au

I Can (Literally) Do This in My Sleep

This is how wicked-awesome I am at proofreading and copy editing. I can now say with confidence that I can do it in my sleep.

One of my many job-juggling tasks is editing Web content written by a writing service. The man in charge hires writers to produce the basic content for various Web sites. So, you know, if Joe’s Garage in Kentucky wants to start a Web site, they need someone to write all that initial content. They probably don’t want one of the grease monkeys fiddling with HTML and text on that old computer they use to print out invoices in the office. They hire someone to produce that content.

And then the writing service hires me to edit that content before they send it to Joe’s Garage.

All of this glamour for a whopping $.0025 a word. (Yes, that’s correct. I didn’t add an extra zero there. I get a quarter of a cent per word.)

This is still a good deal for me because I’ve streamlined the work enough that I can make a tidy little sum per hour while sitting in my jammies late at night with my laptop … while watching a marathon of The Walking Dead on AMC.

Often, the guy who hired me will ask if I’m available to edit today, and I’ll write back with an eager, “Yes, please! I want some more!” … not unlike the Dickens orphan Oliver in that sad British musical of the same name.

That doesn’t mean he’ll send over a batch of content right away, though. Yesterday, for instance, he asked at 2 p.m. if I was available, and I immediately said yes. But the batch of content didn’t show up until 8 p.m., due by this morning.

That’s fine. I’m a freelancer. I’ve learned to juggle multiple projects. In fact, I like switching from one task to another throughout the day. It feeds into my Project-A.D.H.D. quite nicely. But, when the content arrived at 8 p.m., I wasn’t quite ready for it. So, I finished what I was doing and then started on the Web content well after 10 p.m.

Sometime after midnight, not even the zombies on the TV could keep me awake. When my attention starts to flag on this job, it helps to read the articles out loud as I’m adding red slash marks with Word’s Track Changes. It gives me a sense of cadence in the writing and helps me catch all sorts of errors.

(Note: This method works in the living room only when I am the only one home. If Wayne is around and trying to watch Duck Dynasty or a Modern Marvels episode on the ten worst submarine accidents, I try not to read articles on the most effective hemorrhoid removal in all of Houston, Texas, out loud. It ruins his concentration.)

Last night, though, not even reading out loud could keep me awake. On nearly a dozen occasions, each about two minutes apart, I found myself nodding suddenly awake—you know, that head-dip thing you do when you nod off sitting up, when your neck hits the bottom of its natural pendulum swing and your body jolts itself awake. I had a vague awareness that I had been speaking out loud and then had just stopped. The cursor on the screen was still in the same spot in the Word document where I had stopped speaking.

So, I continued on. I was determined to get through this batch before going to bed, rather than setting the alarm (!!) to get up and finish it in the morning.

On the very last piece of content, though—for a chimney and air-duct cleaning service somewhere on the East Coast—I not only nodded off multiple times, but I realized as I woke back up that I was still speaking the whole time. Unfortunately, since my eyes had closed and my brain had mostly shut down, I wasn’t reading the actual Web content on the screen. I was saying whatever words were jostling around in my brain trying to get out.

One time I think I was saying “horse and buggy,” though I don’t know why. Another time I caught myself saying “house house house” over and over again. The last time, I was repeating nonsense syllables of some sort: “Nuhhh… huhhh… nuhhh…”

After sitting up straighter and adjusting my laptop screen, I finished the rest of the batch and uploaded it.

But now I’m afraid to go look at what I did to that article in my sleep. I’m afraid I might have suggested that people come on down from their house house house in their horse and buggy to ask about air duct cleaning.

More Proof That Proofreading Isn’t Boring

Well, perhaps I exaggerate. But, here are links to a two-part interview with yours truly about my favorite topic in the whole world (after Gene Wilder and “Weird Al” Yankovic or potential nuclear power plant disasters): proofreading!

Author Dora Machado (my favorite client) interviewed me about my nitpickiness as a career path. Read both parts here (and it’s in two parts because I have way more opinions about this than a normal person has a right to have):

What a Proofreader Can Do for You, and Why OCD Has a Role in the Profession

And, part 2:

Why Texting is a Tool of the Devil and Proofreading Your work Matters . . . A lot!

Phobias I have known and loved

One of my bigger phobias (which is really saying something) is public speaking. Speaking in public elicits negative physical responses, including (but not limited to) increased heart rate, cold sweats, ringing in the ears, rosacea flare-ups, clammy palms, and gastric disturbances too horrible to describe here (or anywhere else).

