In AA they give you a chip.
In SA they give you a chip.
In Narcotics Anonymous, I hear they give you a chip as well.
So in Gamblers Anonymous, do they give you... a chip?
And, wouldn't that be, um, counterintuitive?
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Things Seen Off the Beach
Billboard for DOS EQUIS beer on PCH between Wilmington and Long Beach, CA:
You only live once.
Make sure it's enough.
You only live once.
Make sure it's enough.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The Peet's Beat
2 Feb. 2008, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Santa Monica
I’m at a Peet’s in L.A., surrounded by sitcom and dramatic series writers, and I’m wondering why there haven’t been assassination attempts on the Ground Hog. Wouldn’t that change the prevailing weather outlook? And shouldn’t Los Angelenos, who take sunny days for granted, produce the sleeper cell to do the job?
-----------------------
2 Feb 2008
More from the Montana Avenue ladies who sip their lattes in the corner...
Things to do with your Blackberry while sipping a cold cappuccino:
Read that a carrot looks like a human eye when sliced…
Figs increase mobility of male sperm…
-----------------------
2 Feb 2008
OMG! The Beverly Hills library has an ATM! Just how expensive are those fines?
-----------------------
5 Feb 2008, Redondo Beach, Peet’s Coffee & Tea
Two 60-something men wearing ball caps and windbreakers stand in line. One says to the other:
“I heard the weather report. They said there’s a ‘chance of rain.’"
I look outside. The sun’s out.
If you think about it, there’s always a chance of rain.”
-----------------------
6 Feb 2008, Yellow road sign in Los Angeles:
Traffic Calming Info
(213) 977-6464
I won't ask. But 'Like Prozac for your Porsche' comes to mind.
-----------------------
8 Feb 2009, Peet’s, Petaluma
Mimi, a barrista, coined the term “Transformational Whining” Mimi is Buddhist and has an 11 year old son. She should know.
-----------------------
23 March 2009, Peet’s, Redondo Beach
Just bought a Vegan Chocolate Chip cookie.
How can a cookie be vegan if it never had any meat in it to begin with? Or had it?
-----------------------
23 March 2009, Peet’s, Redondo Beach, later that afternoon
A dapper man in faded jeans, a black jacket, white open shirt exposing a grey T-shirt and carrying a briefcase and paperback asks me if he can borrow the free chair perpendicular to me at my table. “Please feel free,” I offer him.
“Thank you.”
Seconds later, he becomes aware of the late afternoon sun pouring through the storefront window. He smiles apologetically as he turns to me and says, “I didn’t realize there’d be sun. I’ll have to move to another end of the room.” I point to the pull down shades, two of three I’ve already pulled down for the same reason. “Oh, thank you!” he says, “I’m indebted to you twice.” He takes his seat. And then, his closed Apple laptop on the faux marble bar before him, he blesses himself with the sign of the cross. He then plugs in the laptop.
Man, that’s someone who has little faith in Macs.
-----------------------
28 March 2009, Java Man, Hermosa Beach
While sitting at a wooden table with my laptop and Princess phone to my left,
A late 30-something/early 40-something gent in shorts, Doc Martens, a black
ski cap and a gotee, strikes up a convo with me about my Princess phone and
MagicJack which connects it to the net. I pick up half way through:
SkiCap: …it’s like my cell phone. I have a $20 variety I got at 7-Eleven. You can walk here and there, better reception than my Blackberry. No bells and whistles but it makes calls. It’s like a car. I could drive a Jaguar, but if I’m driving a Jaguar it better be because they’re filming me. With a Gran Torino, I can have five girls in there, (he then swings his right leg forward in a kicking motion), boom! Get out! And L.A. freeways are moving at 4 miles per hour anyway.
I’m at a Peet’s in L.A., surrounded by sitcom and dramatic series writers, and I’m wondering why there haven’t been assassination attempts on the Ground Hog. Wouldn’t that change the prevailing weather outlook? And shouldn’t Los Angelenos, who take sunny days for granted, produce the sleeper cell to do the job?
-----------------------
2 Feb 2008
More from the Montana Avenue ladies who sip their lattes in the corner...
Things to do with your Blackberry while sipping a cold cappuccino:
Read that a carrot looks like a human eye when sliced…
Figs increase mobility of male sperm…
-----------------------
2 Feb 2008
OMG! The Beverly Hills library has an ATM! Just how expensive are those fines?
