For those of us suffering from excessive anxiety about a possible Trump presidency, I think we need a support group.

Maybe call it, "But I don't wanna live under a fascist autocracy."

Oh man, I got another author who is shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that their article was...

[wait for it]

...EDITED. (Seriously, the author said in her angry little email that "Almost every sentence was edited!" And I though, "Oh shit, did I miss some?")

It's less than 3 Word doc pages, and the author has contacted the head of her department at her university to see how to proceed, because "I have been published numerous times and never has this happened to me before." (Yeah, your weird syntax should be a tipoff as to why I had to edit almost every sentence.)

ISTG, 90% of the times that an author complains that their precious baby words have been defiled by nasty-wasty editing, it's for an editorial. The authors who write 30-page research studies, more often than not, reply with "This reads so much better! Thanks for the editing!"

So, I have to reply to this precious princess and tell her all articles are edited to comply with the style as laid out in the 10th edition of the AMA Style Manual (available for purchase at purveyors of texts everywhere) [no, I'm not including the parenthetical] AND including a link to the Instructions for Authors, which say the same damn thing (namely, YOU WILL BE EDITED, YOU DINK).

And I would bet large sums of money she will reply angrily that, no! HER precious baby words are an exception! At which point I will have to kick her up the chain, because she is a jerk and is wasting our time by not understanding what "editing" means.

I have a much darker picture in my head of what Trump and his followers will do if, come January, someone other than Trump is sworn in.

Well, Trump did call for revolution after Obama won in '12.

(He deleted that tweet shortly after he made it.)

Years ago, when we were doing our magazine in-house, I - as usual - edited the stories that came in. The brand-new editor saw the final version and was horrified that I had CHANGED THEIR WORDS. Never mind that some of them could have used a remedial English class, with emphasis on punctuation ....

And, since we've been talking about stinky things, the U.S. Botanic Garden corpse flower is about to bloom (predicted for Tuesday). Live feed of the plant, so you can enjoy the bloom without the smell. Or DC's weather.

The brand-new editor saw the final version and was horrified that I had CHANGED THEIR WORDS.

Perhaps that person shouldn't have been hired as an editor if they were horrified that you did what their job title describes. Sheesh.

t edit Though that did happen to me at a volunteer gig -- I was asked to edit a newsletter, so I, you know, EDITED. The head of the organization lost his shit at me, yelling that I was not allowed to change people's words. I said, "You asked me to edit; that's what editing IS." He said "I thought you would just run spellcheck." I told him that if that's all he wanted, then the people who wrote the articles could run spellcheck before turning in the articles, and I declined to continue not-editing the newsletter (which turned into a shitstorm of epic proportions, where I was called disloyal, a liar, and a quitter [that last one was, I suppose, technically true]).

I hated editing people's fiction, because I was never sure where the line was between authorial voice and coherence. I did lots of "This sentence isn't clear, perhaps focus on the action?" or "Two pages back you spent a lot of time on the opulence of the scene, several paragraphs on the luxury of the clothing seems excessive here."

Man, I love it when editors make my shit better. I love editors! They make me sound so smart.

I hated editing people's fiction, because I was never sure where the line was between authorial voice and coherence.

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd want to edit fiction. STEM editing is so wonderfully clear, because its goal is: present the data as precisely as possible.

For those of us missing Cute Overload:

[link]

Ah, one of the freelance coordinators gave me a template for an icily polite letter that basically says "No, we're the fucking AMA, and we WILL edit your article, but obviously if we change the meaning, we need to know so we can change it back. Don't come for me, bro."