And yet, I must have owed the wrong person a big favor, because someone talked me into conducting a workshop on proofreading and page layout at the West Branch Christian Writers Conference on Oct. 19.

Here’s the short description of my exciting workshop:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Proofreading … And Why You Need to Know It (Linda Au)
Linda M. Au is an award-winning humor writer, and she is a proofreader, copy editor, and typesetter. She’s been on both sides of the publishing desk, and she’ll share some tips for creating a cleaner manuscript for submission or a better layout for publication. You’ll learn about proofreader’s marks, page layout pitfalls, and common mistakes writers make. Linda’s a grammar and font nerd with 25 years of experience in proofreading and typesetting. Learn why her nitpicking quirks might be just what your writing needs as you move toward final drafts and publishing. 

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Now you can see why I’m petrified. Nobody wants to sit through something like this. On purpose.

In the past (and by “the past,” I mean as recent as last week), for my extreme phobia of flying, I’ve resorted to pharmaceutical relief … which gets me onto the plane without fainting, but doesn’t really make me happy about it. The best I can say is that I still know we’re going to crash and burn and die, but at least I don’t care.

For this public speaking phobia, I’m going to have to rely on misdirection and a sort of mental sleight of hand: that is, convincing myself that no one will show up and I’ll be off the hook, or that everyone will be so enthralled with proofreaders’ marks and a PowerPoint presentation on the serial comma that they’ll give me a standing ovation.

I don’t see either one of those really working out.

But, I’ll be there anyway, so if you’d like to join us for a day of writing workshops and learning (and great fellowship, except with that one faculty member who will be in the corner sweating bullets and praying to deities she’s making up on the spot), register now and I’ll see you there! Well, maybe I won’t actually see you, since I’ll be heavily medicated so I can make it through the day without keeling over.

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I blame Ancestry.com for my heart attack

It started innocently enough.

I got my dad a subscription to Ancestry.com for Christmas, and I just renewed it for him for Father’s Day. Every so often I go to my parents’ house, and the three of us sit huddled around my dad’s computer in my dad’s living room. (And yes, my mom has her own computer … and her own living room. Don’t ask. It seems to work.) We start typing in names, clicking on little bobbing leaves, hoping to add more relatives to our ever-growing family tree.

We all find the process fascinating, though the misspellings of names can be a bit vexing at times. And, a few relatives we’re sure existed seem to defy being found. Makes me wonder if half the family weren’t fugitives living under undocumented aliases.

But I digress.

Yesterday I received a call from my mom … on their cell phone, which means one of two things, since they rarely use their cell phone: Either they’re out shopping and are calling me to ask me the size of something or the best brand of something else, or they’re calling me randomly to use up some of the 1,000 prepaid minutes they’ve racked up because they have to keep rolling them over so they don’t expire.

Yesterday it was neither of those things. The caller ID tells me it’s them on that cell phone.

“Hello? Mom?”

“Hi! Guess what!”

This is never a good game to play with my parents, so I fold immediately, although I realize playing the guessing game could at least use up a bunch of their minutes.

“Dunno. What?”

“You’ve got a sister.”

Silence. More silence. Insert crickets chirping.

“What?”

“You’ve got a sister.”

Not only do I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I also can’t fathom why she waited till they were out gallivanting around in the car to call me to tell me this. I keep asking her “What?” as if the answer will change, or at least be augmented with, say, some actual information, but all she keeps saying in response is, “You’ve got a sister.”

I can tell she’s waiting for me to catch on, but I don’t. My mind is busy whirling around our last Ancestry.com huddle-time, and I start doing the math in my head. A sister—and the cryptic way she’s telling me—means one of several things:

  • My parents are a lot more spry than I’ve been giving them credit for. I do not like this option one bit because the resulting therapy might not be covered by our health insurance.
  • One of them has a past he or she hasn’t been telling me all these years, and they’re doing a preemptive strike before I find this woman on Ancestry.com. I do not like this option either because I’ll have to amend my entire view of my childhood, which is already a bit dicey because I’m over 50 and have trouble remembering my Social Security number properly, let alone what kind of childhood I really had.
  • My only sibling has talked his wife into letting him get a “sister wife.” I do not like this option either because, well, I shouldn’t have to explain this one. Plus, my sister-in-law is a lot smarter than that.

“Well?”

It’s my mother, trying to yank me back to reality. She doesn’t mind using up her ridiculous cache of minutes this way, but it’s probably still pretty annoying to listen to dead silence from my end of the phone. And, let’s face it, it’s also unusual.

