Un-mark My Words -- Garbo
The age of digital publishing, professional and alternative, is a mixed blessing, I know. But personally, I'm very happy that e-publishing in its many forms has made the errata slip into a bit of quaint ephemera, an "oh yeah" reminder of the past. There was a time when, once something was printed wrong, it stayed wrong.
When factual errors, typos, or missing information were discovered after books were printed and bound, publishers used to tuck a slip inside the front cover. This "errata slip" contained the corrections. Lucky authors and publishers sold out of the faulty version quickly and were able to fix the manuscript goofs for the second and subsequent printings. But for those whose work didn't sell out, well. . .
When I began writing for publication in the mid-70s, before I even got to the published version, I had to create my word-magic on a manual typewriter. Over time, electric typewriters got fancier and offered more features, but I could never afford anything but used Sears electric portables, often purchased in pawn shops. These well-worn usually had some kind of ongoing issue which had to be worked around: a letter broken off the end of the key arm; a ribbon which had to be lifted off the spindles and wound or rewound by holding a spool in each hand; a space bar with a loose plastic cover which fell off now and then and skittered under the desk.
Oh mercy, there was the one I had in that two-room apartment during the super-hot summer where I had to tie a shoelace to the return lever to move the carriage. I swigged ice-cold grapefruit juice (no vodka), smoked generic cigarettes, and pounded out manuscript pages.
These had to be hand-carried downtown to the White Rabbit copy store for duplicating. Though if I was really broke or if the summer heat was way too much for me to drag myself along the overheated sidewalk, I could make two legible copies with carbon paper. This was if, and only if, I hit the keys hard enough to transfer the ink to the second copy, but not hard enough to make the electric typewriter carriage jump ahead in the line of type.
Then it got to be 1986 or 1987, somewhere in there, and I had access to computer labs at Indiana University. Oh, how I remember the empowerment which came with WordStar, an early word-processing program for the first personal computers. What joy came with using the keyboard shortcuts KB/KK which let me not only highlight a passage, but move it wherever I wanted it in the document. Using the same command plus one more, I could delete just that specific sentence or two while leaving all the rest of the words on the page alone. Wowee!
Previous to this tremendous innovation, how many a short story or novel chapter had been ruined by the wrong words in the wrong places, left there by an author who simply could not face re-typing it all? Often you couldn't just do the problem page over; you had to do at least the next couple of pages because the additions or subtractions shifted the lines on the following pages after the revision was made. If it was a matter of adding, say, a really long paragraph, you might well have to type the whole project over. No wonder writers threw the tattered manuscript pages into the fireplace and sat at a bare kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey and a glass.
Making smaller page corrections to typewritten pages might not sound so terrible until one remembers that even after we stopped using a pencil-like eraser with a little brush on the other end of it, like this --
-- and had products things like correction tape and Liquid Paper --
typing a letter wrong or failing to leave a space became problems which took time and effort to fix. Our high school typing teacher (who looked exactly like Werner Klemperer except he wore a white short sleeve work shirt and Dacron slacks instead of the commandant's uniform --
-- was rumored to have murdered a sophomore for erasing over the carriage, thereby getting eraser crumbs in the machine. To save your own life while trapped in Typing I at Warren Central High, you couldn't erase your mistyped character untile you had pushed a metal lever which let you shift the platen to one side.
Once you'd shifted both page and roller at once to one side, you could gently rub the gritty point of the typewriter eraser on the page. Like making carbon copies on a cheap portble machine, this was a task which took finesse. You had to erase firmly enough to remove the ink left by the letter at the end of the key arm after it had inked itself on the ribbon, but not so firmly that you smudged things or -- horror of horrors -- tore a hole in the paper, leaving a tiny, ragged flap with accordion folds in it.
If you wielded the typewriter eraser pencil well, you'd still left bits of the special eraser tip on the page and you used the little brush to flick these off before pushing the platen back to the right spot. The returning-to-where-you-were move was a perilous one. Heaven help you if you tilted the typed page under the two black metal rollers on a metal rod which held the paper to the roller. Another disaster happened if, instead of grasping the knob and leaving it in the same position, you instead accidentally turned it crank-style as you shifted the carriage back into place. If this last mistake happened, you would shortly find that you no longer typed on the correct line, but rather entered the new characters up a half-line, in the space where things like footnote numbers and the top half of fractions were meant to go.
With the advent of the word processor, all this tiresomeness disappeared but once the tractor wheels on your dot-matrix printer had pulled the accordion pages out of the box and up where the print head could zip back and forth --
-- you still had a hard copy, because there was no Google and no modern internet and email was a bit iffy. And that hard copy went to an editor, and then your work was printed in a book or magazine or newspaper and if it was printed wrong, it stayed wrong. Magazines and newspapers didn't even have errata slips. All they could do was print a little shameful correction of your goof in the next edition. Eep.
So, with all these memories of the effort it used to take to fix something I wished I'd written differently, I am loving this age of liquid history. I do understand that Evil Forces use after-the-event data distortion to do -- well, evil.
