About four years ago, when I was living entirely off my freelance editorial income (which is to say, when I was living off my savings), I spent a month or two trying to keep up with the discussions at Copyediting-L. And while regularly reading this very busy listserv may cause insanity, I do still recommend taking it in small doses, if you’re at all interested in editing. Because no matter how good you think you are at English grammar, reading just a day’s worth of wrangling on CE-L will impress upon you how vast is the portion of that realm that you don’t know. Flexibility is important in copyediting and proofreading, and once you see how even a group of longtime professional editors can disagree on what may seem like the most fundamental “rules” to you, you’re more likely to remember to wield your pencil lightly when changing all those whiches to thats.

I no longer follow CE-L, because I have actual work to do nowadays, but it was while skimming that list that I kept coming across mentions of a site called Editorium.com. Probably people were discussing Word macros, or how to use the Track Changes feature, or something like that. Editorium has an excellent newsletter that gets into all the nitty gritty bits of MS Word that people who work on manuscripts need to know—how to keep the spelling checker from skipping certain words that are correctly spelled but often misused, for instance, or how to delete unused style sheets. If you use Word, you should subscribe; it’s great.

But when I visited the site, I found that the real mindblowing thing at Editorium.com is the software—complex collections of well thought-out and documented Word macros and scripts. It’s these I can’t live without, specifically a package called Editor’s Toolkit Plus. Whenever I have to reinstall Word on my computer, the second thing I do—after turning off practically everything under the Tools->AutoCorrect menu—is install Editor’s Toolkit. Whenever I go to a new day job, I plead until we buy a license. Because without ETK, Word to me seems broken.

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Okay, first off, here are the last two books I’ll ever index:

These happen also to be the only two books I’ve indexed. Professional indexers are special people, and I am not that kind of special.

Trivia:

• Appeal to Reason, most of which I also typeset and the copyediting of which I supervised, had the cleanest manuscript I’ve ever seen, before or since. I kept saying, “We ought to send Craig [the editor] flowers.” We never did, but we did gush praise at him every time we spoke.
• The manuscript for the History of African American Theatre was about seven inches high, and it was being copyedited while I wrote the index. Which meant that I had to look up which of the zillions of variants of all those titles and proper names and so forth were correct, and then e-mail them to the copyeditor. It was kind of insane; I thought I might die; I nearly died. The published index is forty-three pages, typeset. Also, I really don’t recommend compiling a large index using Excel. On the bright side, having obsessively fact-checked the index myself, I can now place reasonable trust in it as a fact-checking resource—I look up play titles and actors’ names in it all the time.

I’m launching this blog as a place to post work-related stuff. It’ll mostly serve as an online portfolio so that when people Google me, they won’t just get hits that are seven or eight years old, but I promise also to post things of (slightly) more general interest–tools I’m using, design or reference books I’m reading, pictures of intriguing found text, books I consider pretty, etc.

Because it’s a professional blog, I will try not to swear or say “like” all the time, but don’t get your hopes too high.