-----------------------
5 Feb 2008, Redondo Beach, Peet’s Coffee & Tea
Two 60-something men wearing ball caps and windbreakers stand in line. One says to the other:
“I heard the weather report. They said there’s a ‘chance of rain.’"
I look outside. The sun’s out.
If you think about it, there’s always a chance of rain.”
-----------------------
6 Feb 2008, Yellow road sign in Los Angeles:
Traffic Calming Info
(213) 977-6464
I won't ask. But 'Like Prozac for your Porsche' comes to mind.
-----------------------
8 Feb 2009, Peet’s, Petaluma
Mimi, a barrista, coined the term “Transformational Whining” Mimi is Buddhist and has an 11 year old son. She should know.
-----------------------
23 March 2009, Peet’s, Redondo Beach
Just bought a Vegan Chocolate Chip cookie.
How can a cookie be vegan if it never had any meat in it to begin with? Or had it?
-----------------------
23 March 2009, Peet’s, Redondo Beach, later that afternoon
A dapper man in faded jeans, a black jacket, white open shirt exposing a grey T-shirt and carrying a briefcase and paperback asks me if he can borrow the free chair perpendicular to me at my table. “Please feel free,” I offer him.
“Thank you.”
Seconds later, he becomes aware of the late afternoon sun pouring through the storefront window. He smiles apologetically as he turns to me and says, “I didn’t realize there’d be sun. I’ll have to move to another end of the room.” I point to the pull down shades, two of three I’ve already pulled down for the same reason. “Oh, thank you!” he says, “I’m indebted to you twice.” He takes his seat. And then, his closed Apple laptop on the faux marble bar before him, he blesses himself with the sign of the cross. He then plugs in the laptop.
Man, that’s someone who has little faith in Macs.
-----------------------
28 March 2009, Java Man, Hermosa Beach
While sitting at a wooden table with my laptop and Princess phone to my left,
A late 30-something/early 40-something gent in shorts, Doc Martens, a black
ski cap and a gotee, strikes up a convo with me about my Princess phone and
MagicJack which connects it to the net. I pick up half way through:
SkiCap: …it’s like my cell phone. I have a $20 variety I got at 7-Eleven. You can walk here and there, better reception than my Blackberry. No bells and whistles but it makes calls. It’s like a car. I could drive a Jaguar, but if I’m driving a Jaguar it better be because they’re filming me. With a Gran Torino, I can have five girls in there, (he then swings his right leg forward in a kicking motion), boom! Get out! And L.A. freeways are moving at 4 miles per hour anyway.
TOP 10 SIGNS THAT YOU NEED AN EDITOR
By Edward It
1. THERE'S A METHOD TO HIS PUNCTUATION
Just because he showed up on the scene more than 400 years before you did and has a few more Tony's to his credit, Shakespeare has nothing on you. So you decide to update the Graveyard scene in your revisionist one-act entitled, "Hamlet and Eggs" by painting the young, indecisive Prince as a modern day victim of A.D.D., perpetually fondling the joy sick on his PS2, and imbibing on one too many lattés. Only in the midst of thinking through the racing thoughts that are surely plaguing your main character's mind like so many accidentally disturbed hives of bees or not to bees, you forget the risks of misplaced punctuation. Naturally, you don't catch it until your lead executes the scene on opening night (which will double as your closing night). Looking upon the quiet skull at an arm's length, young Prince Hamlet laments: "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. Well, Horatio....tennis?" He tosses the old bone over his shoulder as he and his companion stroll off stage eager to exeunt to the nearest watering hole, laden with the knowledge that their careers are all but finished. As for how your star handled your scene, what else could an accomplished actor do? The madness to his Method acting dictates that he had to make your lines work after all, and every playwright knows that if it's on the page, it's probably gonna show up on the stage in one form or another. Your editor, seated behind you, slips you his Playbill with a note hastily scribbled across it: "Psst. Methinks the period takes a comma. The second comma is...out. And Bill would never have said, 'Well.'"
