Manning the Workshop

Most of you who read me have probably already read this post on punching our fears in the face. In a more literal mental sense than perhaps most people think of. So, alright, I'm one of those people for whom running subroutines with names and faces and particular skillsets of their own also helps. As if you couldn't have guessed.

The other thing I (we) do, which is a lot more foundational for me, is having a mindscape. Some people call it a memory palace, other people call it your power focus or your center or what-the-fuck-ever. I like mindscape, because I grew up on a steady diet of mythology and folklore, and what it is, essentially, is me playing Fisher Queen. I have a manor house, because I imprinted on Narnia and L'Engle and Weyrs and other such sprawling complexes which may or may not bear any resemblance to architectural feasibility. (Kitty has a Tower, a White Tower against a certain someone else's Dark Tower, because she imprinted on King.) Then there's the lands around, because when I was a little girl I wanted a lot of land, both from the horse-crazy phase (which I grew out of) and the sheer pleasure of being in the relative middle of nowhere (which I did not). Also I gave myself fire lizards, because fuck you MY mindscape, that's why.

(It probably says several things about me that I went for the empathic carnivores that are more intimidating than they look. I leave parsing the subject as an exercise for the reader.)

So, then, let's play with the land of metaphor! The lands are mostly there to amuse me, though there's a set of burial mounds (look, I grew up within spitting distance of a set of Late Woodland mounds, I imprinted on those heavily) which serve as the mental place I keep bad memories. Not quite like having a nightmare realm, more of a place where I can shut things away unless I'm needing to bring them out for some reason or another. Then we get into the manor house itself for interesting bits of metaphor - there is, as you would expect, a massive fucking library. Because I need my reference material, and you didn't think I kept all those pop culture allusions sorted without some kind of help, did you? Especially around Yuletide, when I have to haul out my reference material and edit however many stories Kitty ends up pinch-hitting this year.

Up on the top floor, though, is my Workshop, which gets a capital letter because tradition. (Also known as its origins have been lost to the dim dark haze of memory.) It has turret guns with which I and whichever subroutines are running can shoot down brainweasels and other distractions. Like the urge I'm having right now to tab over to Twitter and find out who said what this time. (Bang!) The Workshop's also sectioned off into smaller chunks; I keep the editing workshop separate from the music workshop because they require very, very different forms of attention for me. The editing workshop, as you might expect, has all my grammar and narrative tools laid out; there's the mallet of Wrong POV and the chisel of Clarify Your Action and the brush of Let Me Just Polish Up That Typo For You. Among other things, of course, but that does for a sampling of recently used tools. I grew up with family members who did woodworking, imprinted on archaeology early and often, and only came to fiber crafts later on. Besides which, in a lot of respects editing is like an archaeological expedition, to find the bones of a writer's story and help to fix up the rest of the structure so that it looks like a story ought. Sometimes that means you learn that the story's bones look like a whole different animal once you get it excavated, but usually it's putting the vertebrae in their proper order and fixing the reversed phalanges. I did mention the archaeological imprinting, right?

You may have noticed I think a lot in metaphor, or at least I'm less shy about saying so than a lot of people. (I may be less shy about a lot than a lot of people. This continues to boggle me. If you guessed I was the shy kid at school, you are 100% right.) At any rate, the music workshop is even more metaphorical and, I would say, close to synaesthetic in nature, at least as compared to the editing workshop. Moreover, parts of it are relatively new in conception. I've always played music, but I've never approached it in as structured a manner as I am now. The muscle memory section is old, and is hard to put into words even metaphorically - you know how you know your way around your home, right up until you (or somebody else) moves a chair? Like that, applied to technique. Those of you who play an instrument, dance, do martial arts, or anything else that requires a specific form of body awareness know how hard this can be to describe to laypeople. Then there's the repertoire section, aka that part where I learn other people's music. This also has some archeological tools in place; getting to the bones of a tune is a crucial part of learning a primarily aural (and oral) tradition. The sight-reading module looks like nothing so much as a microscope, whereas the ear training module is a pair of giant noise-canceling headphones - I hate wearing them IRL but I appreciate the increased focus the metaphor demands. And the newest part, the songwriting part, is one part writing toolkit to one part raw emotional core to one part music theory. Theory falls under the same very general kind of pattern recognition that narrative and grammar patterns do, which I find alternately helpful and frustrating. Most of this takes the form of blobs of color, often but not always yarn-based; sometimes when I have a particular image in mind it's worked more in cross stitch where every piece is slow and laborious to come together, but it makes a glorious final image. As I do more songwriting, no doubt this part of the workshop will firm up its metaphors and imagery.

