The Tea That Launched a Thousand Manuscripts

Just a short post about cool beverages (hey, we’re getting warmer weather now!), and my former boss at the university press. I was reminded of her delicious iced tea last weekend when we visited her during Boonville’s annual Big Muddy Folk Festival.

She served us some of her tea while we were there. So delicious and refreshing! I had to make some today for myself.

Jane was the managing editor and, I’ll bet, played a part in creating darned near a thousand published books. (Maybe a lot more. Or maybe I overestimate slightly.) Those of us who worked at the University of Missouri Press during her long tenure were used to seeing her large, insulated cup of iced tea on her desk. It was a fixture, just like her computer, her dictionaries, her copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, her thesaurus. The stack of manuscript pages for the current work. And a stack of page proofs to be sent to the author, proofreader, and indexer.

Ahhhh, the university press. Where I once edited a manuscript, translated from German, to be published in an English edition, that had sentences that were so long I had to scroll down in order to finish them. Yes! It was double-spaced, DOS, WordPerfect 5.0, and it wasn’t a gigantic monitor, but the whole sentence wouldn’t fit on my screen at one time. I kid you not.

Now, please realize that what follows only applies to a few cases. And it’s my opinion only. I don’t want to make it sound like drowsiness was a big problem for any of us: it really wasn’t. For the most part, we had good, interesting, important manuscripts and incredibly nice authors. But a few manuscripts were indeed snoozers. I’m sure you can imagine. I mean, sometimes I’ve told people about editing, say, index manuscripts, and how I rather enjoyed it. “It’s especially nice to have some Bach or other baroque music playing. All those straight lines and right angles: perfect for making sure all the entries and page numbers are in the right order!” Just telling people about that kind of makes their eyes roll up in their heads.

Once (“only once,” ha ha), while nodding and plodding through one of the snoozers, I truly nodded off while editing. My finger was on the “down” arrow on my keyboard, and I started awake to find the manuscript flying upwards on my monitor, lickety-split. “Heck!” I thought. “This is terrible! What’s the last thing I remember reading?” I had to scroll back for my last change, or my last query.

I figured out lots of ways to keep awake while copyediting some of these projects. My morning coffee kept me chugging for a while, then it was lunchtime, but then there was the dreaded midafternoon lull. It was quiet, and I was digesting. I figured out that Polar Ice–flavored chewing gum could rouse me. I also learned to take a fifteen-minute break behind the building to practice my trumpet. That woke me up! (Well, the smokers in the office took smoke breaks, why couldn’t I?) When the drowsiness was really bad, I would put a small bowl of fresh, raw cranberries on my desk, and chew up one of those when the florescent lights’ humming lulled me to sleep.

What I’m describing is the “goofus” method of being an editor of scholarly manuscripts. Now, I’m about to share with you the “gallant” method: Be like Jane!

Jane’s m.o. was to get up super early, work out, then basically be the first person at the press. She doesn’t drink coffee. Instead, she drinks this tea she makes. There’s caffeine in it, but not much. She’s an efficient worker, so she kept to her schedule and was able to depart for home right at 5 p.m.

So this is her recipe for her special iced tea. It’s how she told me she makes it a few years ago, though according to what she said last week, she changes it a little depending on what she has on hand, or what she’s in the mood for. The bag of black tea can vary, though I indeed like to use Earl Gray.

Here’s the formula:

• 2 teabags green tea
• 2 teabags jasmine tea (which is also green tea)
• 1 teabag Earl Gray (which is a black tea)

That’s it! Make a pitcher using this formula, and you’ll have the deliciousness of the Earl Gray and jasmine, and the health benefits of green tea. Enough caffeine to keep you chugging along, but not enough to make you jingle-jangle. Also, the punchiness of the Earl Gray is softened with the other flavors. I think you’ll like it!

. . . But I’m pretty sure I’m not ready to give up my morning coffee.

Thanksgiving Already

Wow, folks, here it is already. How did it sneak up on me? Oh yeah: I’ve been really busy. But you knew that already, since it’s been so long since I’ve written.

I feel like I owe you an explanation—but that would be really boring. I’ve had some big work deadlines—the kind where you have to stay up late staring at a computer and shuffling through mountains of papers. The kind where the project gets increasingly, nightmarishly complicated and problematic before it can become intelligible and orderly, ready to leave your desk.