2. MODIFIERS BE WITH YOU
Remember that teenage joke, the bastion of so many zit-adorned males who loved to torment their female peers with: "Hey Judy (Sue, Emily, etc.), you're pretty...ugly." Ouch. But now that you're 15 years older, more mature, and no one can play connect the dots with your face, you wouldn't dare stoop so low. Besides, Judy has gone through a minor makeover herself – she’s now CEO of the defense contractor for which you're interviewing to land the job of Director of Marketing, and she's sitting on the other side of her Lake Erie-sized mahogany desk training her (Wow! When did she get so beautiful?) brown eyes on your résumé like a Stealth Bomber sniffing out a sand bunker under a roof spray painted with six-foot block letters announcing "Gone to Maui. Wish you were here." As her eyes move over every well-crafted paragraph of your illustrious work history, Judy alternates between smiles, smirks, and uh-huh's. She pauses and looks up. Your nails dig deeper into the leather, brass-studded arms of that genuine Louie XIV hot seat in her office, although you're feeling a lot more like Anne Boleyn before Henry the VIII. Your future prospective employer speaks: "So, tell me about your time with Tasty Queen. What encompassed the role of, what was it again?" She glances down at the 20-pound, gray linen page hot off the presses from Kinko’s, "Oh yes... 'Post-Consumer Viscous Waste Eradication Supervisor.’" Feeling like a cow moving under the conveyor belt utility lights of a patty processing plant, you attempt to explain the fine art of transporting used fryer grease once a week from the kitchen to the environmental containment unit out back or what some might less affectionately write off as 'the dumpster.' Your editor? He would have suggested you jump off the ladder of abstraction somewhere around the rung labeled:
Chef Apprentice.
3. DON’T STALK WHEN YOU TALK. WATCH THOSE NON SEQUITURS / TRANSITIONAL SENTENCES
Your uncle’s funeral was touching. You had no idea one man could be so loved by so many. At a healthy and vibrant 105 years old, Uncle Luigi probably had a few detractors along the way, but from all the wet faces during the viewing, you sure wouldn't know it today. Too bad he didn't see that milk truck last Thursday as he stepped off the curb to pick up a cigarette butt during his daily -- and final -- morning jaunt around the block. As several hundred guests exit the funeral parlor, you express your sincerest condolences to your aunt. Aware that she soon will be very much alone, you invite her out for a late afternoon aperitif to toast one more round to "dear Uncle Luigi." She is moved by your overture. "That’s lovely," she says, "where shall we go?" You think out loud. "Well, there's Sam's Cock and Crow on Main, but that place is usually dead this time of day." Gripped by a sudden sense of horror, you mobilize to dig out of a looming hole widening beneath you with every forthcoming utterance. Your timing is almost…deadpan. Grinning sheepishly, you redirect: "I mean, it's really quiet there, not much life in the joint...(ouch) um, and I once was stiffed on my Bloody Mary by the bartender (ouch again). I was dying to pay my tab and split. I mean--" Forget it: you're buried. Some people simply don't know how to transition. Then again, some people play in traffic. If writing is, as some experts suggest, really an extension of human language, then before your next utterance, talk to your editor. She'll take a look at your word use, your sentences and your paragraphs, especially those that conclude chapters and sub-chapters in your manuscript or thesis, and recommend the most effective approaches for preserving continuity of thought without, if you will, leaving your prose hemorrhaging.
4. I STINK THEREFORE I AM
Is that a lump in your throat or are you just choking on what your characters should say next? Dialogue. From the moment we proudly voice our first "mama" or "dada," most human beings are instinctively gifted to gab. Although we sometimes later put our respective feet in our mouths, one foot per person, talking with other people is generally the least of our worries. We part our lips and make a statement. We're asked a question, we respond. So why, at times, does it seem easier to break the ice with a first date than to make characters open up and talk from your pages? If your story’s characters are leaving you speechless, you need an editor. S/he will help you and your characters find your voice and theirs. Let's say, for example, your novel stars a dapper but odiferously challenged skunk that happens to possess the introspection of Descartes. After studying the skunk’s profile and the context within which the character speaks, your editor might suggest that this attribution: "Geez, why duzz everybody diss me at parties?" is not as effective (for this particular character) as this one: "Just because I'm special doesn't mean I deserve to be treated like I don't exist."