But for those of us who aren't evil but who have just thought better of our decisions, we can now, gloriously, go back in time like crew members of the starship Enterprise, only we don't even have to discuss whether fixing page 17 will cause alterations in the timeline of history and deprive the Chicago Cubs of that 2016 pennant.
In general, I'm a believer in healthy revision in many different forms. For example, there's a building I visit about once a week, and it has a number of places to hang one's coat, but this set of pegs is my favorite:
I have always thought that one of the original wooden pegs fell out or broke off. Someone bought four or five of those steel-wire screw-in coat hooks and set them to the right of each of the original peg holes. And I doubt anyone has ever noticed the old peg holder holes except me. But I admire the approach of the coat peg revisionist. Either a peg broke or maybe the old set were too close together for bulky coats? Whatever the reason was, the old backing board was left in the same place, and the old pegs were replaced by hooks and now people can hang their coats up. Old arrangement bad, new set-arrangement good.
In the same way, I sometimes go back to my stories published online and I repair them. Sometimes I've spotted a typo. Sometimes I've found a set of re-write notes and realized that the version I shared was not the completed manuscript but one step back in the multiple-revision process. And sometimes I'd simply read an older piece and realized it wasn't as good as it would have been if I'd done more work with it. And so now I just go nack and I do the work.
I would imagine that, since the time when the mass-produced book first became possible, celebrity authors and prima donnas have realized that the published version of their work is not to their liking, and they have no doubt demanded that their publishers retract the first edition and replace it with an updated or improved edition. The joy of putting one's work online is that, currently, no hissy-fits need to be thrown. If I don't like what I did with a piece of fiction, I click "Revert to Draft" and no one can see my words till I've made them all better again.
Creators of public scandal, tweeting while drunk, have tried to erase their errors, and been dismayed to find that unofficial guards of the internet have kept screenshots of the 280 characters of embarrassing nonsense blasted out to the entire world. Same with government or business officials who launch policy moves or program roll-outs which fail miserably or meet public fury. The people who made the goofs, or the fixers they hire, try to claw the posted information back, but watchdogs without day jobs spot those "now you see it now you don't" moments.
Me? I don't care if anybody remembers what the old version of my work looked like. I don't deny I did it. I just reserve the right to do it better. Modern technology lets me make that happen.
When factual errors, typos, or missing information were discovered after books were printed and bound, publishers used to tuck a slip inside the front cover. This "errata slip" contained the corrections. Lucky authors and publishers sold out of the faulty version quickly and were able to fix the manuscript goofs for the second and subsequent printings. But for those whose work didn't sell out, well. . .
When I began writing for publication in the mid-70s, before I even got to the published version, I had to create my word-magic on a manual typewriter. Over time, electric typewriters got fancier and offered more features, but I could never afford anything but used Sears electric portables, often purchased in pawn shops. These well-worn usually had some kind of ongoing issue which had to be worked around: a letter broken off the end of the key arm; a ribbon which had to be lifted off the spindles and wound or rewound by holding a spool in each hand; a space bar with a loose plastic cover which fell off now and then and skittered under the desk.
Oh mercy, there was the one I had in that two-room apartment during the super-hot summer where I had to tie a shoelace to the return lever to move the carriage. I swigged ice-cold grapefruit juice (no vodka), smoked generic cigarettes, and pounded out manuscript pages.
These had to be hand-carried downtown to the White Rabbit copy store for duplicating. Though if I was really broke or if the summer heat was way too much for me to drag myself along the overheated sidewalk, I could make two legible copies with carbon paper. This was if, and only if, I hit the keys hard enough to transfer the ink to the second copy, but not hard enough to make the electric typewriter carriage jump ahead in the line of type.
Then it got to be 1986 or 1987, somewhere in there, and I had access to computer labs at Indiana University. Oh, how I remember the empowerment which came with WordStar, an early word-processing program for the first personal computers. What joy came with using the keyboard shortcuts KB/KK which let me not only highlight a passage, but move it wherever I wanted it in the document. Using the same command plus one more, I could delete just that specific sentence or two while leaving all the rest of the words on the page alone. Wowee!
Previous to this tremendous innovation, how many a short story or novel chapter had been ruined by the wrong words in the wrong places, left there by an author who simply could not face re-typing it all? Often you couldn't just do the problem page over; you had to do at least the next couple of pages because the additions or subtractions shifted the lines on the following pages after the revision was made. If it was a matter of adding, say, a really long paragraph, you might well have to type the whole project over. No wonder writers threw the tattered manuscript pages into the fireplace and sat at a bare kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey and a glass.
Making smaller page corrections to typewritten pages might not sound so terrible until one remembers that even after we stopped using a pencil-like eraser with a little brush on the other end of it, like this --
-- and had products things like correction tape and Liquid Paper --
typing a letter wrong or failing to leave a space became problems which took time and effort to fix. Our high school typing teacher (who looked exactly like Werner Klemperer except he wore a white short sleeve work shirt and Dacron slacks instead of the commandant's uniform --
-- was rumored to have murdered a sophomore for erasing over the carriage, thereby getting eraser crumbs in the machine. To save your own life while trapped in Typing I at Warren Central High, you couldn't erase your mistyped character untile you had pushed a metal lever which let you shift the platen to one side.
