mmmmm...

man, my apartment smells so fuckin' good right now...

i took a 3-hour break from thesis/publishing to bake apple pies. i don't know if they taste good, but they sure look and smell sexy.

i want to take a couple to the ubyssey kids tomorrow and maybe one for the mpub crew, but i don't want to seem like i'm trying too hard. maybe i'll just leave the mpub one at home for the guests i'm expecting for the game on tuesday.

thursday's and friday's classes were superb. i love my editing instructor; she's a big bag of fun. she's given us each a manuscript -- a real manuscript -- to work on for the term, and i have no idea how she keeps track of everything. apparently, it's customary for the editors not to have any of the manuscripts bound -- they just keep stacks of paper loosely kept together with rubber bands. the sample manuscripts our instructor brought in to show us were almost pristine; the corners were a little worn, but my one-week-old thesis draft looks more dog-earred than her copy of an edited manuscript that had been read time and time again. i don't know how i'll keep my manuscript from getting scrambled, disheveled and covered with food stains.

editing book manuscripts, it appears, is a lot more aggressive than i'm used to. or perhaps editing in an industry outside of the student press is a lot more aggressive than i'm used to. it's become quite evident that descriptivism has little place in book editing, and since the timeline is a lot more drawn out for a book than for a serial, there is emphasis on a certain conservative perfection.

i can't say that all of the books i've read have conformed to this standard, but it seems we'll be expected to adhere to it, in any case.

we've also been given a short editing test, and it's pretty much the worst piece ever written! god! it's truly, truly wretched: run-ons, incomplete sentences, sentences that just end, a complete lack of logical flow, spelling errors, diction and syntax errors, convoluted structure and generally uninteresting subject matter...i guess they're trying to throw everything at us to see how we'd do. i've seen worse submissions to the physics journal, but i've never had to edit any of them, 'cause i've always had the luxury of refusing to publish if i thought an article were sufficiently bad.

...i hadn't mentioned this earlier because the outcome was still in question, but one of the students who was supposed to be in our cohort was stopped at the border when he tried to cross up to canada from the states on tuesday. he's been trying to sort it out, but now it doesn't look like they'll solve the problem in time for him to join us. now, there are only three males in 17 students. we don't know, of course, why he was detained at the border. for lack of a better theory, i'm going with coke mule.