5. MY LIFE IS FALLING APART. SO ARE MY SENTENCES.
Someone famous once said, "I write like I speak." Good advice. He must have tuned in to how people talk. Because most people, contrary to what you learned in grammar school, speak in sentence fragments. They're a mainstay of great literature (novels, screenplays, speeches, dramatic works, poetry, billboard ad copy, etc.). They're less acceptable when deployed within written communications that require more formal, precise, unequivocal text such as, for example, your Masters thesis, a legal brief, a technical guide, or even the standard corporate memorandum. Of course, many successful CEOs have a rep for sidelining formality and speaking like they do behind closed doors, i.e., in plain terms. A good editor will feel out your text, embrace it, juggle it, consume it, and regurgitate it in a way that truly captures what you wanted to say and as it should be said. If called for, an editor will not hesitate to use sentence fragments. Nor should you. Just make sure you use ‘em at the right time and use ‘em well. Just because Hemmingway was alleged to use fragments with reckless abandon, don’t assume you can start living off a six pack cooling in a cold brook in the middle of a burned out European countryside or take out a charging rhino at 30 yards. Sentence fragments -- like drinking and rhino bagging -- should be handled with care.
6. PARENTHETICALLY SPEAKING (NOT THAT IT MATTERS)
Well, actually, it does (and more often than you would think). Are you a writer who is hell-bent on inserting asides and commentary within your sentences but too afraid that if you take your thinking outside the parenthesis your prose is preordained to lose impact? Or maybe you have managed to break that habit, sneak outside the presumed constraints of those twin sideways smilies, and go the other direction: using quotation marks to punch up the impact of a word or phrase or italics like you were writing on shaky ground (a 7.0 on the Richter, for example). Your editor might ask you to "Take two Valium and call me after the next draft" or, for the more pragmatic within our profession, he or she likely will suggest you go on a quotation mark, parentheses and/or italics diet. (Hey, it's all about "will power," as they say.)
7. WHAT ARE YOU, HYPER-ACTIVE OR JUST PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE?
It used to be that many writers, particularly newbies, couldn't seem to pull their prose out of the passive voice. Then someone suggested they pick up a copy of Professor Strunk's Elements of Style and, next thing you know, they're looking at the passive voice like a vampire who inadvertently encounters garlic while vegetable shopping at the local Farmer's Market. In these uncertain times where speed of expression seems mandatory, (according to some predictions, World War III could break out next week, or a six mile wide, near-Earth object could change course at any moment), the active voice seems to be popping up in literary works ad nauseum. To be sure, most editors, myself included, will choose the active over the passive 99 percent of the time. But there's an inherent beauty in the passive voice that, used at the right moments, can give pause to your prose so that even if you don't survive Armageddon, future archeologists uncovering your manuscript will conclude, "If this writer were alive today, we might thank him for his reflective insights that he expressed with such care. He must have been quite a talented writer." Then again, they might just assume you had found a good editor.
8. WHY BURY THE LEAD WHEN CREMATION IS CHEAPER?
It's the cardinal sin of journalism, but to watch most local TV newscasts, somewhere between the lead story and the weather, you'd get the impression that many reporters, anchors, news writers, and news directors could use a remedial writing sabbatical...at the Vatican. Indeed, there are times when you want to break the news slowly like, for example, when you're 17 and you're forced to walk five miles home after mistaking the family car's accelerator for the brake, or perhaps you're a pediatrician (or play one on TV) and you have to disclose to the nail biting dad-to-be in the waiting room that, "You know, there just may have been something to that bright light over your house that you say you encountered nine months ago. You see, your wife just gave birth to a three-headed amphibian." But anyone who has ever edited the cover page of a supermarket tabloid or the Wall Street Journal will tell you to "GET TO THE POINT," and in most cases, so will your editor. By the way, did I get to the point?
9. BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF SURVIVAL
Lights are out and it's 20 minutes into the previews at the local multiplex. The theatre is packed. The THX reminds you that it's never too early to set up a layaway plan for micro hearing aids. Buttered popcorn? You're soaking in it. While the rest of the crowd is hypnotized by a potpourri of flashes, booms and VH-1 style rapid-fire cuts firing off before their mesmerized pupils, you suddenly smell smoke. Taking a quick sip of your Pepsi, you stand up, clear your throat and, assuming your best rendition of Dudley Do-right while trying to be respectful to the culture around you, you proceed to describe the anticipated conflagration on the immediate horizon: "There's a dark and pungent gaseous substances emanating from the ventilator 25 meters due north of the woman donning the retro beehive hair style in the third row two seats in from the stage left aisle. I have certain reason to fear for our collective lives." As you clear your throat one more time and take a cursory view of the field of heads ignoring you from around the room, your editor stands up and yells, "FIRE!"