I do a lot of work in my head, due to my various preferred forms of expression. It's only fair to me that I keep a tidy - if not logical - workplace. This isn't the only tool in my kit; I'm as likely to use fiddle practice as a form of meditation and to-do lists as a form of structure as anything more internal, but it's a damn powerful one. And now that I have straightened out my headspace for the afternoon by writing this post, I get to go make dinner! This is actually a fairly common thing for me, the internal sorting intentionally combined with external action, so that I'm neither too stuck in my head nor too prone to acting without thinking. While I cook dinner, no doubt my subroutines will be working on sorting out the lyrics I finished drafting two days ago, assimilating the version of this week's tune I solidified earlier today, and arranging my weekend schedule. And whether it's this evening or a few days from now, I will inevitably be astonished at how much I get done by sheer virtue of having a well-tended mindscape.

Second Verse

Hey, look! I have a blog. Another blog, since technically I've been running Unspooling Fiction for the better part of six months with my co-conspirator, braintwin, sister-in-arms, whatever you want to call her. I have no idea where that time went, nor how that became as successful as it did, but since I'm endeavoring to be a real grown-up professional something or another, I got my very own blog.

If you want to get really specific, I had a blog over on WordPress that I just killed, because I'd rather work with the Blogger interface and, frankly, the handle I was using was too restrictive. I don't want to pretend like I'm not doing half a dozen things at once at all times. Unlike Kitty, I'm not engaging in the unspoken authorial contract of Having A Blog; instead I'm engaging in the unspoken very busy person contract of maintaining an online presence. But my path to get here has been long, twisty, arduous, and I in no way promise that here will be the same place tomorrow that it is as I type. I rather hope it won't.

Going back some ways, I went to college and got an English degree, and now everyone is either laughing or nodding in sympathy. I didn't get it because I expected to make money off it; I got it because I loved the subject. I adore ripping texts apart and understanding them in new ways. (If you want to see me fall over laughing, just tell me with a straight face that I'm interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.) This did not lead to work in my field. You're all very surprised, I can tell. I have a jar with a surprised face for that; I keep it on my desk.

What it led to was a short series of jobs in fairly dead-end occupations, followed by the loss of my last "real" job a week before the market crashed in '08. (For "real," see 9-5 with benefits. There are reasons I put scare quotes around the term.) I did what I was supposed to for a good year, eighteen months after that. I applied for unemployment, then I applied for jobs. Job after job after job, looking for temp work or temp to hire or anything at all that wanted an over-educated liberal arts major. Eventually, I applied for state healthcare and foodstamps. Throughout it all, I was very lucky to have both savings and a partner who was working in a more lucrative field. But several things kept niggling at the back of my mind as I did this: crafts, writing, and music. I hated the process of applying for two jobs every week even if they were crap jobs or ones I was patently unqualified for, just to fulfill the unemployment requirements. I hated not being able to dive into freelancing as seriously as I might have, because too much and all my benefits would disappear and I'd have to start the whole process again. I loathed having to devote hours every month to ensuring that the benefits were there, since they were one of the few things keeping us from falling back on parental handouts.

