No tags yet.
I posted this to my Facebook page but decided to post it here as well. This is a short intro into my beginnings as an editor. What does this have to do with the title? I don't know . . . none of your business!
OK, wait, I know why. I’m a little obsessed with dialogue tags: when and where they work best, how they’re capitalized, how they’re punctuated. Fascinating, right? I wasn’t always this odd. Well I was, but not about punctuation. My final year of school, I signed up for an editing class as an English elective. I don’t know why it took me so long to get into editing, but I immediately knew I’d found my calling in this class. I loved it. I loved discussing the history of Helvetica. I loved finding and removing double spaces and extra periods in a document. I loved fact-checking, which our professor specifically told us we would hate so much we would also hate him.
We were required to join a student journal for the class. I’m not much of a joiner, normally. I was older than most other students in my classes and antisocial, not to mention I have young kids, which for me means I am reluctant to leave home and make friends. Working on that journal, which I continued to do for the next several years until I graduated, changed me. I became obsessed with things like stylesheets. I spent an embarrassing amount of time making training materials for my fellow editors about the Chicago Manual of Style, typesetting, and Word’s track changes. Nobody could give me enough work to satisfy my appetite.
I also found some lifelong friends on that journal, friends I would later go into business with on a literary journal of our own. My story is pretty common, actually. Those student journals are filled with people who joined for credit only to find they loved it. When I became editor in chief, I made it my goal to seek out those people and provide lots of opportunities.
I still spend an embarrassing amount of time looking things up. But I like it. I’m always open to learning more, and I do. If I can learn more about dialogue tags than I know now, all the better. I hope I do. I’m just that kind of oddball.