How did I get into this? That story, okay. I had a journalism degree that I knew I was never going to use. I went to South America for a long few months in order to delay making any life plans and came back with absolutely none. At a family reunion, I was talking to a distant cousin who asked, “Have you thought of copy editing?” (It was spelled as two words back then.) I asked her back, “What do they do?” She got me a temp job at the grade school textbook house where she worked.
That was mostly a clerking job, but still, I was indoors at an actual publishing house, with a cubicle all to myself, and had a chance to see what the job looked like, if nothing else. That one didn’t last, but still, sheer inertia and a grain of experience to exaggerate had me looking for another similar gig. So I started making cold calls. The Senior ME at one textbook house, the largest one in Canada, actually returned my call, and instead of telling me that all their needs were met, said, “Did you live on the Second Concession of King Township? Do you have a brother named James? Are you those Kudelkas?” I stared at her name on my call list, gave my childhood memories a hard shake, and took a flier: “And you lived on the Fifth Concession, top of the hill. You father kept bees.” We’d gone to grade school together. It was 10 October 1984 – I remember that, because it also happened to be my birthday. It led to my first freelance assignment: The Nineteenth Moon of Jupiter Beasts, a grade two reader.
I kept looking for a full-time job after that, but all I found was spot work, which meant that suddenly I was a freelancer. Except for two six-month stretches early on, I’ve been one ever since.
My first monograph? That was thirty years ago, 1994. This time it was a bit of a cattle call. The ME (who still comes over for dinner sometimes) handed me a skills test to complete, and I aced it – the fourth-highest score she had ever seen, she told me long after. (I didn’t tell her at the time that I’d just taken the identical test at a different house.) I don’t remember the name of the book she assigned me, only that it was urban studies for a West Coast professor. It seems I did not embarrass myself, because that press has been my home base ever since.
I bumped into my cousin again a few months ago at a family gathering, and as always since I started out, she asked me how business was. I’m always delighted to tell her, just as she’s delighted at what she let loose on the world.
ADDENDUM: Etymology can be useful and even fun. In situ is Latin for “in position” (more or less). So I always apply where to the word “situation”: “In situations where …” Never when. I don’t know what other CEs do, or whether it’s necessary, or even correct, but it’s what I always do, and no one has complained.
ANOTHER ADDENDUM: Strictly speaking, denigrate means “criticize unfairly.” When I encounter it in a mscript, I always change it to “disparage.” It’s close enough. Disparage means “represent as being of little worth.” So they mean two slightly different things, but even so, they’re close enough in meaning that they basically overlap. In social studies mscripts, it’s quite amazing how often authors reach for denigrate – they all do at some point. “The racists denigrated Black people … [etc.].” And I always make the change, and add an in-text comment: “‘Denigrate’ means ‘blacken’ and is falling out of use.” (In this case, how can you denigrate people who are already Black?) It just never strikes me as a word that an author would want to use in a sociology book if he considered its derivation, which is niger, the Latin word for black. And the response at I get to that comment is generally, “Thank you so much for catching that.” Their hero …