Streamlining

Another item I should have added to my weekend list is "Realized this: My son is now taller than me."

I made him stand behind me, heel-to-heel, in front of the full-length mirror. Taller.

Then I made him do it again in front of my husband, who did the horizontal karate chop across the tops of our heads to measure. Taller.

Seems just yesterday the kid looked like this (his tenth birthday, third from right):



Every picture was filled with a guffaw, a peace sign above a pal's head, a tongue out and crazy eyes, one hand under his tee-shirt to flap an armpit fart.

Now he's a teen and has streamlined his responses: "Yep, Nope, Huh?"

I'm taking a break from the blog for a week or so. Not because I'm depressed he's taller but because I have a boatload of manuscripts to work on. Many, many words to edit. 219,344 words to be exact.

A light edit might look like this:


But I remember reading about a famous New York editor who had celebrated his birthday at a three-star restaurant with all the authors he had helped to publish over the years. If I remember right, Toni Morrison was there. She told of the venerable editor's distinct style. He had only two editing marks, which he wrote judiciously out in the margins.

!

and

?

He penciled in the exclamation mark when he liked a passage. He inserted the question mark when he didn't. Morrison described that it was up to his authors to figure out how to fix it. She said it was maddening but that she always seemed to figure it out. And that in the end his methods were probably the best thing for her writing.

So I'm going to get in the thick of it next week, pencils sharpened and poised.

And to get through it all I'm streamlining the work. It's either

?

or

!

or

Yep. Nope. Huh?