"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
A busy day at work, spent mostly continuing to read the manuscript that arrived in my in-box on Friday. I finished, for the most part, although I’ll have to spend tomorrow making a few structural changes, as well as converting all of my handwritten corrections into the Word document I can send back to the authors. (Therein lies the drawback of preferring to edit on a printed copy.)
And tonight, for dinner, we had leftover Chinese food. Hence, the leftover fortune cookie.
What did I do today? I had my ass thoroughly kicked by the Sunday crossword. I went to see Thor, which I quite enjoyed. And I wrote this in my semi-regular writing group:
The prophet killed the poisoned man, but the poisoned man refused to die.
Every schoolchild knows the story, has heard a thousand times how the poisoned man tricked the prophet into revealing his false god’s name and, through his magics, how evil came to be exiled from our land. There are some texts that still name the man by the old traditions, Ibrahim el Fadil, although the name of the god, whatever it might have been, has long been lost to the dusts of time. Scholars have long debated and conjectured, but, then, that is the nature — is it not? — of scholarship. You and I have no need to know the name, my little one, or in the end even to believe in the stories of the poisoned man. The shipwreck in the guarded wastes. The seven demon brides. The slaying of the giant’s sister. These may all be true, or they may just be parables, more fancies for a young mind like yours than the true history of what once was. We have no need to know the truth, so long as the laws that have grown out of those traditions continue to keep us safe. There is your truth, young daughter, the only truth you will need upon your long journey. The knowledge that, if given law, men can be good; moreover, men will strive to be good, will seek out law even as the other half of their nature may seek to undermine and escape from it. Even if the poisoned man is just a myth and you do not, as your grandmother has suggested, encounter his spirit upon the road, take comfort and strength in the existence of the law he has bequeathed to us. It is durable stuff, that law, and it is the wall that keeps evil’s exile still in place.
Though I would be remiss if I did not instruct you in at least a few additional magics…
All in all, not a bad Sunday. Though no fortune cookies.
Today I bought some new shoes. I paid ten dollars in overdue library fines. I re-mailed a few issues of Kaleidotrope that had come back because of wrong addresses. I went for a walk. I read a little. I listened to this Radiolab podcast. I watched the last episodes of the season of Supernatural and How I Met Your Mother. (The former making poor use of H.P. Lovecraft but generally turning around an uneven season; the latter…well, there’s a reason sitcoms generally don’t have CGI budgets, I guess.) And I had dinner with my parents and aunt, who’s in town for her daughter’s bridal shower. (The wedding’s in North Carolina, but they’re all from here originally.) We ate out at a local Chinese restaurant. So I guess tonight the fortune cookie is entirely justified.
Anyway, that’s the nutshell version of Saturday.
How is that Friday, the very last day in the week, was also by far my busiest?
Maybe it has something to do with the manuscript that landed in my lap, or rather my e-mail in-box, first thing this morning. I started reading through it and realized it needed more corrections — mostly typos, but some factual — than at first glance. So, aside from another project that ate into a lot of my time, I spent the day reading the book, with my red pen in hand. As I noted via Twitter, sometimes I don’t feel like I’m correcting grammar, but rather introducing it to a manuscript for the very first time. (I also realized that my life would be very different, at least in the way I think about my job and the way I do it, if I hadn’t taken that copyediting class my senior year of college.)
When I left for the day, I was about halfway through the manuscript. With luck, I’ll finish on Monday and send my corrections and queries off to the authors. It would be nice to put the book into production soon, even if at this point it’s unlikely to make the year.
And yeah, I’m fairly sure the world isn’t going to end this weekend.
This evening, after dinner, I got a fortune cookie, the one in the photograph up above. (That’s allowed even when you don’t eat Chinese food for dinner, right?) It said, “A romantic evening awaits you tonight.” So, of course, I spent the evening watching a zombie movie with friends over Twitter. Well, I had a lot of fun, even if I can’t say my feelings on 28 Weeks Later as a film are much revised from my original opinion.
Though never let it be said that zombies can’t be romantic.
The sun actually came out for most of today, which was a shock. I ate my lunch in a little public park — basically just some benches in the courtyard next to a building — a couple of blocks from the office.
Beyond that, it was a pretty ordinary Thursday. I started reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea. I got my business cards — a whole box, with no one, really, to give them to. And the not-quite-as-dreadful instant coffee flavors arrived today as well. That’s about the level of excitement we’re dealing with here, this particular Thursday.