10.
There is no point 10. My editor killed it.
Edward It (but you can call him 'Ed') is a professional editor of more than two decades. He is president of Northern California based
CREDIT THE EDIT (www.credittheedit.com). Ed is always on the prowl for a (don't say 'darn' when you can say) damn good piece of copy.
By Edward It
1. THERE'S A METHOD TO HIS PUNCTUATION
Just because he showed up on the scene more than 400 years before you did and has a few more Tony's to his credit, Shakespeare has nothing on you. So you decide to update the Graveyard scene in your revisionist one-act entitled, "Hamlet and Eggs" by painting the young, indecisive Prince as a modern day victim of A.D.D., perpetually fondling the joy sick on his PS2, and imbibing on one too many lattés. Only in the midst of thinking through the racing thoughts that are surely plaguing your main character's mind like so many accidentally disturbed hives of bees or not to bees, you forget the risks of misplaced punctuation. Naturally, you don't catch it until your lead executes the scene on opening night (which will double as your closing night). Looking upon the quiet skull at an arm's length, young Prince Hamlet laments: "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. Well, Horatio....tennis?" He tosses the old bone over his shoulder as he and his companion stroll off stage eager to exeunt to the nearest watering hole, laden with the knowledge that their careers are all but finished. As for how your star handled your scene, what else could an accomplished actor do? The madness to his Method acting dictates that he had to make your lines work after all, and every playwright knows that if it's on the page, it's probably gonna show up on the stage in one form or another. Your editor, seated behind you, slips you his Playbill with a note hastily scribbled across it: "Psst. Methinks the period takes a comma. The second comma is...out. And Bill would never have said, 'Well.'"
2. MODIFIERS BE WITH YOU
Remember that teenage joke, the bastion of so many zit-adorned males who loved to torment their female peers with: "Hey Judy (Sue, Emily, etc.), you're pretty...ugly." Ouch. But now that you're 15 years older, more mature, and no one can play connect the dots with your face, you wouldn't dare stoop so low. Besides, Judy has gone through a minor makeover herself – she’s now CEO of the defense contractor for which you're interviewing to land the job of Director of Marketing, and she's sitting on the other side of her Lake Erie-sized mahogany desk training her (Wow! When did she get so beautiful?) brown eyes on your résumé like a Stealth Bomber sniffing out a sand bunker under a roof spray painted with six-foot block letters announcing "Gone to Maui. Wish you were here." As her eyes move over every well-crafted paragraph of your illustrious work history, Judy alternates between smiles, smirks, and uh-huh's. She pauses and looks up. Your nails dig deeper into the leather, brass-studded arms of that genuine Louie XIV hot seat in her office, although you're feeling a lot more like Anne Boleyn before Henry the VIII. Your future prospective employer speaks: "So, tell me about your time with Tasty Queen. What encompassed the role of, what was it again?" She glances down at the 20-pound, gray linen page hot off the presses from Kinko’s, "Oh yes... 'Post-Consumer Viscous Waste Eradication Supervisor.’" Feeling like a cow moving under the conveyor belt utility lights of a patty processing plant, you attempt to explain the fine art of transporting used fryer grease once a week from the kitchen to the environmental containment unit out back or what some might less affectionately write off as 'the dumpster.' Your editor? He would have suggested you jump off the ladder of abstraction somewhere around the rung labeled:
Chef Apprentice.
