I’m sure that every trade generates its war stories. Bakers have them, lawyers do, chefs do, sailors do, tuba players … jockeys … copyeditors. Moments when the job goes bad, suddenly or not, God help you, and a simple enough task goes irreversibly sideways. It could be for any reason, as long as it’s unexpected. If it was always the same reason, it wouldn’t be a catastrophe, because experience would tell you what to do about it. A real catastrophe is going to be one-off. Everyone remembers their own, and one of the weary joys of this craft is swapping stories with people in the same line who recognize a catastrophe when they see one.
Most projects roll along easily, and everyone is happy with everyone else. Those are the ones you forget.
I’ll start with a simple one, which I remember as the “Lost in the Mail” job. It was an advanced sociology mscript for a textbook house, “the semiotics of sociology,” if you can figure out what that is. I never did. Even I could tell, that long ago, that the volume editor was in over his head with the subject and that the contributors were neophytes – most of them were his grad students and first-time authors displaying first-timers’ weaknesses (confused thinking buried under weak writing and jargon they themselves didn’t fully understand). The volume editor should have caught most of that, but it was clear he didn’t look or try hard. This was pencil edit days, and my changes were heavy throughout. That’s what I remember first about that project – what a slog it was, week after week for five weeks.
I decided to mail the mscript back to the house instead of using a courier. (I was never a fan of couriers, and the post office was much closer than any UPS.) At the post office, I asked for registered mail, and the clerk there told me, “Within the city? Don’t bother. Save the money. It’ll be there in three days, tops.” So I saved the three dollars and sent it as surface mail.
Ten days go by, and I wonder why I haven’t heard from the ME that he had received the mscript. This was before email, and even before fax machines, when communications had to be by letter or by phone. In the event, he phoned me. He’s a good guy, and to this day is one of my oldest friends in the business, but we hadn’t become that yet, and he was angry. I told him I’d mailed the package. He gasped, and told me that I owed him a completed task, that he’d wait five more days for it, and that it it didn’t show up I would have to redo the CE over the weekend.
Five days go by. On a Friday morning he couriers me a fresh copy of the mscript and tells me to have it back to him by Monday. I’m still haunted by that weekend – 500 atrociously high-jargon pages in two days. No Friday dinner out with my wife, no market Saturday, no Sunday morning walk, except that Deborah got one – an emergency run to find me more 2H pencils. No sleep. I stopped for dinner on Sunday, at my desk, and went back at it till Monday dawn. I never left my office.
That morning, I call the ME and tell him that I’ve finished all but the last two chapters out of the twelve. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he begins. So he just says it. The mscript package had arrived on his desk ten minutes earlier, busted open and retaped and covered with tracks from being run over by a truck, but yes, he has it, and it’s usable.
It had been my own fault that I hadn’t registered it, so I kept my mouth shut about the weekend I just had. But he noticed without my telling him.
“Four hundred fifty pages in three days?,” he asked.
“That’s right. My own fault I went through that.”
“Wow,” he says. “Get some sleep, now.”
Ten minutes later, he calls back. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says, again. So again, he just does. The last two chapters, the ones I hadn’t handled yet that weekend, are missing from the package. The ones I hadn’t completed by Monday morning will need to be done by end of day.
“I’ll get on them right now,” I tell him. “Will you send a courier for a four o’clock pickup?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” If I’d cried, I would have remembered it, so I suppose I didn’t. A situation like that, I would have felt mostly despair, with completing the job the only available cure. But after it was over, I would have told myself, “I’m going to keep this client. He’s not going to forget I salvaged this.” And that’s what happened. If you make a blunder, own up to it right away, in full, and then fix it right away.
The ME used the second CE, the rush job, for typesetting. That company always assigned proofs to a second set of eyes (which is a good practice – CEs should not proofread their own work, though many houses let them.) Which is what this ME did. And when the proofs came back, the ME asked the proofreader, “Did you notice anything strange about the copy edit?” “No, nothing,” she replied, “it’s cleaner than most.”