Editors Edit Quotes

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.

There should be no crying in copyediting.

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically: His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong. Her editor would cut that line.

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

A good editor is like a pair of Spanx: firming up the body, making the subject look good, and absolutely invisible.

Write poorly. Suck. Write Awful. Terribly. Frightfully. Don’t care. Turn off the inner editor. Let yourself write. Let it flow. Let yourself fail. Do something crazy. Write 50,000 words in the month of November. I did it. It was fun. It was insane. It was 1,667 words per day. It was possible, but you have to turn off the inner critic off completely. Just write. Quickly. In bursts. With joy. If you can’t write, run away. Come back. Write again. Writing is like anything else. You won’t get good at it immediately. It’s a craft. You have to keep getting better. You don’t get to Juilliard unless you practice. You want to get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice. Practice ..or give them a lot of money. Like anything else it takes 10,000 hours to get to mastery. Just like Malcolm Gladwell says. So write. Fail. Get your thoughts down. Let it rest. Let is marinate. Then edit, but don’t edit as you type. That just slows the brain down. Find a daily practice. For me it’s blogging. It’s fun. The more you write the easier it gets. The more it is a flow, the less a worry. It’s not for school, it’s not for a grade, it’s just to get your thoughts out there. You know they want to come out. So keep at it. Make it a practice. Write poorly. Write awfully. Write with abandon and it may end up being really really good.

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.

When reading I pretend I’m an editor, though when writing I realize I’m not.

Editing is a kind of creative activity where, in a perfect world, an author and an editor find that elusive oneness to understand each other intuitively.

The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist.

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…) A good novel editor is invisible.

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

When you pick a partner, you pick a story. So what kind of story are you going to write? You are the editors of your life stories. Write well and edit often. And remember ... a life story is not a love story. You can love a lot more people than you can make a life with.

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.

Being editors is not the best way to wealth. We all feel this now, and highwaymen are not respected any more like they used to be.

​​"We edit your words, your writing, your sentences and paragraphs... but never your voice." 

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses. -James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything. We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.

A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.

[I]n the long run it's worthwhile to see the manuscript as a text capable of improvement.

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

Edit your author as you would be edited.

In editing, as in life, I have found "We can discuss this" to be a reliably effective suggestion. Sometimes the other party thinks, "Oh, well, since I have a choice, I'll let it go," and sometimes, "Omigod-she wants to discuss this endlessly. I'd rather just let it go.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

But the work had told upon the Editor. Work of that sort carries its penalties with it. Success means absorption, and absorption spells softening of the brain.

A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide.

Personally, I don't plan to retire from writing. My plan is to visit a body editor, have them slap on a hot new cover, and be re-released as a new edition.

[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: “The editor is always right.” The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.

I am the discoverer of Quantum Editing, the process whereby the amateur editor keeps being changed by the editing he does, requiring him to further edit the manuscript, changing him yet further, etc.

Write poorly. Suck Write awful Terribly Frightfully Don't care Turn off the inner editor Let yourself write Let it flow Let yourself fail Do something crazy Write fifty thousand words in the month of November. I did it. It was fun , it was insane , it was one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven words a day. It was possible. But you have to turn off your inner critic. Off completely. Just write. Quickly. In bursts. With joy. If you can't write, run away for a few. Come back. Write again. Writing is like anything else. You won't get good at it immediately. It's a craft, you have to keep getting better. You don't get to Juilliard unless you practice. If you want to get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice. ...Or give them a lot of money. Like anything else, it takes ten thousand hours to master. Just like Malcolm Gladwell says. So write. Fail. Get your thoughts down. Let it rest. Let it marinate. Then edit. But don't edit as you type, that just slows the brain down. Find a daily practice, for me it's blogging every day. And it's fun. The more you write, the easier it gets. The more it is a flow, the less a worry. It's not for school, it's not for a grade, it's just to get your thoughts out there. You know they want to come out. So keep at it. Make it a practice. And write poorly, write awfully, write with abandon and it may end up being really really good.

Separate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit or sculpt and polish or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.

The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good." In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves—this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it.

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.

