In December, I volunteered to edit a manuscript of a
colleague of mine. They had sent it to iUniverse once upon a time, and the
company said that it all KINDS of potential…but it needed work.
Understatement of the CENTURY.
I volunteered to edit the memoir for the author.
There’s no denying that it’s important. There’s no denying
that it was fascinating.
There’s also no denying that it was not only filled with
spelling errors, context errors, misstatements of history, and numerous other
flaws. It was also written as stream-of-consciousness with no particular regard
for chronology.
That’s right: there endless run on sentences that would
change tense, character, and time frame. The writer would go from talking about
their current experiences, to those of their great, great grandmother. This was
without punctuation and without any kind of warning.
Let me say here that if I didn’t think that this story was
important, I would have returned the file to the author with a note that said, “I
don’t think this is for me.”
As for this manuscript, I finally hit on the solution of “dating”
parts as I read them. Now the manuscript ranges from “Before 1900” to “Now” or “Present”.
The narrative covered some 150 years of family, personal, and world history and
how the author interacted with the men, women, and children from those times.
Last night, at a cost of time spent with my wife, housework,
yard work, and working on the edits of my own manuscript – which is due back to the editor
at the end of THIS week – I finished.
Would I do it again?
Not if you paid me.
Besides being a subject I typically have no interest in
(history), there were parts that were so intimate that they made me extremely
uncomfortable; and there were opinions that were, while not directed at me
personally, were directed at me nevertheless. It was often difficult to remain objective.
It was difficult not to take the narrative personally.
I wish the author the best of luck, but this will have to be
the end of my involvement because I have come away from the project almost
entirely drained emotionally.
Should I have done it? It’s a moot point now, the project is
in the author’s hands. But I was wondering what others out there thought…
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