A day in the life of an editor

An editor's day starts early. Our job is not so simple as merely fixing the errors on a writer's work, or inserting punctuation where it is needed, we need to keep our bodies and minds in peak physical condition to put up with the shit we read.  

This particular morning I wake up at 4:00 AM, after which I decided to take a leisurely 73 mile jog up the nearest mountain, I need to arrive at the office for 9:00 AM so I should have more than enough to time to sort any outstanding affairs before work. 

Right, after finally disarming the bomb and apprehending the terrorists I arrive at the office with 30 minutes to spare. All I can do now is wait for my client to arrive. 

It's gone 9:03, I don't know who this person thinks he is but this is my fucking time he's wasting. 

It had just turned 9:06 when I saw the person in question peeking their head through the door. Don't ask me his name, it's not worth remembering. He smiles at me and nods, I meet his gaze and smile back, trying my hardest to contain my utter contempt. This thing, this amoeba, this representation of that middling gathering of dust that is authors. Truly last on God's great chain.  

Luckily this person is so simple to have never noticed my less than stellar opinion of them. I suppose it can't be helped, authors are of course not the most emotionally or socially inclined creatures. This person in particular is so charitable to have come to assume that my scathing comments and threats to their immediate family have only ever been for the purpose of improving their writing. 

Of course, most of my comments towards him are genuinely for the improvement of his work, I want to get out this alive after all, but even a person of such character as mine cannot help but insert genuine malice into my critiques, and I can't pretend that they are always going to be constructive. 

Nevertheless, our partnership for the time being continues as is. I see that he is holding a modestly sized manuscript, meaning that he has completed the latest assignment I had set out for him.

I had asked him to completely rewrite the first 3 chapters he had presented to me of his latest novel proposal, the physical trauma I had taken when reading them was so great that my left kidney had ceased functioning for up to 14 hours and my hearing was shot for the next two weeks. I've come to peace with the fact that I won't live a long life, even the most impressive editors only live to about 60 due to the daily physical and mental damage they incur. It's just the sacrifice people like us make. 

Absolutely everything about these chapters was simply abysmal, the prose was robotic and unnatural and the punctuation was all over the fucking place, I barely registered it as English. Worst of all was his hollow attempt to insert himself as some kind of surrogate for the protagonist. There is nothing conceptually wrong with such a notion, as long as you actually have something interesting to say. However, to only use it as a means of vicariously living through a character so as to make up for your own mediocrity is actually just fucking sad. 

This is his fourth attempt at getting a novel off the ground, all of them so far has of course been torn to pieces and vetoed. This is my usual process with prospective authors. I must first beat out any notion that an author is free to write as they please. 

This is a common delusion that authors tend to allow themselves to be taken in by. Childish obsessions such as 'protecting their vision' or 'writing something that is uniquely them' among other such notions. Freedom is only a catalyst to stupidity, people become too drunk on the notion that they are welcome to do as they please, and act out in foolish ways so as to demonstrate that. This is especially true for authors, dull creatures that they are, they allow themselves to think that their vision is anything other than a waste of everyone's time. The results are always disastrous.

Of course editors are different, you could say we are the only ones with the prerogative to freedom.  

Many potential authors have turned tail and run due to this method of mine. Some have even chided me, calling me such names as odious, desperately narcissistic, a psychopath, among others. Obviously, the meaningless buzzing of little creatures is not going to get to me.  

I take his manuscript and begin to inspect it. To no one's fucking surprise I immediately notice a needless comma and an incorrectly placed semi-colon. I start coughing up so much blood that I need to excuse myself. 

After 40 minutes of recovering I continue to read. Thankfully, the protagonist resembles the author far less now, his design is markedly different and his personality has been made slightly more off-putting to discourage the notion that he is inserting himself into the affairs. No more pointless sex scenes either, that helps. 

Having finished the work I am surprised that I hadn't developed cataracts while reading it, at the very least this tells me the work was at the bare minimum of competence.  

I return the manuscript with annotations and we begin to discuss where the work could go from here, he agrees to my suggestions, nodding enthusiastically as we go along. I tell him he's a dick head and to leave my office.