2003-06-19
Last night the best friend and I had our first telephone editing session. I dug up an old hands-free phone and brought the Word file up on my screen and she had me search for words to find her place and then she gave me very specific notes. In some cases she made suggestions, in others she just identified areas of confusion or less-than-perfect language.
She blew me away.
She caught things that were very subtly off but had been bothering me for reasons I could not pinpoint. She is really, really good, and I'm feeling very optimistic about this process; I believe she'll be able to help make this book shine. The best metaphor has to do with weight: It's already a fairly lean book, but she's helping me whittle away all these tiny bits of flab that are slowing it down. When we're done, I think it will really fly.
God bless the best friend. This is the kind of work that I gather the editors who work for publishing houses once got to perform but no longer have time for. It's very time-consuming and taxing and she's unemployed but won't let me pay her for this. I will owe her big.
A few other odds and ends of note:
- Clay's vocabulary has expanded to include "bubble" (pronounced "bubba").
- For B's birthday last month, he'd originally asked for a new pair of glasses but then changed his mind and decided he really wanted a fancy new vacuum cleaner (a Bagless Hoover V2 Windtunnel, to be specific). He's very happy with it.
- Two items in the "How times have changed department"
- We found a Fisher-Price "music box TV" from 1961. You crank it up and then two songs (Row, Row, Row Your Boat and London Bridges) play as a loop of paper with illustrations scrolls behind a screen. It was made in America and the musical element was made in Switzerland. (This explains why it's 42 years old and still works perfectly.)
- Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, the writer-illustrator pair who did Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny, did another picture book called My World, originally published in, I believe, 1959. In the library copy I got, the back cover of the dust jacket includes photographs of the two; in his, the handsome Mr. Hurd is shown smoking a cigarette.
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