3. DON’T STALK WHEN YOU TALK. WATCH THOSE NON SEQUITURS / TRANSITIONAL SENTENCES
Your uncle’s funeral was touching. You had no idea one man could be so loved by so many. At a healthy and vibrant 105 years old, Uncle Luigi probably had a few detractors along the way, but from all the wet faces during the viewing, you sure wouldn't know it today. Too bad he didn't see that milk truck last Thursday as he stepped off the curb to pick up a cigarette butt during his daily -- and final -- morning jaunt around the block. As several hundred guests exit the funeral parlor, you express your sincerest condolences to your aunt. Aware that she soon will be very much alone, you invite her out for a late afternoon aperitif to toast one more round to "dear Uncle Luigi." She is moved by your overture. "That’s lovely," she says, "where shall we go?" You think out loud. "Well, there's Sam's Cock and Crow on Main, but that place is usually dead this time of day." Gripped by a sudden sense of horror, you mobilize to dig out of a looming hole widening beneath you with every forthcoming utterance. Your timing is almost…deadpan. Grinning sheepishly, you redirect: "I mean, it's really quiet there, not much life in the joint...(ouch) um, and I once was stiffed on my Bloody Mary by the bartender (ouch again). I was dying to pay my tab and split. I mean--" Forget it: you're buried. Some people simply don't know how to transition. Then again, some people play in traffic. If writing is, as some experts suggest, really an extension of human language, then before your next utterance, talk to your editor. She'll take a look at your word use, your sentences and your paragraphs, especially those that conclude chapters and sub-chapters in your manuscript or thesis, and recommend the most effective approaches for preserving continuity of thought without, if you will, leaving your prose hemorrhaging.
4. I STINK THEREFORE I AM
Is that a lump in your throat or are you just choking on what your characters should say next? Dialogue. From the moment we proudly voice our first "mama" or "dada," most human beings are instinctively gifted to gab. Although we sometimes later put our respective feet in our mouths, one foot per person, talking with other people is generally the least of our worries. We part our lips and make a statement. We're asked a question, we respond. So why, at times, does it seem easier to break the ice with a first date than to make characters open up and talk from your pages? If your story’s characters are leaving you speechless, you need an editor. S/he will help you and your characters find your voice and theirs. Let's say, for example, your novel stars a dapper but odiferously challenged skunk that happens to possess the introspection of Descartes. After studying the skunk’s profile and the context within which the character speaks, your editor might suggest that this attribution: "Geez, why duzz everybody diss me at parties?" is not as effective (for this particular character) as this one: "Just because I'm special doesn't mean I deserve to be treated like I don't exist."
5. MY LIFE IS FALLING APART. SO ARE MY SENTENCES.
Someone famous once said, "I write like I speak." Good advice. He must have tuned in to how people talk. Because most people, contrary to what you learned in grammar school, speak in sentence fragments. They're a mainstay of great literature (novels, screenplays, speeches, dramatic works, poetry, billboard ad copy, etc.). They're less acceptable when deployed within written communications that require more formal, precise, unequivocal text such as, for example, your Masters thesis, a legal brief, a technical guide, or even the standard corporate memorandum. Of course, many successful CEOs have a rep for sidelining formality and speaking like they do behind closed doors, i.e., in plain terms. A good editor will feel out your text, embrace it, juggle it, consume it, and regurgitate it in a way that truly captures what you wanted to say and as it should be said. If called for, an editor will not hesitate to use sentence fragments. Nor should you. Just make sure you use ‘em at the right time and use ‘em well. Just because Hemmingway was alleged to use fragments with reckless abandon, don’t assume you can start living off a six pack cooling in a cold brook in the middle of a burned out European countryside or take out a charging rhino at 30 yards. Sentence fragments -- like drinking and rhino bagging -- should be handled with care.
6. PARENTHETICALLY SPEAKING (NOT THAT IT MATTERS)
Well, actually, it does (and more often than you would think). Are you a writer who is hell-bent on inserting asides and commentary within your sentences but too afraid that if you take your thinking outside the parenthesis your prose is preordained to lose impact? Or maybe you have managed to break that habit, sneak outside the presumed constraints of those twin sideways smilies, and go the other direction: using quotation marks to punch up the impact of a word or phrase or italics like you were writing on shaky ground (a 7.0 on the Richter, for example). Your editor might ask you to "Take two Valium and call me after the next draft" or, for the more pragmatic within our profession, he or she likely will suggest you go on a quotation mark, parentheses and/or italics diet. (Hey, it's all about "will power," as they say.)
7. WHAT ARE YOU, HYPER-ACTIVE OR JUST PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE?
It used to be that many writers, particularly newbies, couldn't seem to pull their prose out of the passive voice. Then someone suggested they pick up a copy of Professor Strunk's Elements of Style and, next thing you know, they're looking at the passive voice like a vampire who inadvertently encounters garlic while vegetable shopping at the local Farmer's Market. In these uncertain times where speed of expression seems mandatory, (according to some predictions, World War III could break out next week, or a six mile wide, near-Earth object could change course at any moment), the active voice seems to be popping up in literary works ad nauseum. To be sure, most editors, myself included, will choose the active over the passive 99 percent of the time. But there's an inherent beauty in the passive voice that, used at the right moments, can give pause to your prose so that even if you don't survive Armageddon, future archeologists uncovering your manuscript will conclude, "If this writer were alive today, we might thank him for his reflective insights that he expressed with such care. He must have been quite a talented writer." Then again, they might just assume you had found a good editor.