Once I eliminated all the piles of bureaucratic bullshit from my life, I got a chance to start again. I spent awhile looking into Etsy and cross stitch, only to determine that the kind of cross stitch I did would be undercut by cheap knockoffs that flood the site. I sat down and wrote a novel, at least half to prove I could, and dropped the second one when I realized that I don't love writing. I love talking about writing, and I love analyzing other people's writing, but that's not the same thing. (Some people find this weird. I find them weird, so it all works out.) Then I fell back in love with music, and I haven't looked back since.

Right now I pay the bills through some arcane conglomeration of proofreading, editing, and translation on the rare occasions I can get it. It's not my first love, but I know the chances of making money off music, and I know I've got another year or more of work to build up enough of a fiddle repertoire to make a go with that. Which you all get to watch me sweat through! I have no idea what's going to happen or where I'm going from here, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

In Which I Blather About Process

It's been pointed out that I should maybe, possibly, talk a little about how I do what I do as far as editing goes. The short version is, I've been reading other people's writing for a very long time now, and I have a good idea about two things: what I like, and what works. I even know how to separate the two, though it's always nice when I get to work with the former. That's not a talent most people have. I can also sit down with something that's not working and list 3-5 ways to fix it, which is generally more helpful than "here's my one true way." The chances that you're coming to me for fiction editing are pretty high. There is no One True Way. There's ways that work, ways that don't, ways that lead you to a story that's not the one you thought you were writing, and ways that may be beyond your current technical skill level. Just for a few.

How I edit is, in at least one sense, very much like how I write and translate. Though it's possible for me to work on the laptop (in fact, I'm doing so right now), I prefer to do the bulk of my work at the desktop. As you can see, I've got most things to hand, and in the event that I need my foreign language dictionaries they're a hop away in the filing cabinet. (Yes, I have a filing cabinet full of language and music books. What? This isn't normal? I ran out of bookshelf space.) Squirt bottle of chastisement for when the cat decides attacking his reflection is the best way to break my concentration, assorted musical instruments when I'm chewing over a knotty problem, various things to keep warm with, external hard drive, and all the ibuprofen and Tums you can shake a stick at. I try to keep it warm enough that I'm not shivering, cool enough that I'm not sweating, and the music at a volume suitable to my mood. I take micro-breaks where I surf the internet, reply to chats or emails, and so on at completely unpredictable intervals. Longer breaks come around once every hour or two, where I make sure to stand up and stretch and do a couple rounds of PT exercises.

I usually work best in one hour blocks of time anyway, spaced out throughout the day and swapping one set of tasks for another. Ideally, I swap editing/writing/translating for something physical, be it music practice or eating a meal or doing some quick housework. Unlike a lot of people, I don't have specific times of the day I am "most" productive. My most productive times are when I plant my ass in the chair and declare I'm accomplishing something, and I do that at least twice a day, five days a week. Because breaks and regular meals are important too! Because I'm a musician by training, I tend to think of this as 'playing the rests.' Editing work occupies my analytical brain and gives my body a chance to rest; music occupies my body and my instincts (and, sometimes, a different side of analysis). Translation calls on both instincts and analysis, especially if I'm not going for a word-for-word but a more freeform translation, making it arguably the most difficult of the three. Regardless of what I'm doing, the important part is that I get to engage all my faculties each day, as well as taking short knitting or cross stitch or reading breaks, depending on what part of me feels most depleted.

Whenever I get a new work, I do an initial read-through in reader-brain. This is markedly different from editor brain, and it lets me figure out if the writer has succeeded in whatever they set out to do. Am I entertained? Am I informed? Am I moved? I make a note of it, usually for my own personal use, and go on to the second read-through. Assuming I'm doing a full round of edits on it, I start by addressing the overall structure. Weak points get shored up, places where I feel the writing has strayed get marked off, and I make a quick sketch of the outline of the piece for the benefit of the writer. (If the writer worked from an outline, it's always fascinating to know how closely these match.) For fiction, I will take special note of guns on the mantel. Then I send it all back to the writer and we get to engage in either real time or asynchronous discussion of the edits. Once the structure is hammered into something closer to a final draft, I work on grammar fixes, typos, and line edits. Sometimes a line edit will lead to revisiting the structural edits, but more often they sand the rough edges off an author's natural voice, playing to their strengths. For example, Kitty has a very noir, spare writing style for a great deal of her work. This makes finding the exact word tricky but ultimately more rewarding than using five words where one would do.

