Humorist. Novelist. Scapegoat.
If you get new post notifications and emails from me today, I hereby apologize. I’m migrating my website, and that includes moving and reposting some older blog entries from the previous site. Ignore any notifications about new posts for the next day or so.
I’ll come up with a catchy, obvious post title when I’m back to new blog posts.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled internet, already in progress.
Thanks to all of you marvelous backers for a successful, fun Indiegogo campaign for Train of Thought! I couldn’t have done it without you! Well, technically, I could have, but it would have been a pointless waste of time to write up an entire campaign only to donate a thousand bucks to myself and then watch Indiegogo take a cut. I’ve done stupider things, but not lately.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, I was thanking you lovable, wacky knuckleheads…
Thanks!
Thanks to you, now the credit card company will stop throwing panicky fits over that huge charge I made to Amtrak a few weeks ago.
I’ve already made quite a few notes for the book, and I haven’t even left yet. But of course, a strangely introspective trip like this is going to start in my head months ahead of time. That’s the beauty of our overthinking, introvert brains: we never stop asking, “What if?” We are the kings and queens of the Worst-Case Scenario.
The official trip starts in early May, around midnight here in Pittsburgh. Due to my husband’s work schedule at that time, he can’t drive me to the station. So I’ll start off with a cab ride to the train station downtown. And I’m already obsessing over whether the cab will show up on time. (Just ONE time I called a cab in the 1990s and it was late, and I’ll never let myself forget it.)
Once I acclimated to the idea of a cab, though, I realized I might as well start the trip off with an introvert’s worst nightmare: sitting alone late at night in a small vehicle with a stranger who will drop me off in a desolate part of the downtown area. Yay!
And of course it will be smooth sailing from there. Right? Because… what could go wrong?*
——
*rhetorical question, not meant for actual answers
P.S. If any of your friends (or enemies, I’m not picky) still want to get in on this sweet campaign deal at one of my many backer levels, the campaign will continue to run until the trip. Oh sure, anyone will be able to buy the book after it comes out in September, but only backers will get combo deals on my other books, plus exclusive, hand-wringing updates like this one (including some photos and maybe video!) during the actual trip. (If you didn’t feel special before, I bet you’re preening like crazy now.)
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/train-of-thought-book-travel/x/7437287#/
Feel free to share this link with anyone. I’m not proud. Plus, that credit card company is still hassling me about the other half of that large Amtrak transaction…
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.
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!
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.
——–
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.
.