Editing is a big part of organising. It's about selecting the best and letting the not-so-good go... Life is like this. There's lots of stuff that doesn't matter: things that you're 'going to do'; outdated, broken or not-so-good stuff... Be an editor every day. Constantly reassess and you'll find that the things that don't matter easily slip away.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

Most of these editors, as they call themselves, couldn't even effectively edit a haiku.

Hermione end up with Ron. As the author told Emma Watson, guest editor for the upcoming edition of the quarterly British lifestyle magazine "Wonderland,

It is free speech, just edited into defeat.

newer approaches to textual editing have been skeptical of the concept of an authoritative text, let alone an editor’s ability to distinguish such a text among multiple versions.

Protect yourself: There are more than enough fake (and bad) editors out there. The more you know about grammar and

It was like removing layers of crumpled brown paper from an awkwardly shaped parcel, and revealing the attractive present which it contained.

Remember that the first rule when editing a book is to DO NO HARM.

If you tell me that I have to write the story of my life, I would be very quick to tell you that God has already written it. What I have to do is to quit playing editor.

A book that is made up of only great sentences is not necessarily a great book.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.

The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.

But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one--at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.

encouragement. Becky Johnson of Hot Tree Editing has been a miracle worker, and this updated version goes to prove how well an author and editor can work together to create a wonderful story. I am blessed

It’s funny how we think life works a certain way because of TV and movies. Most people don’t really think about how scripts are edited and how people get to practice their lines and rehearse. If one doesn’t get it right they get to redo the scene until they do. In real life what’s missing or not working only comes up when we’re going along full blast. We end up being the editors of our lives only while we’re running in real time.

You only have one chance to make a great first impression. You make that first impression with a great cover, an intriguing synopsis, and professional editing. Let my inner editor polish your ​manuscript ​the 'write' way.

This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature. With the addition of this Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition, The Salmon of Doubt can now claim to have no less than three Introductions, one Prologue, and one Editor’s Note.

In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield passed on some useful advice to his son: 'Buy good books and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads; for they may profit of the former. But take care not to understand editions and title-pages too well. It always smells of pedantry and not always of learning. What curious books I have, they are indeed but few... Beware of the Bibliomania.

In this book industry we have different kinds of birds; excepting one; all having in common that they are ONLY watchers and squawkers at the pond. We have readers, editors, reviewers, interviewers, publishers, marketers, websites, monopolies, and writers. All are better compensated than the writers. Yet the system is totally upside down as those better rewarded are all derivative of what is primary; the writer. Without that person the readers have nothing to read; the editors have nothing to edit; the reviewers have nothing to review; the interviewers have no one to interview; the publishers have nothing to publish; the marketers have nothing to market; the website cannot adware infect ‘members,’ and the legalized monopolies have nothing to monopolize. So, in effect, this is where the troll steps in. He’s kind of a writer; but he’s not taking the time to churn out masterpieces. He’s just effortlessly telling the vultures exactly what they are.

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

Before Perkins nobody at Scribners had edited so boldly or closely as he did Fitzgerald, and some of the older editors considered the practice questionable. They liked Max and sensed his ability, but they did not always understand him. In small ways as well as large, Max was different.

On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature: It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for some editors and it reads I AM NOT A REAL CHARACTER. I AM A PROBLEM YOU MUST DEAL WITH. The white characters are permitted to saunter about with their physical descriptions hanging out all over the place, but best not make mention of dark skin or woolly/curly hair or dark eyes (Unless, of course, that character is white. None of my white-skinned dark-eyed characters had any problem being described as such. And I’m pretty sure that Sól’s curly hair never gave anyone a single pause for thought.) As I said, I understand the desire not to define a POC simply by their physical attributes, and I understand cutting physical descriptions if no other character is described physically – but pussyfooting about in this manner with POC is doing nothing but white wash the characters themselves. It’s already much too hard to get readers to latch onto the fact that some characters may not be caucasian, why must we dance about their physical description as if it were some kind of shameful dirty little secret. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the way homosexuality used to only ever be hinted at in texts. It was up to the reader to ‘read between the lines’ or ‘its there if you look for it’ and all that total bullshit which used to be the norm.

