I’ve reached that final moment of editing a book—the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face. — Richard Due
That’s a pretty good description of editing—at least the kind I like best wherein the author, after finishing the writing, steps back into the arena to confront each sentence. Said sentence must step up to the fight, prove its integrity, or be chipped away (maybe knocked out cold). It’s invigorating work. As a process, it has much in common with a sculptor’s effort painstakingly to remove stone and uncover the desired image.
It is the other kind of editing that kills me–the round-after-round of copyediting wherein one searches for mistakes before the thing goes off to the printer. This kind of editing feels like being trapped in a weird sport with endless innings, ruled over by a maniacal referee who screams at you, “How could you not have seen this?!”
Yet that is what Hank and I have been doing for the past few days as we give our new Second Edition of Discovering Music its last dip in cleansing acid.
I must say: I am pleased with our new textbook. It provides a solid, interesting narrative for the 17 units of video lectures that undergird Discovering Music. Its wealth of illustrations, charts, and new features like the glossaries for “Who’s Who?” and “What’s What?” will be valuable for students and teachers alike.
To create a separate student workbook, we broke certain materials out of the first edition’s text, supplemented them, and added some nice graphics and timelines. There are new covers, too, and I’ll be interested to know what you think of the venture.
Watching Hank do the labor of designing and formatting these texts made me fall to my knees in gratitude that 1) he has the knowledge and insufferable patience to do it, and 2) I didn’t have to!
Still, we came back together for the final hurdle: spotting the piddly errors that are so hard to get out. Typos, missing spaces, missing words, missing italicizations, foreign terms that spell-check turns into bizarre words, and even whole sentences that fell out somewhere along the way. Ugh.
But that part is far easier than the fixing the more invisible problems: the “a’s” that need now to become “an’s” upon rewrites, identifying indefinite antecedents (where a pronoun could refer to two different nouns), grabbing those miserable misplaced modifiers (when a clause does not “do” what the main noun requires), and tracking the possible inconsistencies in tense, number, and voice (active/passive) as well as every other problem that writing entails.
No matter how hard one tries, something is always overlooked. Two sets of eyes are better than one set, of course, and four would be better. Ultimately, of course, there will be thousands of eyes (yours) which both consoles and terrifies me as I bend over the prose.
Still, the good news is, I’m home. After three weeks filled with wonderful travel (Greenville, SC, Phoenix, Dallas), it’s good to look out my window at our wildly blossoming yard. Except that it needs to be mowed.
And so life goes, right? Meanwhile, if you’ve ordered the new text or workbook, you’ll have it soon! The cyber-button will be pushed and the rest of the process will happen quickly.
Then, we’re turning full force to our next project, a printed guide to Great Operas. This series has grown out of our series of free webinars (now two-years’ worth of them) called A Night at the Opera. The first title is already done: Mozart’s Don Giovanni (we wanted to start with a bang!). It will be followed by Rossini’s Cenerentola (Cinderella), Bizet’s Carmen, and Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. And there are more in the works. Whether you love opera or are a novice, these guides will give you the “skinny” and allow you and your students to enter into the rich musical, literary, and dramatic world of opera.
So, that’s the report from our side today. I think of you, our readers, every day, amazed and grateful for all you do. How I wish we could come together somewhere in a soft, green meadow, with a blue sky above us, music filling the air, delightful food and drink piled high in every corner, all surrounded by rows of gardenias, hyacinths, and lilacs (okay, that’s probably too many scents, but you get the idea).
Finally, like many of you, we are anticipating Holy Week next week. Our Eastern Christian brethren will be celebrating their “Bright” or Paschal Week just one week later. Besieged as we all are by images of the devastating news in our world, and weighed down by their sorrows, we look to Holy Week to offer silence, clarity, strength, beauty, and hope. May these very qualities shower their blessings on you in this season.