Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious article of Buzzfeed lore— Hey will you accept all of our cookies? Will you allow alerts so we can keep you up to date on the latest articles? Yes, I know you set your browser to not allow us to ask but that was weeks ago. Don't mind me I'm just going to start playing a scrolling video over the body text. Oh, no, this website can't be navigated with the keyboard. What are you, eighty years old? Our reactive menus are much nicer anyway once they've loaded. If you really have trouble finding something, just use our search function, then after it doesn't help at all just search our website by using it as a keyword in Google instead. I'm mostly kidding. Research generally won't be on those kinds of sites, but I'm still allowed to call the Internet user-unfriendly.
I confess: I think about sex all the time. I spend two weeks out of the month writing sex scenes (M/M,M/F,F/F, multiple) that may or may not make it into stories. I confess that calling your sexual partner "Daddy" or "Mommy" creeps me out. I love mustard and ketchup on my hot dogs, corndogs, and burgers.
I much prefer styrofoam cups to china to hold my coffee (never paper), and beer tastes best from a Solo cup.
Confession: I am an IDIOT! A few months ago, a gentleman I know only through joint participation on an internet forum mentioned that he was writing (editing) a book, and not having much luck finding a publisher. I (foolishly) mentioned that I had self-published some books through Amazon and that, if he decided to go that route, I could help him set up the book for upload. Big mistake. HUGE mistake. He still hasn't found a publisher, so he has decided to self-publish. He sent me a bunch of disjointed Word files for the manuscript, and an even more disjointed collection of image files, to be inserted into the formatted final product. I had NO idea what I had gotten myself into. This genius uses a computer like an electric typewriter. He knows NOTHING about styles and paragraph formatting in Word. The book includes reproducing large portions of other, historical publications, most extensively formatted with lettered and number paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, and sub-sub paragraphs. Did he use Word's outlining tool? Nope. Did he manually set indents and hanging first lines? Nope again. What he did was to use the brute force method, using tabs and spaces to line text up where he wanted it it to align. Did I mention tabs -- PLURAL? No, he doesn't know how to set tabs, so to get something aligned over toward the right he would enter three or four tabs (at the default 1/2-inch intervals). He was typing (yes, I wrote "typing," because that's what he was doing) on a virtual 8-1/2 x 11 default page size. The book will be 5 x 8, so you can perhaps imagine the havoc all those tabs caused when the text was reflowed to fit the smaller page width. The images? Most were screen grabs -- of the ENTIRE screen in landscape orientation, with an image in portrait orientation in the middle. He didn't bother to crop the images -- he left that for me to do. And then there's the cover. I originally told him I would format the interior but that he should hire a cover artist for the cover. He didn't want to do that, so he persuaded me to have a go at it. He sent an image, and I did a mock-up with his full image wrapping around onto the back cover. He didn't like that. He wanted the image cropped to a small portion, and appearing in a box on the front cover. So I gave him that. Now he wants the image to wrap onto the back cover. AAARRRGGGHHH!!! I'm done. Did I mention that the portions he write (as editor) are garbage? He can't even create a sentence, he occasionally inserts commas where they aren't needed and much more often simply omits commas entirely. I could fix that -- but I signed on to format a finished manuscript, so I'm not doing editing or proofreading. The scary part is that this person is a published author. He has several books on military history in his book list. His editors must have earned their pay. /rant mode
This might be missing something obvious, but why are you still helping/working with him? Did you sign a contract?
There's a very published author whose work I enjoy. Their* novels have won multiple Big Awards in their genre. I started to follow their blog a few years ago and gave up because, IMO, they must be the idea person and have someone else to do the actual text and typing. I know that one probably doesn't take the same care with a simple blog post as a trad-published novel, but if I knew them simply through their blog I would have forgotten them in moments. *Nope, not going to reveal name, genre, gender, or nuthin. I hope to be published someday and don't want a beef with a Name.
Because I said I would. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It won't happen again.
I feel your pain. I have volunteered to read someone's short stories, give constructive criticism, light grammar help, and content review. Six stories were literal copies of each other down to the breakfast and decision of what to wear for the day. The only differences were the names. Three whole chapters, word for word copies, only they typed them out each time, no actual copy and paste because they are using some horrible notebook software that limits the number of words per page. Mistake for someone struggling with their own writing, worse when I can't even mention that a sentence is a repeat of the previous sentence or ask what the plot is without getting yelled at for "hating" the story and "complaining" about everything. I told them I would read their stories (they had to pull all them because of comments on various writing sites), but that was it. No questions, no suggestions, nothing. After a year of painful communications, I asked what their favorite books were. I was wanting to know what their style was she liked. I was stunned: Goodnight Moon and The Hungry Catipliller. They are 30, they told me. Don't get me wrong, Mouse Soup is an all time fave, but really? Maybe I am being too petty and shallow, critical?
Or too honest. Lots of people say they want honest feedback -- but they expect the feedback to range somewhere between "fair" and "fantastic." They are totally unprepared for "it sucks," regardless of how gently you try to convey it. And the same applies to editing and proofreading. They say they want help in improving their writing, but when you send back a marked-up copy of their first draft, they get all huffy and respond (as you encountered) that you're being negative and "hating," or else "That's the way I talk, and I want to write the way I talk 'cause it's genuine." Well, yes, I suppose it is genuine. The problem is that it makes you appear to be a genuine hick -- which you probably are. Knock yourself out.
Few things are more thankless than trying to help a terrible but self-satisfied writer to improve, however gentle one tries to be. I taught writing through continuing adult education for five or six years. Most people buckle down to improve and did very well indeed, but a few argue and get offended at the mildest suggestion. One guy came unglued because I explained describing something as the size of a football field was a cliche. He was furious. How dare I try to change his voice? If there is something I hate in writing, it is hearing someone babble about finding one's voice, then clinging to that voice like it is holy writ. To be any kind of writer, one needs to learn to write in many voices, for many different venues and many different audiences. One of the English teachers at the college couldn't understand why the newsletter I publish quarterly wouldn't accommodate a student's haiku, though the guidelines state clearly articles are supposed to be related to the museum or substantive science, no fiction, no creative nonfiction, no poetry. People who can't grasp guidelines make me crazy, and teachers who don't explain the facts of publication to students seeking publication make me crazier. No, no. Let's teach students that the world will adjust to their expectations. Blech.
Not if you grew up in parts of the American South where football is a religion, especially when Texas and Oklahoma play.
Who knows? Some people think strictly in sports metaphors: big as a football field, getting to first base with a girl, a final gamble being like a fourth down with 9 yards to go... The one hard and fast rule in my classroom became NO DAMN SPORTS REFERENCES unless one was writing about sports.