The trouble is, very few people, even in the least provincial communities, seem to understand that the motive for fiction, or the impulse from which it arises, is a serious one. They think of fiction as having no value except that of amusing and passing the time; and so it is impossible for them to understand why it could not just as well be pleasant and pretty.

Create mode is when you’re imaginative, creative, and open to new ideas. Edit mode is when you are logical, regulated, and analytical. Most of us constantly switch back and forth between the two within a given piece of work, like when we write an email. You write a small part, read it, make edits, and then write some more. The major issue is that your editor brain gets in the way of your creator brain. It stops the flow, which can remove the potential of amazing thoughts that you didn’t even know exist in your head from ever coming out. You need these thoughts to surface during this experiment, but your editor brain can get in the way because it’s too focused on making everything right or perfect. Thinking puts your editor brain into the driver’s seat.

Proust fared better. “I cannot even begin to tell you how much pleasure we both derive from the mere presence of LA RECHERCHE in our dwelling,” Véra thanked her husband’s Gallimard editor, but this before she had begun the Maurois-edited volume, into which she was appalled to see that a great number of slips and misprints had crept. She could not help it; hers was the kind of eye to which typos positively leapt.

Over my entire career in editing, I don't think I've encountered more than half a dozen difficult authors. By "difficult," I mean a writer who simply does not want changes made to his manuscript and is not even prepared to discuss them. We know the stereotypes: The hotshot journalist jealous of every comma. The poet who claims that his misspellings and eccentric punctuation are inspired. Assistant professors writing a first book for tenure are notorious for their inflexibility, and understandably so: their futures are at stake. They take editing personally; red marks on their manuscripts are like little stab wounds. And then there are vain authors who quarrel when we lowercase their job titles, who want their photos plastered all over the piece or their names in larger type. And don't get me started on writers who don't know what they're talking about, writers who are your boss, writers who are former high school English teachers.

Doudna deeply enjoyed being a bench scientist, a researcher who gets to the lab early, puts on latex gloves and a white coat, and begins working with pipettes and Petri dishes. For the first few years after setting up her lab at Berkeley, she was able to work at the bench half her time. “I didn’t want to give that up,” she says. “I think I was a pretty good experimenter. That’s how my mind works. I can see experiments in my mind, especially when I am working myself.” But by 2009, after her return from Genentech, Doudna realized that she had to spend more time cultivating her lab rather than her bacterial cultures. This transition from player to coach happens in many fields. Writers become editors, engineers become managers. When bench scientists become lab heads their new managerial duties include hiring the right young researchers, mentoring them, going over their results, suggesting new experiments, and offering up the insights that come from having been there.

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf ’s birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature.

THOMAS JEFFERSON LEFT POSTERITY an immense correspondence, and I am particularly indebted to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, published by Princeton University Press and first edited by Julian P. Boyd. I am, moreover, grateful to the incumbent editors of the Papers, especially general editor Barbara B. Oberg, for sharing unpublished transcripts of letters gathered for future volumes. The goal of the Princeton edition was, and continues to be, “to present as accurate a text as possible and to preserve as many of Jefferson’s distinctive mannerisms of writing as can be done.” To provide clarity and readability for a modern audience, however, I have taken the liberty of regularizing much of the quoted language from Jefferson and from his contemporaries. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson’s frequent use of “it’s” for “its” and “recieve” for “receive,” and have, in most cases, expanded contractions and abbreviations and followed generally accepted practices of capitalization.

In an interview, the creator of the popular London A–Z Street Atlas described how she momentarily lost possession of 23,000 index cards out of a window thanks to a sudden gust of wind. Many of those hand-completed cards flew onto the top of a bus as it sped down Holborn High Street. This explains the absence of the entry for Trafalgar Square in the first edition. I had no idea whether this anecdote was true or not. I never checked, but David made a very compelling narrator for forgivable editors’ oversights.

Look at an offending edit and figure out why the editor thought the text needed help. There will usually be something wrong that needs fixing: after all, if the editor misunderstoodyou, other readers may, too. If you don't like the editor's solution, figure out a better one and write it in. If you are convinced that the original wording is the way you want it, mark a row of dots under everything you want restored and write "stet" beside it. And unless you want to go another round on the issue with the editor, pencil in a brief explanation.

