Things about publishing that are harder than they seem (Part 2)

I AM TRYING MY BEST OKAY?!

If you know anything about me, you probably know this: I am a 46-year-old writer groping my way through the dark hallway of my first book deal. My age makes me Gen X, or, if you want to be specific about it, part of the Oregon Trail Generation. This means computers came into my life sometime in middle school, when I was still very stupid.

My family kept a squat, cumbersome IBM and all its various components in the basement, next to the gerbil’s cage.¹ On floppy disks, we had about 5 games², an “encyclopedia,” and a word processing program I never learned to use. I preferred to write my poems in diaries with locks, thank you very much, kept hidden in the canopy over my bed where everything was safe.

In high school we had a weekly computer class with Mr. Monaco. Let me just say that Mr. Monaco didn’t put his all into this class, and we spent most of the time passing notes, snapping bras, and playing with clip art. (Though I did write a comic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood that was about 8 paragraphs long—perhaps my first attempt at fiction.)

I got my first laptop in 1996, the year I graduated from high school. It went to college with me. I wrote many bad essays on it³, and some pretty good poems. The spell check didn’t work properly, which screwed me on more than one occasion. I couldn’t hook the little fella up to the internet in my dorm room, so I still had to use the computer lab in the lobby to send emails to my friends at other universities. I remember having to wait in line to print on a v e r y s l o w dot-matrix printer in the library, and I’m pretty sure I had to pay per page. Errors be damned; there would be no reprints.⁴

After college I moved to New York City with that same laptop. This was y2k, the golden age of AOL and Hotmail and dial-up internet. It was not the same as it is now. For instance, you didn’t get news on the internet back then. It was too slow. Images were pixilated. You’d get kicked off if the phone rang. We were better off with cable tv and flip phones. I mostly used my computer to write long letters to my friends, which I then printed and stamped and snailmailed.

In 2003, I started my art history master’s program, and already, at age 25, I felt like I had missed the boat on being young and computer savvy. I had a MacBook, sure, but the “kids” were talking about Friendster and Napster and what-ster-ever else. I stopped paying attention. I was happy helping my professors digitize the antiquated slide library and waiting for my interlibrary loans to come through.

After grad school, I went to work for a septuagenarian art dealer. I was by far the youngest person at the gallery, and they all thought I knew my way around the computer because I pushed to update the website and to get inventory software—any kind of inventory software. My boss, who started his business in 1962, had all his inventory “up here” (temple tap).

He was generous and supportive, though, and he let me take the reins. I researched the software available, picked one, then followed Carl around the stacks, labeling and entering thousands of artworks into the database, as he told me what each piece was. It was tedious and time consuming, but beneficial to the gallery—and to me, personally. Turns out, that software was the future of the art business, and my experience with it helped me land every gallery job I had for the next twelve or so years.

In that time, however, there were things that I didn’t stay updated on: Word, for example.

This would turn out to be a problem.

Years ago, when I was working with my first agent on the book-that-didn’t-sell (BTDS), she suggested I use track changes when I sent it back to her. This, my friendsters, was a horrible, gutting experience. Track changes were, to me, at that stage in my life, the visual equivalent of a panic attack. Those dotted blue and red lines, the marginalia— oh, I feel hives coming on just thinking about it. It’s too much clutter. Too much noise. Live having a death metal concert blasting in my ears as I’m trying to discern the complicated lyrics of a new Taylor Swift song. It’s all wrong. I can’t focus. I can’t hear my thoughts.

A manuscript besmirched with track changes

It happened again with Tell Them You Lied. In the email I told you about a few weeks ago, the one I’d been not-so-patiently waiting for, the one with line edits from my editor, there was a little note at the bottom that sent a dart of fear into my very soul. That sentence (and I am paraphrasing) was: Please keep on all track changes.

I felt sick. I also knew the plague of track changes were everywhere in publishing, so I took my complaints to my writing partners.

How am I supposed to work like this? I texted. How can you guys hear the words in your head with all these goddamn squiggly lines everywhere?

My youngest friend, Francesca, was aghast. 

omg laura, this twenty-something told me, you can turn them off.

No, I have to keep them on!

Francesca followed up with a 5 second video, clicking a red line on the side of her own Word document, thereby making the track changes all but invisible.

What is this sorcery? Hold on. It works! And if you click again, they all come back!

So, for the past several weeks I’ve been plugging away at my edits and not worrying about the ugly red and blue dotted lines. But then, just yesterday, I got an email from CeCe asking for the most recent draft of TTYL. It didn’t need to be perfect, she told me, she would make sure the person seeing it knew it was still a working draft.

But guys, I have this issue where I cannot let sitting words lie. If I am reading, I am tweaking. So my working draft currently looks like this:

Which is unacceptable. I told CeCe it would take me a few hours to get a clean draft. I made a copy and resaved it (I got that far on my own!) then started clicking though, accepting change after change after change, comment after comment, until I heard Francesca’s horrified voice in my head. omg laura.

I googled it, and figured out how to accept all the track changes at once. I sent CeCe my draft within 15 minutes.

All this to say—-

Never stop learning!

1. After the novelty wore off, both Critter and the IBM were equally ignored, but that’s a story for another time.

2. Leisure Suit Larry, anyone? Where in the World is Carmen Santiago?

3. I didn’t know what a “thesis statement” was until my junior year. Thanks for nothing, Mr. Kelly.

4. And no, before you ask—we did not email homework to our professors. How to explain this? Email wasn’t really real back then. It was equivalent to sending a postcard.