THE EDITING: A funny story about the editing process

"This cataloguing of people coming and going makes my eyes glaze over. Cut!?"

The editor's comment was scrawled on my manuscript in a vigorous, impatient hand (at right). It was the first sign that he didn't quite get it. The second sign was when he insisted in his cover letter that "we really must" go with the title he had chosen: "The Golden Age of Athens."

Can you imagine anything worse?

I didn't know what to do. He had sent me back pages and pages of demands for cuts and revisions. All my friends, all the ones who weren't bankable rock n roll heroes, were marked for deletion.

The book was as much autobiography as it was reportage, so the demand to excise my memories from the book caused much anguish. But, sigh, I knew I wouldn't get the second half of my advance unless I revised the manuscript and had it accepted. So I got out the bush ax and went to work.

Choppity choppity choppity. Out went my favorite professors; gone was the girl I once loved.

But they don't call it punk for nothing. After a while I just shuffled some paragraphs around and, per his instructions, I "endeavor[ed] to find the right key combinations" to make magazine titles italic instead of all caps. (My mistake, I sputtered. I thought you had people for that.)

I rolled the dice. I sent it back after minimal bloodletting.

Sometimes fortune shines on you. A little while after I returned the revised manuscript, I got a call. It seems the editor I was working with moved to a different publishing house. My book had been reassigned. The new editor had taken a look at it. He wanted to call me himself.

"I love it," he said.

The joy! My new editor got it!