The Dictionary of Bullshit
Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 in: Writing
This post is a shameless plug.
It is a shameless plug for my Dad.
Now… as you may have gathered from previous posts, I come from, heaven help us, a family of writers. We did not, by the way, set out to be a family of writers! Oh no! When I was 7 years old, in fact, my mother took me to one side and made me promise never, ever to be a writer.
‘It’s a ridiculous job. Unreliable, badly paid, you never get out of the house enough… be a doctor instead,’ quoth Mum.
My Mum, whose professional name is Susan Moore for anyone wondering, has pretty much done it all. Publisher, editor, novelist and ghost writer. As a child, I liked the title ‘ghost writer’ the most – it had an aura of mystery about it, the sense that here was my Mum, secretly making the words of others better behind the scenes. I learnt the secret of editing from her at a swimming pool when I was 10 years old. Climbing out of the pool to get a towel, I found my Mum sitting on the side of the pool with a manuscript she’d been hired to edit and a pencil in her hand. As I approached, she frowned at the page and then, with a single decisive stroke, crossed out the entire thing with a triumphant swish of blue pencil on messy page.
Saying this, my Dad has been the victim of some nasty editing… an entire chapter was struck by an over-enthusiastic editor from his biography of Douglas Adams, to much wailing in the house. I’ve generally been very lucky with my editors, although will always cherish the editorial query I once received to a particularly fantastical bit of writing… ‘Are you sure that would happen?’ My Dad started writing after me, to my great delight. A publisher since time began he’s always been the voice of steady commercial advise since I’ve been a kid. When I was about 12 years old, he left publishing and by the time I was 18 he was writing. What personality changes raced over him! As a publisher, my Dad had always told me that authors are difficult, wingy, moaning gits. As a writer he suddenly came to realise that 35 years of experience lied and in fact, authors were under-rated, misunderstood, underpaid and under-regarded lambkins tossed between the merciless hands of evil editors. As Douglas Adam’s publisher, he was in a good position to write the official biography – feel free to flick through the photos, dear reader, to discover exactly what I mean when I say that as an 8 year old I had that haircut known as ‘mother did my fringe’. He later went on to write the Dictionary of Bullshit and is in the process of publishing its updated version in expectation of the great surge of oily manipulation that will be the 2010 general election. I am proud to report that I am the dedicatee of a dictionary of bullshit… as well as an avid contributor.
Anyway, point of all this is… my Dad is my Dad, and this is a shameless plug for his books, as is frankly, a good daughter’s duty as well as a sensible writer’s pleasure…
My favourite definition (reproduced without permission but in the fervant hope that my Dad won’t sue me)…
Growing as a person: This is Good. Growing as something else would not be so good.
2 Comments so far - click here to join in
Nice post, Kate, and your experience learned from your parents shows in the quality of your writing. As someone who’s worked in publishing and print for most of his life, there is a person who I would say is just as important as the editor, because although a decision by the editor will be obvious to the author, but not nessessarily to the reader, a sloppy job by this person ruins the reading pleasure of the end user. That person’s the proof reader. I’ve done a fair bit, enough to be driven nuts by a crappy proofing job when I’m reading a book: a big collected set of Arthur C. Clark’s spoilt by an entire page left out near the end of a story, missing paragraphs, or paragraphs repeated, large numbers of literals and spelling errors and poor punctuation… Aaaarrrrrggg!
You seem to be blessed with a publisher who’s doing a really good job, I haven’t had any mistakes leap out at me in any of your books, which is great, and long may it continue, but sadly publishers are not doing so well with ebooks.
Your books are almost certainly digital right through to the printing press, so if they go on to be sold as ebooks, it should be simple to re-format a digital file.
Older books, however, are really suffering. I bought a collection of Larry Niven’s ‘Gil the ARM’ stories via Stanza, and I couldn’t finish the first story, it was just unreadable. More recently I bought ‘Diamond Age’, by Neil Stephenson, via the Kindle app, which had errors all through the book, and it was the same ones cropping up every time. It’s glaringly obvious that lazy publishers are getting an office junior to scan printed pages, then run the scans through OCR software, which is miss-reading certain letter combinations. It’s very poor work, and the authors are being done a disservice by their publishers. Yours seem to be on the ball, but keep an eye open for things slipping, it’s not fair on the author, and it’s not at all fair on the customer.
And how we are looking forward to this additional dictionary! I enjoyed the first one immensly. If it’s as good as the first, I swear I’ll pop over and cook you all another porter steak casserole.
All the best
Jenz
February 17, 2010