Kate’s a freelance copy editor. In other words, she’s a rewrite man. Self-help books by depressed therapists. Memoirs wrested from the rising fog of Alzheimer’s. A tampon tycoon’s grand treatise on quantum consciousness. A dog’s breakfast of print-on-demand cookbooks for a firm that underpays Craigslist bottom-feeders to not quite plagiarize the works of Rachael Ray. Kate hears herself being introduced. She takes a sip from her paper cup of Sprite, wishing it were chardonnay, wondering how her life went astray.
NOTES
Until somewhat recently, copy editing was understood to be the editorial stage between developmental editing and proofreading. As such, copy editing is the first step in a book’s production process. It should not entail wholesale rewriting but too often it does, in a publishing environment where marginally competent writers are recruited to follow AI-derived manuscript outlines for AI-derived projects with unreasonably tight deadlines.
You may have seen the terms copyediting and copyeditor. To my knowledge, these spellings (What’s next? Foodeditor? Financialediting?) gained traction with the first edition of Karen Judd’s Copyediting: A Practical Guide, a book notorious for its many typos, factual errors, and editorial diktats so idiosyncratic as to be useless unless one worked directly for Karen Judd. Full disclosure: When I was young, I worked directly for Karen Judd, who once left a justifiably irritated message on my answering machine (it was that long ago) about my failure to notice and correct a misplaced photo caption in the blueline proofs of a French textbook. The photo showed a commandant with troops from his tank battalion near Montcornet in 1940. The caption read, “Ces jeunes profitent d’une journée à la plage” (“These young people are enjoying a day at the beach”).
Hard to not feel that way.
Love it.