Over the years, I've read lots and lots and many blog posts over How To Be Self-Employed, but the one thing that the most successful people have in common is that they show up. Whatever it is that I'm aiming to do, I have to be there for it, and being there can be as simple as walking away from the computer and picking up my instrument or as complex as sitting and working on edits while using of the internet/books to fact-check things and not getting distracted. It's a tricky balance, to be sure, and there are days when I absolutely don't wanna. Those are the days I curl up with hot cocoa or promise myself a cold beer after finishing a certain amount of work. It's not just a good idea to reward yourself, it's vital when you're self-employed. But that's a whole other blog post.

Being an introduction of sorts

I suppose the first and most sensible place to begin is an introduction and some explanation of how I got to this point. What a quaint and shocking notion, etc. Some of you reading this will likely know me from my work over on Unspooling Fiction; others of you may know me more professionally or not at all. Regardless, I needed a place to drop all my linguistics and editing geek babbling, and since that's nominally what I do for a living (when I have the clients), this blog was born.

At the moment, I speak about three and a half languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. I learned bits and pieces of Spanish in some summer program when I was very small, and retained a few odds and ends until I came back to study it independently as an adult. (This made for a great deal of swearing when I discovered the alphabet had changed meantime. Give me back ch and rr! Hmph.) French I picked up from the end of middle school straight through high school, and was one of only two students in my class to complete French 5. I think I was the only one to try taking the AP exam, for all the good that did me since I lacked motivation as well as opportunity for lots of different conversational partners with varying accents. My primary teacher had a strong Parisian accent, somewhat distilled from years of dealing with high school students, and I had maybe a semester of time around a Quebecoise student teacher. Since that time I've gotten better about seeking out a variety of French media, but it's still not easy.

German I've been working on for about a year now, and it's both easier and more difficult than the Romance languages, depending on what aspect of them I'm dealing with. The list of languages to learn is as long as my arm and ever-growing, but imminent projects include Arabic, Russian, the rest of the Romance languages (though probably only a drive-by attempt at Romanian), Japanese, and Mandarin. Assuming I can find good classes on some of those, of course, since I may be stubborn and driven, but I'm not going to set myself up to fail at learning a language by not finding a native speaker (ideally) to learn from.

Things in my toolkit include Memrise, for vocab and alphabets; Project Gutenberg for various texts in their original language (Dumas père and fils are both on my to-read list); and an assortment of hard-copy textbooks, dictionaries, and verb dictionaries. On top of that, I have the kind of ridiculous English vocabulary that stems from a lifelong liberal arts education and a brain that is pattern-seeking in the extreme. This often results in hilarity as I either try to jam things in patterns that don't work, find a pattern that makes sense to my brain that nobody else understands, or look at a word and recognize its Latin roots and the ending being used and never need to look it up again.

I never said it wasn't a usefully skewed brain.

Since I get reminded that I'm skewed in this direction on a regular basis, though, I figure other people might be amused to watch the process of learning a new language (or three) and the ultimate results. Plus, I get a way to organize my thoughts on any given aspect and maybe have some no-shit-Sherlock moments. I like those moments.

I also edit. I edit a lot. Sometimes I have this urge to talk about common mistakes people make, sometimes I feel like banging the drum about the ways the English language is changing as a result of the internet (and whether or not I approve of all those ways it's going to keep changing), and sometimes I just need to fling up my hands and go WRITERS HOW DO THEY WORK.
I'm told the answer is to give them chocolate, but I have my doubts.