To make the past week more difficult, some smaller projects came up out of the blue. To be honest, those were more interesting that the big thing that was seeming old by now, and I enjoyed them—in some respects, just because they represented a change of subject. But it all combined to make for a big work crunch, that ol’ freelancer “feast-or-famine” thing. Hence the long nights.

Up until very recently, I have managed to stay away from the so-called energy drinks, but I’ve been abusing Red Bulls recently. And I’ve found out that although Red Bull “gives you wings,” it also gives you the jitters and heart palpitations! But you know how it is: Sometimes we have to abuse ourselves to meet the all-important deadlines. Right?

I’ve always kind of assumed that the term deadline meant that “if you don’t get this done on time, heads will roll.” But I’m beginning to see that isn’t really the case. Seriously: What’s another damn day? No one gets killed when a work deadline is missed. (Well, unless you’re a surgeon, or someone in charge of delivering a vital organ needed ASAP for transplant purposes.) The very worst that could happen is something financial, a loss of funding, a loss of a job.

Instead, I think that the term deadline has more to do with what happens to us, cumulatively, after decades of that kind of stress—abuse, really.

On the first day of my first job in publishing—right out of grad school—I was shown to my new desk, which I had inherited from my predecessor. The desktop was clean except for some dust, a stapler, a tape dispenser, and the phone with all its unnecessary buttons. I opened the desk drawers and found a dish of paperclips, some chewed-up pencils with the erasers worn off, and a bottle of Excedrin with just a few tablets left to rattle around in it. Sliding around next to a dog-eared pad of post-its were some mint-green Tums, dusty from being loose in the drawer.

That all should have been a clue right there. But I was convinced that my graduate-school training would make me different from my predecessor. I had been taught the correct procedures for my job—I had learned not only the substance of book editing (how to copyedit, how to proof—those two things are different, you know—how to index, etc.) but also the procedures. Editors, by nature, are rule- and procedures-oriented. We like checklists. We like workflow elegance, streamlined with an engineer’s precision.

I had been taught the time-honored, standard, logical sequences for bookmaking. When the manuscript arrives, this, this, and this happen, usually simultaneously, first. The editorial department does this, the marketing department does that, and the production department does something else. And so on down the line—first the copyediting, then the author review, and then you enter all the final corrections. Then the manuscript goes to the production department for page layout, and after that, there’s the page proofing. Blah, blah, blah. The details vary, but the process is the same, if you want to be efficient about it.

But then, just a few weeks into my first job, my supervisor was telling me, “well, this manuscript doesn’t need ‘copyediting.’ I think it just needs a light proofing; then it can go straight into production.” I followed his instructions, though I did know better. I told the copyeditor to do only a proofreading, and sure enough, weeks later, the proofreader was informing me that the page proof needed a copyedit.

It soon became clear to me that the bitten pencils, the spent Excedrin bottle, and the miscellaneous Tums were symbols of a companywide dysfunction, to which I was not immune. Within a year, it got to the point where I couldn’t quite tell if my smiles were genuine, or only camouflaged grimaces.

That life was brought back to me with this most recent push, the late-night rubbing of eyes and temples, the concerned e-mails from my client, my reassuring e-mails in response. It would get done on time, and I knew it. Whatever dysfunction or miscommunications had created the distressing situation, it was my job to get it resolved.

So I did the work and got it all off my desk and onto my client’s. It is in a much better and more organized condition than it was when I received it. What a great feeling! Just in time for the holidays.

It’s not that I enjoy the stress and late nights, the anxiety of a thousand questions that each give birth to five more, as the time is ticking down—but completion and cleaning off my desk does give me a little extra something to be grateful for when we offer up our thanks before the sacrificial turkey.

And I hope you have a little extra something to be thankful for, too.

Don't Use Big Words

Slow news day. Well, honestly, there's plenty to write about, but it's taking me a little time to get my thoughts down, resize photos, and so on. Soon I'll have a few new local restaurant reviews for you, as well as a description of another favorite hiking trail.

Meanwhile, here's something for you to chew on, another see-lection from a favorite old book that I've mentioned to you before, Humorous Hits (bibliographic info is at the end). This one is attributed to "anonymous." I used to have a photocopy of it hanging in my office.