Editing is perhaps the only one of the film arts that has no historical antecedents,” says Hirsch. “Editing is the choice of the images, their succession, and their duration. An editor is dealing with time, which is more of a concern in the musical arts. Only film and music require that an audience comprehend the details of a work of art over a given period of time. You can read a novel in one sitting or you can take six months to read it. You can look at the edges or at the center of a painting; you’re not compelled to experience it in any order.

I am often asked by editors, fans, friends about what I read or which authors influence my writing. My answer seems surprising to them, for people expect names and quotes from me, while I give them the source of "feelings". I believe that becoming a writer is not about finding similarities, nor following the same trends, with different accessories. I often un-follow subscriptions and newsfeeds when I want to write about something. When I write I follow, read and am inspired by Life, People and Passion. I guess my "current" is personal and universal. (Soar)

You have got to stop writing in the library books," Tyson said. "I will if you stop looking at me like I just kicked a kitten," I replied, sliding the offending book away from him. "I couldn't help it. Someone needs to edit these things." He sat back in the library chair. "Yeah, they're called editors and they already did that." I snorted. "Please. I could drive a truck through the holes in your education." "We're here about your education, not mine." He actually lowered his forehead to bang it on the table. The librarian sent me a stern glance. "What?" I said. "I'm not the one giving myself a lobotomy.

Perhaps most important, they both require revision. And revision usually means collaboration. Whenever I talk to students, one of the key points I try to make is that their teachers aren’t crazy or cruel to make them edit and revise their papers. Author Jonathan Rogers gave me that advice on things to talk about at school visits. Not only do the kids need to learn revision, they need to hear from someone else that their teachers are right. The thing the Resistance doesn’t want you to know is that revision is the fun part. My brother, an author and playwright, is also a formidable editor. He understands story as well as anyone I know, and he delights in revision.

He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.

To The Critics Suicide has made more than one mediocre author glorious before he's able to achieve that sobering "second edition" making his a suicide that waits until it's justified. But I've taken more precautions against to Suicide which is to survive in the face of failure. Success is mostly editing, that's what makes things nice. To edit is the other great Power; thus this novel started at age 30, continued at 50 and its 73, has finally achieve supremacy: a person of Good Taste as the third author and as a result the editor of all three. In the end I'll be the author of a letter to the critics a sort of "open letter" but for the living: suicide is not something you can edit out.

First of all, please, please, don´t go publish until you are one hundred percent sure you are doing a great job, the best that you may deliver. For in this publishing media it´s easy to get it all wrong when you are just starting. Secondly, find a good editor, or at least a second opinion. You know, four eyes read better than two. You will regret later on for not having a good editor to go through your writing, or having a great artist to do the best cover for your book. Because if there is something I learned during these years in the publishing market it is to never ever underestimate the power of good editing. And my third piece will be to advice about a good image: the saying “never judge a book by its cover” was created by a lazy author who didn´t give much thought of what really works in the marketing of both fiction and nonfiction.

The war is not over, however. Even organisations like Wikipedia succumbed to the authoritarian twitch, appointing editors with special privileges who could impose their own prejudices upon certain topics. The motive was understandable – to stop entries being taken over by obsessive nutters with weird views. But of course what happened, just as in the French and Russian revolutions, was that the nutters got on the committee. The way to become an editor was simply to edit lots of pages, and thereby gain brownie points. Some of the editors turned into ruthlessly partisan dogmatists, and the value of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia was gradually damaged. As one commentator puts it, Wikipedia is ‘run by cliquish, censorious editors and open to pranks and vandalism’. It is still a great first port of call on any uncontroversial topic, but I find Wikipedia cannot be trusted on many subjects.