Once you'd shifted both page and roller at once to one side, you could gently rub the gritty point of the typewriter eraser on the page. Like making carbon copies on a cheap portble machine, this was a task which took finesse. You had to erase firmly enough to remove the ink left by the letter at the end of the key arm after it had inked itself on the ribbon, but not so firmly that you smudged things or -- horror of horrors -- tore a hole in the paper, leaving a tiny, ragged flap with accordion folds in it.
If you wielded the typewriter eraser pencil well, you'd still left bits of the special eraser tip on the page and you used the little brush to flick these off before pushing the platen back to the right spot. The returning-to-where-you-were move was a perilous one. Heaven help you if you tilted the typed page under the two black metal rollers on a metal rod which held the paper to the roller. Another disaster happened if, instead of grasping the knob and leaving it in the same position, you instead accidentally turned it crank-style as you shifted the carriage back into place. If this last mistake happened, you would shortly find that you no longer typed on the correct line, but rather entered the new characters up a half-line, in the space where things like footnote numbers and the top half of fractions were meant to go.
With the advent of the word processor, all this tiresomeness disappeared but once the tractor wheels on your dot-matrix printer had pulled the accordion pages out of the box and up where the print head could zip back and forth --
-- you still had a hard copy, because there was no Google and no modern internet and email was a bit iffy. And that hard copy went to an editor, and then your work was printed in a book or magazine or newspaper and if it was printed wrong, it stayed wrong. Magazines and newspapers didn't even have errata slips. All they could do was print a little shameful correction of your goof in the next edition. Eep.
So, with all these memories of the effort it used to take to fix something I wished I'd written differently, I am loving this age of liquid history. I do understand that Evil Forces use after-the-event data distortion to do -- well, evil.
But for those of us who aren't evil but who have just thought better of our decisions, we can now, gloriously, go back in time like crew members of the starship Enterprise, only we don't even have to discuss whether fixing page 17 will cause alterations in the timeline of history and deprive the Chicago Cubs of that 2016 pennant.
In general, I'm a believer in healthy revision in many different forms. For example, there's a building I visit about once a week, and it has a number of places to hang one's coat, but this set of pegs is my favorite:
I have always thought that one of the original wooden pegs fell out or broke off. Someone bought four or five of those steel-wire screw-in coat hooks and set them to the right of each of the original peg holes. And I doubt anyone has ever noticed the old peg holder holes except me. But I admire the approach of the coat peg revisionist. Either a peg broke or maybe the old set were too close together for bulky coats? Whatever the reason was, the old backing board was left in the same place, and the old pegs were replaced by hooks and now people can hang their coats up. Old arrangement bad, new set-arrangement good.
In the same way, I sometimes go back to my stories published online and I repair them. Sometimes I've spotted a typo. Sometimes I've found a set of re-write notes and realized that the version I shared was not the completed manuscript but one step back in the multiple-revision process. And sometimes I'd simply read an older piece and realized it wasn't as good as it would have been if I'd done more work with it. And so now I just go nack and I do the work.
I would imagine that, since the time when the mass-produced book first became possible, celebrity authors and prima donnas have realized that the published version of their work is not to their liking, and they have no doubt demanded that their publishers retract the first edition and replace it with an updated or improved edition. The joy of putting one's work online is that, currently, no hissy-fits need to be thrown. If I don't like what I did with a piece of fiction, I click "Revert to Draft" and no one can see my words till I've made them all better again.
Creators of public scandal, tweeting while drunk, have tried to erase their errors, and been dismayed to find that unofficial guards of the internet have kept screenshots of the 280 characters of embarrassing nonsense blasted out to the entire world. Same with government or business officials who launch policy moves or program roll-outs which fail miserably or meet public fury. The people who made the goofs, or the fixers they hire, try to claw the posted information back, but watchdogs without day jobs spot those "now you see it now you don't" moments.
Me? I don't care if anybody remembers what the old version of my work looked like. I don't deny I did it. I just reserve the right to do it better. Modern technology lets me make that happen.
 |
| Garbo |
I hate typing, and even talking on the phone. I don't know what to do, yet I do it, lol!
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school, clerical skills - of which typing was considered to be at the time - weren't part of what was considered the academic track in the middle-to-late '70s at Bishop Egan. So, that was something I had to pick up on my own. That my handwriting, and to be honest even my printing, is so poor, variable and, even then, a painstaking effort, drove me toward the keys of typewriters and then, mercifully, computer keyboards. None of it, though, was taught in any class I was part of, so I'm sure my typing method is technically abominable, mostly using thumbs, index and middle fingers, with the other four only offering a small assist.
ReplyDeleteSuch small facility as I may have with writing was mostly off in my twenties and beyond, and owes most of its existence to computer access.
Definitely a fan of being able to go back to revise and even expand old work. The drive to do it properly in the first place is mostly reinforced these days by knowing that someone who read the piece early on is unlikely to come back to read it again, so e-publishing a sloppy draft can mean bad first - lasting - impressions.
Still, we've always been at war with Eastasia.