Monday

[ellarien]

I wrote 1230 words today, in about two hours; this is quite fast by my recent standards, but it was a the kind of scene that pretty much wrote itself -- and presented me with a twist I hadn't thought of before.

The Editing Project of Doom has come back to haunt me yet again, this time in the form of proofs. At least they don't expect actual proofreaders' marks from me! It doesn't actually look particularly doom-laden, apart from a couple of figures that were converted to color in a hurry and seem to have lost their outlines.

It was a lovely day today, sunny and warm; the pear trees are starting to bloom, a little timidly, and it wasn't (quite) dark when I got home at about 6.45. (Silly buses. It would be nice if they weren't usually about fifteen minutes late every evening.)

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

At least they don't expect actual proofreaders' marks from me!

I like making actual proofreaders' marks. I think it was the wonderful grown-up feeling I had, the first time the opportunity arose - "see, real proofs to correct! Just like in the how-to books!" - plus the fact that my handwriting is unreadable, so it really helps to have formal marks that everyone understands.

[ellarien]

I can see that, but scientific publishing is a different animal. It's almost all electronic these days, and it's quite common to send in proof changes as a list in email. (P10, L33, "purple" ---> "green")

(Also, we do most of our own typesetting using LaTeX, design our own artwork, and for some journals happily pay hundreds of dollars a page for the privilege. This project went from the authors to me to the publishers to the printer, and back to me as proofs, without any physical paper except the signed contract and copyright forms changing hands, and most of it was only keyed in once, by the original authors in flat ascii files.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup. It hadn't struck me before, but I probably am of the last generation that will have a use for proofmarks. This makes me glad-but-sorry (we need a word for this, something better than 'nostalgia': it's a cheerful melancholia, that sense of loss as we advance to a brave new world...); fond as I am of all computergeekery, I also have an abiding love for paper and its concomitant industries. I guess I'm in the ideal position, bridging the last of the old printing technologies and the first of the new, right at the turn of the tide. So long as I don't get stranded...

[In my early twenties, I still hand-printed occasionally on an old letterpress. A couple of years later, I bought my first computer...]

[ellarien]

Things have changed a lot over my career; as a postgrad I wrote a couple of papers by the time-honoured method of writing them out in my best handwriting and handing them over to be typed. Everything after that was electronic to some degree, though we were still mostly submitting hardcopy until about the turn of the century, and there were strange transitional states where some journals' idea of electronic submission was that after they were happy with the paper manuscript you posted them the files on a floppy.

(I suspect physicists and astronomers, having a bit of an affinity for computers, may have been slightly ahead of the curve on electronic publishing tech.)