I bet there's an online club for Bartleby-the-Scriveners where they get together and discuss the Scrivenering they accomplish each day.

"Instead of making one note at the beginning of the document that they needed to change [blah] back to [foo], I added a note every single place [foo] was changed to [blah] in the document! I know that 50 notes will ensure a prompt response!"

(No, it is literally 50 notes telling me "In the field of [medical foo], we use the term [foo] instead of [blah]. Please keep [foo.]" FIFTY TIMES I HATE YOU SO HARD YOU SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE.)

(I wouldn't hate them so much if I didn't have a running list of at least 10 items where they object to our editing according to our style manual. In some instances, we let the whiny special snowflakes have their way, but in other instances, we *never* change [blah] to [foo], and have to explain that to the special snowflakes who have apparently never read an issue of the journal they want to be published in.)

(Haaaaaaaate.)

Oooh, and someone on FB is taking my love of DST as a personal affront and snarking about how "sure, people who can work from home and start whenever they want must love it!"

1. I don't "start whenever." It is an actual job, you ass.

2. Fuck off.

3. I've loved DST even when I worked in an office.

4. See #2.

5. I'm not actually loving DST *at you.* This is not a personal attack; it's just my preference.

6. Please see #s 2 and 4.

7. PS Are you my difficult author?

It was a full moon last Thursday. (In the public library world, we note these; they seem to correspond with higher than usual levels of crazy.)

As I am going over a chapter manuscript that I wrote to incorporate the volume editor's notes, I am in a position of great ambivalence wrt Teppy's lovely editorial screeds. I mean, yes, style, but WHY MUST YOUR HOUSE STYLE BE SO FIDDLY AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER IT. But, then, thank you for noting the mistakes in my citations, especially when you pointed to the place I should actually be citing, saving me a trip to another library to consult a 900-page book. (This editor is not the press editor - she's an academic assembling the book. So all the press editor stuff will go to her. But still I am trying to format my citations according to house style!) (Did I mention that this is a chapter based on my dissertation which I abandoned in 2001? And every single time I deal with it there's some type of agony?)

WHY MUST YOUR HOUSE STYLE BE SO FIDDLY AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER IT.

Oh, believe me, I think our style is fiddly as hell and kind of ridiculous. We are NEVER allowed to say something like "diabetic patients"; it always has to be "patients with diabetes." I get that the general reasoning is to not identify the patient AS their disease, but let me tell you, it gets REALLY unwieldy when I have to change "COPD patients" to "patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease."

And I have a really hard time remembering all of our weird fiddly style points, partly because they change all the time. No joke -- we get about 3-5 emails a month telling us "We may no longer use [foo], but must use [blah]." Super annoying.

Happy to report I missed nothing at the office despite being out last Thursday and Friday thanks to our 20° angle skating rink of a parking lot. At least this icefall was considerate enough to come when work was absolutely quiet.

I am wearing short sleeves in the office (I took off my cardigan) and not a turtleneck, a dress AND a cardigan!

Woo hoo!

Steph, I had never thought about publishing like this, so I'm finding the back and forth really interesting. Like, if the journal would never print [blah], why is that even a negotiation? And I see your post about sometimes you do negotiate, but it feels like it could just be "take it or leave it" with a lot of these changes -- like, if they want to be published in your journal, they have to use [foo], but they don't have to be published in your journal!

In a good example of publishing issues, the guidelines for illustrations at the press this book is going to have specific recommendations for production of Figures from ArcGIS. Luckily I had the sense to contact the editor at the press directly to have her translate sample illustrations into their layout program, because following the posted guidelines didn't work at all, and after round 2 of testing she finally came up with, "oh yeah, the last time we worked with this program we did [foo]," so I did that for round 3 and that worked. (Now please change the official guidelines!)

Okay, back to the Late Middle Helladic and Early Late Helladic at Tsoungiza.

Like, if the journal would never print [blah], why is that even a negotiation?

It's not a negotiation, but since the author went through and re-inserted [blah] 50 times, I really have to email the author to say "It is journal style," etc., because otherwise when they see their article online with [blah] rather than [foo] they will lose their minds. Some authors get VERY "Do you KNOW WHO I AM?!?" about shit like this.

And then some smaller stuff we let them change back because we just don't want to fight about it. (Which I don't agree with, because if we let some smaller stuff go through, then the next time we tell an author no, they'll do a search on our website and tell us triumphantly that [foo] has been used in 3 articles and therefore we demand to use [foo], too. Which has happened. They're so proud when they find those 3 exceptions out of the thousands of articles on our website.)

I really have to email the author to say "It is journal style," etc., because otherwise when they see their article online with [blah] rather than [foo] they will lose their minds.

Oh sure, but I could (in a different kind of setting) imagine that being a notification, not something that the author would write back to with further revisions. (I.e., rejecting your explicit house style.)

Heh, Steph, we have shouted pretty much the same things at authors/businesses we have edited.

And I get SO PISSED when people are all "Oh, your wife doesn't work?" Um. Not only do I battle womanfully against crippling depression and anxiety, I do my best to work as mush as possible, build my business AND while this house fooforaw has been going on, I have also spent at LEAST 3-4 per day deep cleaning, packing, moving stuff around and fielding calls, and sitting in the cold ass garage for 3-7 showings per day because agents get pissy if the owners are IN the house, yanno, LIVING and WORKING like real people, when they are showing.

So, yeah. I get you.

Ugh. The radon inspector was supposed to be here at 9, and no show. Don't they have to come IN the house? And the inspection is at noon today. It's not like I was up til 3:15 WORKING and applying for gigs or anything...

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