“Okay, I give up. It’s not you. And it’s not Mike. So it’s …”

And suddenly it hits me. All this time on Ancestry.com has had me thinking in all the wrong ways—in terms of species. I’m having this conversation with a woman who calls my pet guinea pigs her “grandpigs.” She is calling from the cell phone because, yes, she is at the Beaver County Animal Shelter. And they are picking up an 11-week-old kitten this afternoon.

And now it all makes sense … and I can start breathing again. I don’t have to rethink everything I ever knew about my entire nuclear family.

Meanwhile, I wonder what my younger brother, Scooter the tabby cat, is going to think of his new little sister….

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Distract me, please. Keep me busy. Say hello.

So, I’m sitting here on a 90-degree day (with about 70% humidity) in one of the three air-conditioned rooms in our house … and I thank God that one of those three is my home office. Thunder rumbles outside every so often, meaning possible rain that will likely only add to the humidity once the rain stops. The joys of summer…

I’m working on several book interior layouts for friends today, as well as tweaking my own manuscript and eventual layout for my first novel to hit print, Do-It-Yourself Widow (coming soon to an online bookseller near you!). I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this story since first writing it back in 2004 (as part of my first NaNoWriMo). In other words, I love the story; I hate editing it.

But on a day like today, when it’s either my air-conditioned office (which means desk work or playing with the guinea pigs) or my air-conditioned bedroom (which means either sleeping or using the Wii Fit), the choice is simple: Do the work. Avoid the exercise like the plague.

The friends’ layouts are as ready as they’re going to get today, so it’s time to fiddle with DIY Widow and market the humor books. If you see a tweet from me, feel free to retweet it. If you have read either Head in the Sand or Fork in the Road and enjoyed what you read, feel free to post an Amazon or Goodreads review.

And as always, I’d love to hear from you. Because honestly, sitting here staring out at the gathering thunderclouds, hoping a storm doesn’t knock the power out to the air conditioner, I need a little distraction today.

Both literally and figuratively: Stay cool, folks!

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Conversations over a ticket machine …

Fara and I stand in line at the ticket machine to pay our parking fee after seeing Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers at Heinz Hall. We fleetingly wonder why we didn’t just pay on our way in since it’s a flat fee, but at least it gives us more time to gab while we wait.

She tells me of a woman who has a husband who’s a magician.

“A magician?”

“Yeah.”

I try not to be envious, thinking this would be the coolest thing ever. Kinda like having a clown for a husband, only without the creepy factor. Well, sure, some of us DO have clowns for husbands, but I mean literally.

Fara continues. “He has a place at the nearby mall.”

“He works from a booth at the mall?”

“Yeah.”

So now I’m trying to picture how this works, exactly. How does a magician make money at all stall/booth/kiosk at the mall? Does it work like a fast-food joint? Is there a menu overhead?

“I’ll take one card trick and two sleight-of-hands, please.”

“Would you like to supersize that?”

“What comes with the supersize?”

“You get two card tricks and the disappearing rabbit thing.”

“Do you pull him out of a hat?”

“No, that’s the reappearing rabbit thing. That costs extra.”

“Oh.”

“But you get a free Coke with that.”

We move forward a little in line, still trying to figure out just how a mall magician operates. And how does he keep from giving passersby a free show by watching the paying customer get his or her card trick supersaver?

Before we have a chance to ridicule this poor man’s profession any further, it’s my turn to put the ticket in the machine and pay our parking fee. There’s no indication where I’m to put my credit card, and I stand there for a few moments, mind blank, impatient customers behind me sighing loudly as I continue to stare at the machine.

I sudden wish I had a mall magician to help me figure this stupid thing out …

The universe is nothing if not ironic.

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The author is the last to know…

The author is always the last to know…. The paperback edition of FORK IN THE ROAD is apparently now available. And Amazon immediately put it on sale… but I don’t know for how long. (They never tell me anything.)

And remember, if you don’t live near me or won’t see me to sign your copy personally, use the Contact page here to request a signed bookplate/sticker to put inside your copy. (I purposely designed the layout so there would be a blank page for signing/bookplates right inside the front cover. Aren’t I thoughtful?)

Click here to kill a small tree!

Tomorrow I leave for the St. Davids Christian Writers’ Conference, where a lot of this whole “taking writing seriously” thing started for me. Well, as much as a humor writer can take anything seriously….

You guys behave while I’m gone, okay? No parties. And I don’t want to find any cracks in my egg when I get back.

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