No one trans story is better or inherently more “radical” than another, but that hasn’t stopped cisgender media culture from deeming certain trans stories to be more valuable than others. Those of us who don’t fit the classical narrative end up either having our stories edited and reedited until they fit, or end up having our voices silenced. And that’s fucked. At its best, this narrative is just an oversimplification of the trans community. At its worst, this narrative is used as a tool—reinforced by cisgender editors, curators, movement leaders, and gatekeepers—that continues to pressure trans people into fitting into one of two binary genders. By showing how desirable it is to be gender conforming and “pass” as a man or as a woman, this narrative reiterates the idea that gender nonconforming trans people are less-than and should be lucky to be treated as the gender with which we identify.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I pleaded with Norman to use my first name, and he always agreed to do so: “Okay, Mister Regan, I’ll remember in the future,” he’d say with a wicked grin on his face. Eventually Norman explained that he had a reputation for remembering all his customers’ names, and that if he had to learn first names as well as surnames, his workload would be doubled, so I backed down. All would have been well with this had I not introduced Norman to Roy Finamore, who was the editor of the first edition of this book, some six months later; Mister Finamore joined the ranks of thousands addicted to Norman’s wit and his cocktailian skills. A few months thereafter I was informed that Norman had taken to using Roy’s first name at the bar, and I was livid. This called for action. I made the pilgrimage to Norman’s bar. “I hear that Roy Finamore is a regular here now.” “That’s right, Mister Regan, he’s here three or four times a week.” “And what do you call him, Norman?” “I call him Roy.” “And why is that, Norman?” He leaned over the bar until our noses almost met. “Just to piss you off.” It had taken Norman months to set up this one glorious moment. In my opinion, I was looking into the eyes of Manhattan’s best bartender.

p.cm. Includes indexes.ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-6278-7 (soft cover) ISBN-10: 0-7360-6278-5 (soft cover) 1. Hatha yoga.2. Human anatomy.I.Title.RA781.7. K356 2007 613.7’046--dc22 2007010050 ISBN-10: 0-7360-6278-5 (print) ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-6278-7 (print) ISBN-10: 0-7360-8218-2 (Adobe PDF) ISBN-13: 978-0-7360-8218-1 (Adobe PDF) Copyright © 2007 by The Breathe Trust All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. Acquisitions Editor: Martin Barnard Developmental Editor: Leigh Keylock Assistant Editor: Christine Horger Copyeditor: Patsy Fortney Proofreader: Kathy Bennett Graphic Designer: Fred Starbird Graphic Artist: Tara Welsch Original Cover Designer: Lydia Mann Cover Revisions: Keith Blomberg Art Manager: Kelly Hendren Project Photographer: Lydia Mann Illustrator (cover and interior): Sharon Ellis Printer: United Graphics Human Kinetics books are available at special discounts for bulk purchase. Special editions or book excerpts

Every entry, whether revised or reviewed, goes through multiple editing passes. The definer starts the job, then it’s passed to a copy editor who cleans up the definer’s work, then to a bunch of specialty editors: cross-reference editors, who make sure the definer hasn’t used any word in the entry that isn’t entered in that dictionary; etymologists, to review or write the word history; dating editors, who research and add the dates of first written use; pronunciation editors, who handle all the pronunciations in the book. Then eventually it’s back to a copy editor (usually a different one from the first round, just to be safe), who will make any additional changes to the entry that cross-reference turned up, then to the final reader, who is, as the name suggests, the last person who can make editorial changes to the entry, and then off to the proofreader (who ends up, again, being a different editor from the definer and the two previous copy editors). After the proofreaders are done slogging through two thousand pages of four-point type, the production editors send it off to the printer or the data preparation folks, and then we get another set of dictionary pages (called page proofs) to proofread. This process happens continuously as we work through a dictionary, so a definer may be working on batches in C, cross-reference might be in W, etymology in T, dating and pronunciation in the second half of S, copy editors in P (first pass) and Q and R (second pass), while the final reader is closing out batches in N and O, proofreaders are working on M, and production has given the second set of page proofs to another set of proofreaders for the letter L. We all stagger our way through the alphabet until the last batch, which is inevitably somewhere near G, is closed. By the time a word is put in print either on the page or online, it’s generally been seen by a minimum of ten editors. Now consider that when it came to writing the Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, we had a staff of about twenty editors working on it: twenty editors to review about 220,000 existing definitions, write about 10,000 new definitions, and make over 100,000 editorial changes (typos, new dates, revisions) for the new edition. Now remember that the 110,000-odd changes made were each reviewed about a dozen times and by a minimum of ten editors. The time given to us to complete the revision of the Tenth Edition into the Eleventh Edition so production could begin on the new book? Eighteen months.

