Monday, April 14, 2008

The dog ate my homework


So, there I was on a sunny Saturday, sitting indoors and proofreading the typeset copy of my book manuscript, when a knock came at the door. It was my neighbor Kim, dropping off the hedge trimmer that I was borrowing. She borrows my weed whacker and I borrow her hedge trimmer. "Why delay?" thought I. "I'll just trim the overgrown shrubbery right now and get it over with." So out I went and trimmed and shaped until the shrubbery looked more like delicate garden landscape than wild untamed wilderness. I returned the hedge trimmer to Kim's front steps and walked back to the house with a sense of healthy satisfaction.

Then I opened the front door.

Only then did I remember that I had left my typeset manuscript sitting on the sofa in the same room as a certain furniture jumping dog. Said dog was happily shredding and eating page 27.

Luckily, that was the only page the aspiring book-destroyer had gotten to. I sent a sheepish email to my editor asking if he could scan page 27 and email it to me. And for the rest of the day, I remembered to put my manuscript on top of the TV armoire whenever I needed to get up from the sofa.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would start doing my editing on the computer if I were you. Of course, then you would always need a backup, since computers, like dogs, mess up. :)

Kristine said...

I try to stay as paperless as possible, but when you get to a certain point in the editing process, publishers want you to make edits on paper. It's much easier for the editor at the publishing house to see what changes you've made when you're sending them back on paper than if they have to compare computer documents.