Everything is fine

Posted by Chris H.

I've been shirking my responsibilities. Laura has made this clear in no uncertain terms by forwarding me a second chapter of that ill-bred pestilence that conspires under the misnomer "novel in progress." I am thinking at this point installments will have to undergo the fierce swipe of the editor's pen before they see the light of day. Such is my service to mankind.

There are, of course, no actual editors in our offices. There is me, and that only goes as far as the three month course on copyediting I took in which I struggled to "recall" the basic rules of grammar. This was an interesting experience, mostly in that I am fairly confident most of us in the class were "recalling" nothing, having never learned such rules. That they exist and--more importantly-- that people care about the proper places of these squiggles and lines was something I was always conscious of much in the way that I am conscious of the fact that Nicaragua is a country. The country is a place I have no plan to visit, but grammar is a thing that seems determined to visit itself upon me.

This is all well and good, and the periodic blog-like updates I have provided are, as you may have suspected, a sort of cagey manoeuvre to buy time. While I purport to have a stable of writers, the unfortunate, perhaps, yes, even unsavory truth is that I am nominally at the wheel with Laura's hands steering from the passenger's seat, and this does not a dread fleet of fearmobiles make. One might be more inclined to paint our endeavours thus far as a sad little buggy, dripping its way down a desert canvas toward a long, noiseless fall, and then nothing.

Rest assured, I am determined to see that this is not the case.