This week crushed me for no valid reason. I mean, there were reasons, but they should have been manageable, or rather, I should have been able to manage them, but apparently I am a huge baby. The big deal of the week: I got my copyedits, and made it through about forty pages before I gave up and started over again because I was absolutely certain I had missed something. The copyeditor didn’t get my style and removed all my commas. I use a lot of commas. I love my commas. My commas don’t just arbitrarily show up on a page. If I had wanted to use an em dash I WOULD HAVE USED AN EM DASH.
I said, “My poor commas!”
Kate said, “Stet everything.”
I said, “Every time I wrote ‘had not’ she changed it to ‘hadn’t.’”
Kate said, “Stet.”
I said, “And this sentence is so obviously colloquial, why is she trying to change it?”
Kate said, “STET.”
But listen, this happens all the time. Copyeditors have their style, the writer has theirs, and sometimes they mesh perfectly and the copyeditor saves your ass a million times over, and sometimes they don’t mesh well and then the writer wants to die. This is my fourth book, and I should be used to this by now. I remember the copyeditor for my first book suggested that a character would probably not have been listening to that particular Bob Dylan song, and maybe I should pick another? I had spent that summer in Seattle, and I can still picture myself sitting at the big table in the apartment, reading that note, and thinking: Who is this terrible person trying to destroy my soul? But of course they’re not doing that at all. They’re just trying to do their job.
Still, it crushed me. I cried during acupuncture, and I mean wept. All I could see in my head when I closed my eyes was those little delete boxes on the word document. I had been stetting practically everything all day. But I was looping: I was so fearful that I would miss something, because all those boxes started to add up and look the same. What if my book, my beloved book, would turn out less than perfect? It is so hard to explain this agony. Basically you have created something, someone has uncreated it, and now you must build it back up again. My long, paragraph-length, comma-laden sentences run deep within me.
I know I sound like a total asshole here but I swear to god it’s true.
Rosie took pity on me and asked me to coffee. I sat down and told her everything and she told me I definitely should close the word document and not look at it again until next week. And so that is what I did. I am going away for the weekend to give a reading, and when I return I will feel fresh and clear-headed and ready for all of those little delete boxes, and then I will open that document again. And start stetting.
You are a badass. That is all.*
* I hate people who write ‘that is all’, but in this case it fits.