We copy editors sometimes get a reputation for wanting to redirect the flow, change the course of the missile, have our way with a piece of prose. The image of the copy editor is of someone who favors a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people's errors, a lowly person who is just starting out on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i's and crossing the t's and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers. I suppose I have been all of these. But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work ,taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject the for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn't poking up—unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.

The introduction to the original book as I found it in Greece contains many interesting points, since it shows that educators in foreign countries, notably in Germany, had come to the same conclusion with our best American teachers. The editor of the little Greek reading-book says: "In editing this work we have made use not only of Homer's 'Odyssey,' but also of that excellent reader which is used in the public schools of Germany, Willman's 'Lesebuch aus Homer.' We have divided the little volume into three parts, the first of which gives a short resumé of the war against Troy and the destruction of that city, the second the wanderings of Odysseus till his arrival in Ithaca, the third his arrival and the killing of the wooers. We have no apology to make in presenting this book to the public as a school-book, since many people superior to us have shown the need of such books in school-work. The new public schools, as is well known, have a mission of the highest importance. They do not aim, as formerly, at absolute knowledge pounded into the heads of children in a mechanical way. Their aim is the mental and ethical development of the pupils. Reading and writing lead but half way to this goal. With all nations the readers used in the public schools are a collection of the noblest thoughts of their authors." The Greek editor had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

Why, sir, in the beginning we appointed all our worst generals to command the armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers. As you know, I have planned some campaigns and quite a number of battles. I have given the work all the care and thought I could, and sometimes, when my plans were completed, as far as I could see, they seemed to be perfect. But when I have fought them through, I have discovered defects and occasionally wondered I did not see some of the defects in advance. When it was all over, I found by reading a newspaper that these best editor generals saw all the defects plainly from the start. Unfortunately, they did not communicate their knowledge to me until it was too late.” Then, after a pause, he added, with a beautiful, grave expression I can never forget: “I have no ambition but to serve the Confederacy, and do all I can to win our independence. I an willing to serve in any capacity to which the authorities may assign me. I have done the best I could in the field, and have not succeeded as I could wish. I am willing to yield my place to these best generals, and I will do my best for the cause in editing a newspaper.” In the same strain he once remarked to one of his generals: “Even as poor a soldier as I am can generally discover mistakes after it is all over. But if I could only induce these wise gentlemen who see them so clearly beforehand to communicate with me in advance, instead of waiting until the evil has come upon us, to let me know that they knew all the time, it would be far better for my reputation, and (what is of more consequence) far better for the cause.