Please excuse any typos I might introduce! Also, I'm adding the italics at the end, as one of my predecessors with the book had underlined those words in pencil, no doubt to aid an oral recitation of this piece. And it is fun to read aloud; this dates to a time before radio, when folks entertained one another directly, using their own talents.

Don't Use Big Words

In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, purient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent.

In other words, talk plainly, briefly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully, purely. Keep from "slang"; don't put on airs; say what you mean; mean what you say. And don't use big words!

From Grenville Kleiser, Humorous Hits and How to Hold an Audience: A Collection of Short Selections, Stories, and Sketches for All Occasions, 9th ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1908), 163-64.

Letter from the Editor

Well, a brief letter, anyway. Yes, I am an editor of books, but don’t hold it against me. My intention with this blog is to have a bit of an outlet from the daily grind of reading other people’s stuff and, instead, to express my own thoughts—as if mine were as worthy as someone with a publishing contract’s.

When people find out I’m an editor, they often say, “Ugh! How can you do that all day?” You’d think it was as icky as being a plumber, up to my knees is sewage all day. No, it’s not that bad. (Well, usually.) But I have to admit that one of the big challenges of the job is this: Anyone else who reads a book can just stop, if they decide they don’t like it for some reason. But an editor has to keep reading, and rereading, and fixing—basically, until the thing is good to read!

And I’d like to add that rarely do editors get to choose what they edit; people and publishers approach you with their sundry manuscripts and offer you money, and then you get to work. It’s not like going to the bookstore, heading to your favorite section (for me, that would be natural history, food writing, or regional studies), and selecting the manuscripts that look fascinating.

Instead, you wind up editing books that nobody would dream of reading (or correcting) for free. Well, it seems that way. Especially as a freelancer, when you are given manuscripts that no in-house editor wants to look at. Thank goodness there are nonalcoholic beers, or I would be in real, real trouble.

Anyway, I came to this realization because I recently had the opportunity to edit a forthcoming publication that tells the story—in words, old newspaper clippings, and photographs—of Jefferson City’s breweries, saloons, and beer gardens (particularly, though not exclusively, as a German cultural phenomenon). The tone is rather scholarly, but a spirit of nostalgia and a host of fun, cool facts give this full-bodied publication some sparkle and a frothy head. Like all good history, it evokes the feel of the time for the reader.




. . . They say that one’s “perfect job” is the one that is so interesting, and so enjoyable, and so satisfying, that it doesn’t “feel” like work. And I realize that this manuscript was so interesting to me that it didn’t feel like a job. Instead, it felt like a guilty pleasure, something fun, which was distracting me from my “real” work, the manuscripts that kill me with boredom (even if they help me pay the bills).

But if there is a way to work only, or mainly, or even fairly regularly, on books that I care about, and be paid for it, I have no idea how to make that happen. Or maybe it’s a perceptual problem; as Joni Mitchell put it, “Pleasure moves on too early; trouble leaves too slow.”

Meanwhile, as this particular book’s production schedule moves forward into design, layout, manufacturing, and finally marketing, I can be a cheerleader for it without perjuring myself in the process. I feel a sense of pride and tangential “ownership” in that I truly care about this one. (And not just because my dad wrote it.) Sometimes, indeed, work doesn’t seem like work.




Notes on the pictures: This post features some images that won’t appear in the book—we had a photo shoot one afternoon with some local brewery memorabilia, and these are some of the “outtakes,” which I mainly took for my own jollies. Harriet Waldo, here in town, has a nice collection of “breweriana” and was kind enough to allow us to take photographs for the forthcoming book. Capitol Brewery, which had previously been named Moerschel Brewery, closed in 1947; it was located on Dunklin, not very far from where I live today.

Stories abound about the old neighborhood brewery. In the early 1900s, for instance, my great-grandpa would send my grandpa and his brother—as boys—down the few blocks to Moerschel’s to “pick up a bucket of beer.” I have heard that my grandpa, as they traipsed back from Moerschel’s with the beer, was strong and flexible enough to swing the bucket of suds clear around in a vertical circle—over his head—without spilling any. (Because spilling a bucket of beer would have been rather tragic!)

(By the way, just because I love beer and its cultural history and stuff doesn’t mean I’m falling off the wagon. So don’t worry, friends!)