It would turn out years after I started that I would be relying on a stable of clients, but I hadn’t begun to acquire them and didn’t know that any success I had would revolve around developing one. The first few years were about seeking first projects for companies while trying to avoid making bone-headed judgment errors that showed how little I knew.
I’d had the gig at my cousin’s textbook house to declare, and the grade six reader that I handled for a childhood friend. On the basis of those two, I actually had some luck finding projects for MEs who it turned out knew as little as I still did. Coles Notes – do you remember them? – had me turn Macbeth into modern English. The woman who ran their publishing wing had plans (which never panned out) to turn all of Shakespeare into modern English, which would have been a great gig, except they pulled the plug after Macbeth. Still, it was fun for the month or two that idea lasted. I typed it out on a fifty-dollar electric typewriter, which was all anyone had back then.
McGraw-Hill brought me in to proofread a Canadian history book for high schoolers – Standing into Danger –– about a Newfoundland shipwreck. That was the most fun I’d had so far. But the trade side of that company folded soon after. It paid 390 dollars.
Scholastic Books hired me to CE a children’s novel, and I made a fool of myself for trying too hard and taking it too seriously. It wasn’t the lost sequel to Ulysses but I treated it like it was. The woman must have thought I was mad, and didn’t call back.
All baby steps, and they all felt momentous. It was hardly a career, but something was taking shape. Meanwhile, there were months where my life savings were whatever was jingling in my pocket. A vacation was basically walking down to the chain coffee shop to get a free coffee out of my punch card.
I finally bought a dictionary. When I started out, I thought, “The library’s just down the street. I’ll just stroll down and look when I need to.” It occurred to me soon enough that that wasn’t going to work. A copyeditor had better have a dictionary, who knew? With a $50 cheque that came in, I walked down to Grand & Toy and bought the Oxford Concise, 6th ed. That left me $20 to get through the rest of the month.
Twenty years later, I broke that dictionary – the cover fell off from wear. I emailed a photograph of it to the MEs at my main client, and two of the five emailed back, “You’re still using the sixth edition? You should have been using the ninth by now.” Which wasn’t the point I was trying to make.
Bibliographies are mostly fun
My wife would ask me over breakfast most days, “What kind of day are you going to have?” And on good days, I’d be able to tell her, “It’s going to be great – I’ve got a fifty-page biblio to handle. Love those biblios …” Or if it was Friday, I’d tell her, “Easy day – I hoarded a biblio.” Biblios hardly ever felt like work. They’re pure mechanics, and fixes tend to be obvious. I could open the file, plug in the headphones, tune in some Bach or Debussy, and relax all day. Because they are almost always that simple.
The point of a biblio is for the reader to be able to find the sources the author used. That’s all that a biblio entry needs to provide, never more than that. If an item won’t take you to the source, then (a) it’s incomplete, and it’s your job to complete it, or (b) it doesn’t belong in the biblio. If part of an item doesn’t help you locate the source, then it doesn’t need to be provided, and you can trim it out.
Is it Works Cited, References, or Bibliography? Works Cited lists all the sources the author has quoted or paraphrased in the text. References is the APA term for Works Cited. Bibliography lists all the sources the author has used when writing the manuscript, whether he’s quoted/paraphrased them or not. In practice, authors tend to just pick one of those terms out of a hat, and I don’t bother to change it. Most mscripts would be Works Cited if the author was being careful to choose correctly, but most authors call them Bibliography out of habit or sloth. The outlier is that writers who work to APA guidelines always (almost) get it right, and call them References, when they’re providing cites.
Then there are biblios that are not simple, and okay, here’s where you’d better know what you’re doing. Few biblios qualify as not simple – perhaps 10 percent of them – but they’re common enough that you have to wonder what you’re in for when you call up the first page of one. Some are heavy in legal citations; some are heavy in government archival cites and read as if a troop of monkeys fought for rights to play with your keyboard; some are heavy with foreign cites, including, God help you, foreign government archival cites; some are heavy on centuries-old sources (from back when nobody cared much about standardization); some are just plain sloppy; some are subdivided into multiple sections, which makes the task easier in some ways (182 journal articles in a row, means you can coast through the last 179) but also fraught later on when you have to check the biblio against the notes or text citations. There’s not enough room in one instalment to go into all those exceptions to the “biblios are easy” declaration. But I hope I’ll get to them at some point.