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I was sitting smugly in my office the other day when a last minute knock on my door brought with it a request for a project I’d been waiting to hear back on from an editor. Of course it was a hectic week and we’d both let it sit a day or so too long without follow-up. It’s never my job to harangue people, especially people above me in the totem, but usually I’m the good cop at these sorts of ventures. I can ask someone for something on a schedule and not get shot in the process, ergo I am a producer.
Alas, I am not the kind of producer that makes millions from the massage table (not that it would matter… I am always a writer under the war paint.) But you know, it does pay the bills. When I get to meet bestselling authors and shake hands with the pseudo-famous, it’s still secretly a deal for me. But to show any sort of rabid fan girl cliché is not professional, and my job is to get things done. So when an editor slips, my project is to check my timeline and manage expectations from there. Carrot or breadcrumbs depending on motivation. This has also made me a better writer, even if it has taken hours away from my writing.
To first write you need material and after several years of a head on career, I’ve got plenty of it. Tragedy, espionage, romance, etc. For the most part I stay out of the water cooler politico scene. I have bat hearing and the walls are thin enough as far as I’m concerned.
But when it happened to me, I must admit it was fairly stunning event, so much so in fact that I gave a healthy yelp and some choice words when I noticed I had let a campaign go out with the phrase “you’re special gift” included. Beware the ides, ladies and gentleman. Don’t get halfway and get smug.
It was a dark day when the spawn of generations of English teachers could not catch the spontaneously mutated apostrophe in a major campaign. The sad state of what passes for standard English will wear on anyone, but as a writer you will pick things up that you didn’t dream you could be duped into considering as part of the standard grammatical process.
No one else seemed to mind terribly but I was deeply shaken. I think this is ultimately what makes one a grammar disciplinarian. The abject fear of turning into a spontaneous apostrophe mark user. As I am actually dyslexic, it would be a little too close to self-loathing to consider as a vocation any more seriously. A blog post will do.
