One of my teachers in middle school had a rule that every paper had to have at least some certain number of adjectives per page. He pretty much told us, "Yeah, no one's going to be counting adjectives once you get beyond this course, but it'll force you to look at how you can be more descriptive."

Heh. Cindy, no, that wasn't at you - I had actually been talking about the whole "but amateurs do it for love" thing in email, on an entirely different subject, earlier, so it was fresh in my memory curcuits. Robin, yep, I'm with you, but have you noticed how the whole idea of "no one's paying you for it yet so you must suck!" has crept into common intonation when the word is used in speech?

Cashmere, dayum. Yummy-creepy-cool.

He pretty much told us, "Yeah, no one's going to be counting adjectives once you get beyond this course, but it'll force you to look at how you can be more descriptive."

I actually like the idea of using the single adjective as a freight car: let it carry the load of infinite possibilities.

I mean, I may talk the hind leg off a spitting llama in meatspace, but in writing, I'm far more likely to say "the night sky was abalone and ink" than I am to say "the night sky, shivering under a load of stars like tiny golden irridiscent pearls, fell upon her bowed shoulders like mantle of purest indigo velvet", or whatever.

I've added "getting this copy editor" to my list of "things that could go horribly wrong after selling a book"

Oh my good god. As a copyeditor, I'm offended -- it's so very much *not* a CE's job to change words arbitrarily to ones she prefers. You want to write dialogue? Make something minty instead of woodsy? Write your own damn book.

And as an editor? I once had a CE who changed every instance of what she considered un-PC prose in a Western-set historical (Texas 1860s). So one guy no longer had a hairlip, another guy was a Mexican-American (uh, no), etc. She also changed "mad dog" to "angry dog". Not the same thing, you fucking twit.

I know Alison, and I feel so awful for her. It's such a nightmare to open up a manuscript and find someone has decided to put her fingerprints all over it.

I was looking at some of those papers a few months ago, and none of them seemed really overloaded with adjectives, so I'm figuring his limit was something reasonable, and mostly to sort of jump-start us out of the "They woke up. They got dressed. They ate breakfast. They went to school" sort of elementary school writing.

"the night sky was abalone and ink"

This is evocative, and makes the scene vivid, and makes me work just enough to make the image part of my own mental landscape.

"the night sky, shivering under a load of stars like tiny golden irridiscent pearls, fell upon her bowed shoulders like mantle of purest indigo velvet"

This makes me close the book.

Amy, somewhere in the first thread was my snarling rant at the copy editor they saddled me with on "Weaver". She wanted to make every character sound like someone from The Sopranos.

Sample: "You omitted an article. Changing this to "Let's go down TO the pub."

No, Bitcheyes, not in the UK. In London, you go down the pub. Trust me.

Sample: "You seem to have problems with articles. Someone goes into THE hospital."

No, you #%#%%#, not. in. the. UK. You go into hospital. You're at school, in the UK, not in school.

She tried rewriting entire sections of it. I called Ruth, livid, and Ruth said "Oh, damn, you got HER? Just write "stet" across everything and don't worry about it.

My CE now, Ann Adelman, is a British historian living in the US. She did FFoSM and Matty, and she rocks my world.

But a bad CE is a horror.

This makes me close the book.

Exactly. Same here. I sure as hell wouldn't write it, either.

Oh, and Amy, my alltime favourite bad CE? The lunatic at Piatkus who copy-edited the UK edition of Eyes in the Fire. In an example of wanting desperately to put her own imprint?

She tried to change "the complex network of ganglia at the base of her spine tightened to the edge of pain" to "she gasped, dizzy, almost swooning with fear."

I wrote a little note next that one - nice and simple. It said, "If you wish to write a bad bodice-ripper, feel free to do so. But hand my manuscript to a real copy editor on your way out."

"If you wish to write a bad bodice-ripper, feel free to do so. But hand my manuscript to a real copy editor on your way out."

Hee. That's what gets me, though -- could she not see that those two sentences are completely different creatures?

And the stuff you quoted about the UK use of "in hospital" and "at school" -- any CE worth her red pencil should know this. I knew this before I was a CE, or an editor, or a writer, for that matter. (Okay, I'll admit I love all things British, but still.) I once had a CE work on a Regency who clearly had no idea what any of the cant/slang meant, and changed it all. I nearly burst a blood vessel when production gave it back to me. (I sent them on to the authors myself, not production.)

Amy, please, ma'am, will you be my copy editor? For anything I write that isn't part of this series, I mean, because assuming my publisher findds the time to actually make the offer she has now twice told my editor she wants to make, I will have Ann for this particular series?

Another example from the Weaver nightmare, this one more subtle, and flatout deadly:

CE: "Change 'What a lot of noisy water Somerset's got' to "Somerset sure has a lot of noisy rain!'"

Note the differences in that one? Legion, they were. American phrasing, water to rain, exclamation point.

I think I said something unusually profane at that point, even for me. I do know I came into the thread to fume, while Ruth called this twit and told her, BAD editor! No biscuit.