The black magic that evil-minded people of all religions practice for their ugly and inhuman motives. The modern world ignores that and even do not believe in it; however, it exists, and it sufficiently works too. When I was an assistant editor, in an evening newspaper, I edited and published such stories. As a believer, I believe that. However, not that can affect everyone; otherwise, every human would have been under the attack of it. No one can explain and define black magic and such practices. The scientists today fail to recognize such a phenomenon; therefore, routes are open for black magic to proceeds its practices without hindrances. One can search online websites, and YouTube; it will realize a large number of the victims of that the evil practice by evil-minded peoples of various societies. The magic, black magic, or evil power exists, and it works too. Evil power causes, effects, and appears, as diseases and psychological issues since no one can realize, trace, and prove that horror practice; it is the secret and privilege of the evil-minded people that law fails to catch and punish them, for such crime. I exemplify here, the two events briefly, one a very authentic that I suffered from it and another, a person, who also became a victim of it. The first, when I landed on the soil of the Netherlands, I thought, I was in the safest place; however, within one year, I faced the incident, which was a practice of my family, involving my brothers, my country mates, who lived in the Netherlands. The most suspected were the evil-minded people of the Ahmadiyya movement of Surinam people, and possibly my ex-wife and a Pakistani couple. I had seen the evidence of the black magic, which my family did upon me, but I could not trace the reality of other suspected ones that destroyed my career, future, health, and even life. The second, a Pakistani, who lived in Germany, for several years, as an active member of the Ahmadiyya Movement, he told me his story briefly, during a trip to London, attending a literary gathering. He received a gold medal for his poetry work, and also he served Ahmadiyya TV channel; however when he became a real Muslim; as a result, Ahmadiyya worriers turned against him. When they could not force him to back in their group, they practiced the devil's work to punish him. The symptoms of magic were well-known to me that he told me since I bore that on my body too. The multiple other stories that reveal that the Ahmadiyya Movement, possibly practices black magic ways, to achieve its goals. As my observation, they involve, to eliminate Muslim Imams and scholars, who cause the failure of that new religion and false prophet, claiming as Jesus. I am a victim of their such practices. Social Media and such websites are a stronghold of their activities. In Pakistan, they are active, in the guise of the real Muslims, to dodge the simple ones, as they do in Europe and other parts of the word. Such possibility and chance can be possible that use of drugs and chemicals, to defeat their opponents, it needs, wide-scale investigation to save, the humanity. The incident that occurred to me, in the Netherlands, in 1980, I tried and appealed to the authorities of the Netherlands, but they openly refused to cooperate that. However, I still hope and look forward to any miracle that someone from somewhere gives the courage to verify that.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately.

ANNALS OF LANGUAGE WORD MAGIC How much really gets lost in translation? BY ADAM GOPNIK Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs. Although berries and beans may be separated by a subtle sound within a language, the larger space between like words in different languages is just as hazardous. Two words that seem to indicate the same state may mean the opposite. In English, the spiritual guy is pious, while the one called spirituel in French is witty; a liberal in France is on the right, in America to the left. And what of cultural inflections that seem to separate meanings otherwise identical? When we have savoir-faire in French, don’t we actually have something different from “know-how” in English, even though the two compounds combine pretty much the same elements? These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another. Histoire in French means both “history” and “story,” in a way that “history” in English doesn’t quite, so that the relation between history and story may be more elegantly available in French. But no one has trouble in English with the notion that histories are narratives we make up as much as chronicles we discern. Indeed, in the preface, the editors cheerfully announce that any strong form of the belief to which their book may seem to be a monument is certainly false: “Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” So their Dictionary is a self-exploding book,

In 1933 a German branch of the International Society was founded with Matthias Göring as president; needless to say it was gleichgeschaltet and Göring ensured that the rest of the society followed suit. Jung countered Göring by redrafting the society’s rules, allowing Jewish members who had been forced to resign from the German branch to join as individuals. As editor of the society’s journal, Jung made sure that work by Jewish members continued to be published, and that work by Jewish psychologists was reviewed. But as the journal was published in Germany, Jung had little hands-on control, and was enraged when Göring inserted a pro-Nazi statement in an issue in 1933, endorsing Mein Kampf as a core text for all psychotherapists and obliging all members to declare their loyalty to the Fuehrer. The statement was supposed to be included in only the German edition of the journal, but Göring overstepped Jung—something he did more than once—and Jung was furious to find his name among the statement’s endorsers.

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Poly! To the Editor: Reviewing the Library of America edition of “The Days Trilogy,” by H. L. Mencken (Dec. 7), P. J. O’Rourke said that Mencken had only “a trade school education.” Mencken was educated at Baltimore Polytechnic, then and to this day considered one of the finest public high schools in the city. It was established to teach engineering, so describing it as a trade school is like calling M.I.T. one. STEVEN A. KING NEW YORK

Years working at a newspaper. You learn to write fast and reasonably good and in a manner which does not require substantial editing. Or your editors and copyeditors stab you to death and hang your corpse in the newsroom as a warning to the other staff writers.

In an expansive attempt to establish a foothold among California's intelligentsia and create America's first truly national newspaper, The New York Times launched a slimmed-down West Coast edition in October 1962... The result in LA was a sorry stepsister of the great gray New York Times for its West Coast readers... Reprocessed news dictated from 3,000 miles away by editors who knew zip about what made Southern California tick.