Those of you wishing to preserve the illusion that book publishing is a glamorous and thrilling, Mad Menesque profession may want to look away now. Those of you looking for stories of the great city that is New York, tales to rival the classic yarns of days gone by, are sure to be sorely disappointed.
I spent my day, for the most part, immersed deep again in the tedium of manuscript reformatting. I had what should have already been a single document of alphabetized references — but was instead several documents, full of errors and left-over track changes and only a passing acquaintance with which letters in the alphabet go before which other letters — and I bent it to my will using only the gifts that god (and Microsoft Word) gave me. Which means, basically, that I spent the day doing a lot of cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting. (They are, after all, aspects of my game.)
And I was doing all of this, among a few other things — like, oh, compiling a list of contact information for everyone who’s reviewed a manuscript or proposal for me in the past year — while the office was besieged by incessant noise. Like insanely, unbearably, miss-the-constant-fire-alarms-from-the-old-office-ly loud noise. The work crews outside our windows were back, apparently repairing or removing or something a bridge around the outside building. I don’t really know what that means, but that’s what the late-in-the-game e-mail from management told us. They’ll be moving around the building, so they won’t always be directly in front of us, and there’s the possibility that yesterday and today will be the loudest, but the work is scheduled to last all summer long. As I noted on Twitter, it was like listening to giant robots make fart noises, loud enough to rattle the windows, or like being stuck inside a dentist’s drill. It really was difficult to concentrate, and there were points when I thought they really ought to send us home.
There were points when, a split second after I’d cut, I couldn’t remember what or where I was supposed to paste.
Oh, and did I mention the office was uncomfortably cold?
When I overslept this morning, and then the ticket collector on the train shouted loudly as I tried to board, “This car stinks! Move back one,” I probably should have guessed it was going to be one of those days. I don’t even want to think about psychotherapy references all weekend, or even alphabetic order. And whatever I do think about, I want to be able to hear myself do it.
All that said, I’m not going to characterize it as a bad day. It didn’t make me miserable, was just aggravating and tedious in a lot of ways.
I’m glad it’s the weekend.