Monday, January 23, 2006

Call for Submissions

All Royal Stet Lodge members in good standing are hereby required and directed to proceed without a moment's loss of time to post as comments to this post any and all Interesting marginal notes on manuscripts, such as those directed to copyeditors, overeager or otherwise, made by our esteemed colleagues and clients, The Authors. Said authors are to remain nameless, as are their books, publishers, and all other lawyer-hiring entities related thereto. Hereof nor you nor any of you shall fail as you will answer the contrary at your peril.

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I am sad to say that I am unable to lead the action properly at this time, as I ill-thinkingly sent back unphotocopied the novel proofs we had last week that contained two Extremely Hostile marginal notes, presumably directed by the author to the copyeditor or editor. The wording of one of them was something like, facing a deletion and insertion of several words, "Words that are not the author's should not appear in the text." Another said something like "If you want this reworded, ask me; don't just rewrite it." Very firm black felt-tip printing. We see a lot of distinctive marginal notes, but rarely anything this angry. Perhaps this is because most of our books are nonfiction? Discuss.

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