8. WHY BURY THE LEAD WHEN CREMATION IS CHEAPER?
It's the cardinal sin of journalism, but to watch most local TV newscasts, somewhere between the lead story and the weather, you'd get the impression that many reporters, anchors, news writers, and news directors could use a remedial writing sabbatical...at the Vatican. Indeed, there are times when you want to break the news slowly like, for example, when you're 17 and you're forced to walk five miles home after mistaking the family car's accelerator for the brake, or perhaps you're a pediatrician (or play one on TV) and you have to disclose to the nail biting dad-to-be in the waiting room that, "You know, there just may have been something to that bright light over your house that you say you encountered nine months ago. You see, your wife just gave birth to a three-headed amphibian." But anyone who has ever edited the cover page of a supermarket tabloid or the Wall Street Journal will tell you to "GET TO THE POINT," and in most cases, so will your editor. By the way, did I get to the point?
9. BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF SURVIVAL
Lights are out and it's 20 minutes into the previews at the local multiplex. The theatre is packed. The THX reminds you that it's never too early to set up a layaway plan for micro hearing aids. Buttered popcorn? You're soaking in it. While the rest of the crowd is hypnotized by a potpourri of flashes, booms and VH-1 style rapid-fire cuts firing off before their mesmerized pupils, you suddenly smell smoke. Taking a quick sip of your Pepsi, you stand up, clear your throat and, assuming your best rendition of Dudley Do-right while trying to be respectful to the culture around you, you proceed to describe the anticipated conflagration on the immediate horizon: "There's a dark and pungent gaseous substances emanating from the ventilator 25 meters due north of the woman donning the retro beehive hair style in the third row two seats in from the stage left aisle. I have certain reason to fear for our collective lives." As you clear your throat one more time and take a cursory view of the field of heads ignoring you from around the room, your editor stands up and yells, "FIRE!"
10.
There is no point 10. My editor killed it.
Edward It (but you can call him 'Ed') is a professional editor of more than two decades. He is president of Northern California based
CREDIT THE EDIT (www.credittheedit.com). Ed is always on the prowl for a (don't say 'darn' when you can say) damn good piece of copy.
Eating in Hermosa
If you get off the Broadway Local somewhere around SoHo, skip up the cement stairs mosaically adorned with old chewing gum and, once you're tossed out onto the street you head for any local South Manhattan pizzeria, you might do a double take curbside wondering what the hell happened to the seal skin covered surfer dudes and tan babes slam dunking volleyballs on the beach. Hey, by the way, where is the beach? You can only embrace this bit of ecstatic confusion if you've recently had the incredible delight of dining at Pedone's, a not so little taste of old New York less than 3,000 miles away from the Big Apple's contribution to world culture other than lives expressed in cut time and cabs doubling as asphalt rollercoasters. Like most NY ex-patriots, I didn't have much time when I stopped by this checker tablecloth hamlet between Pier and 14th on Hermosa Avenue on a Sunday night in April, so when the hostess asked me what I would like, I figured that the best way to test a pizza place and skip through a menu packed with traditional Italian favorites like Eggplant Parmesan, Chicken Marsala, and Spaghetti & Marinara, would be to order, that's right, two slices of plain pizza. Even if he'd had a bad day, The Godfather himself would be smiling. And so was I... in between bites, of course. This was a blessed union, the perfect marriage of slightly chewy thin crust and wholesome cheese that, as I compose this, continues to lure me back to the old country, even if the old country is 13 miles long and was purchased for a handful of beads in a deal that would have made Donald Trump proud. Then again, Trump probably would've said the Europeans paid too much. So the next time some 20 inch cardboard box protecting a cardboard disk "fresh" out of the oven from one of those mass pizza plants confronts you with: "You've tried all the rest, now try the best!" tell that little chef imprinted in red outline on the outside: "Forgettaboutit! I'm going to Pedone's. I'm gettin' me a real pizza."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
