Better work stories - Publish or Perish

 I studied for a diploma of Editing and Proofreading, but the course became out of date almost as soon as I completed it, so learning all the signs of proofreading seemed redundant and only good for anyone who couldn't turn their automatic grammar and spellcheck on their Word document computer.

However I did manage to proofread and edit a few university assignments (paid for by the poor student!) and nearly an entire novel about the French Revolution. I can't say if it's been published, because I would have heard if it was - but it gave me a few nightmares because, well people got their heads chopped off and I didn't like the whole demi-monde world that much. Also the protagonist was a 'French girl' and you know all the cliches about French girls - they are easy, they are like Brigit Bardot, they get by on pure sex appeal. And it was written from the male point of view which made it even more 'Memoirs of a Geisha' like. Ugh. Or maybe '50 Shades of Grey.' 

Though it didn't really matter what *I* thought of the content - I was just there to check the spelling, grammar, and run on sentences. Which there were a lot of, and I would cut and cut until the paragraphs made sense and weren't repeating what had already been told in the previous paragraph. It was like the author had forgotten what he was writing about and rehashed the plot over and over again. 

So working to deadlines and subediting and word counts are something I'm not a huge fan of. I had enough of that in my university days. I worked in libraries that had off site storage areas for the thousands and thousands of journal articles dating back to the 19th century it seemed. A professor would call up the interloans desk and I would charge $14 for a journal article to be photocopied and sent to their office. Or they could do it electronically, which was a bit easier, though I wondered just how many journal articles did a Professor have to read to keep on top of it all. They all needed citations and footnotes and bibliographies too, and to be checked, and peer reviewed. 

I probably spent about half the day in front of the photocopier, scanning away. Imagine doing that for the page of every single book - and some librarians have actually done it, digitised their entire collection so that everyone can just read on their tablets or whatever. They would have had to have done it retrospectively, because nowadays, publishers will automatically have an e-book version from the get go. 

My thing would be to read every single book out loud so that everything that was ever published would now be on audio. However it seems only actors and actresses get to do that, because nobody really wants to hear a novel being read in a Kiwi accent. People want to hear the Holy Bible being read by Laurence Olivier and Shakespeare being read by ...Laurence Olivier. However I do know that Beatrix Potter's Tales were read by his wife Vivien Leigh. 

The National Library keeps two copies of everything that is ever published in New Zealand and has its own cataloguing record. I've never actually worked IN the National Library but I think it would be kind of cool just to see everything there. Obviously a job for bibliophiles. Not saying I am one or anything...