I was distraught, I was bouncing off walls, I was on the brink. I wondered how 462 (badly Xeroxed nine-pin dot-matrix) manuscript pages would scatter if hurled from a sixth-story suburban condo. I imagined them floating gently down to earth, a love scene nestling in the bushes, the dedication sticking to the Coppertoned chest of the sunbather on the patio, the epilogue swept away by a passing bus.
I was, in the prevailing lingo, a copyeditor who had gone splaa.
One more fiesty attendent, one more side-affect, one more acomodate or supercede, and I would throw my career out the window. It seemed wisest to put some distance between myself and Ardwyn in Shadow.
Not to mention that my alternative fantasy entailed all 462 pages landing in a pile on the head of my husband, Len the electrical engineer, with whom things were not going well.
So I took a stroll into town and, with the serendipity of fiction, came across a shop that might offer just what I needed.
The faded sign read STATIONERY--SPELLS--OFFICE SUPPLIES. I had noticed it before, in passing--although copyeditors work myopically, they also learn to take note of odd details for general reference--but I'd never gone in; I bought office staples in bulk from the discount chain store.
A little bell on the door jingled old-fashionedly as I entered, and the back-to-school scents of plastic noteBooks and rubber erasers soothed me. The kind-faced proprietor straightened up from behind the glass counter. She had been arranging gold and silver pens in the vitrine, and they gleamed in the fluorescent light.
"Can I help you?" she said.
For a moment I just blinked. Her face was a fascinating webwork of lines, and I wondered randomly if anyone had ever developed a facial version of palmistry or phrenology. It seemed to me that there was quite a lifetime inscribed there.
Then I explained my problem, finishing with, "I don't know if you can help me ... I mean, it is my job to fix typos, but I'd rather put the energy into smoothing out grammar, keeping track of logistics..."
The woman was already nodding. "You need a utensil. Something to fix things. What sort would you prefer?"
Taken aback by her ready understanding, I said, "Well, uh, I use green FaberCastell pencils, usually...."
She held up a thin, pale finger for me to wait, and ducked through a door behind her. I caught a glimpse of a cramped storeroom, and then my view was restricted to a vertical section of shelving as the door swung almost closed. I could hear her rummaging; then a grunt, and a very long pause; and then an odd murmuring sound. A funny smell drifted out--first sulfur, as from a match, and then something akin to incense.
I guess the sign wasn't kidding about the spells, I thought, trying for wryness and failing.
She emerged with a perfectly ordinary-looking box of pencils. "Will that be all?" she said, approaching the cash register. Her eyes, a gray so light they looked silver, glowed with secret delight. I answered her with a nod, paid for the merchandise--the usual price, I noticed, nothing extra for the mumbles or incense--and went home feeling that if nothing else I had at least brightened her day, and dispelled (as it were) my own bad mood.
I was pleased when the first pencil I tried shorted out the electric pencil sharpener. I had to dig up the old manual one and reattach its loose rubber-suction base. That a modern device had been zapped by the bespelled object--that only metal cranked by flesh could sharpen it--seemed evidence of its magic. I sat down in my ergonomic chair, amid piles of dictionaries and reference books.
Back to the land of Ardwyn, the distressed Lady Karryl, and the search for the moonstone ring. Karryl was having trouble with her lover, too, but at least her problems would be solved in another two hundred pages.
I read slowly at first, my eyes readjusting to the faint letters; I marked the chapter head for the compositor, added a few serial commas, corrected a dangling participle and a past-tense transitive "lay," and then, as my pencil hovered over the next line, saw that neat green marks--in my own handwriting--had appeared on all the misspelled words in that line. It was a pleasant, reasonable solution: I still had to do my job, correcting grammar, checking facts, flagging inconsistencies ... but no more would I be plagued with the endless stream of typos!
)
There are plenty of stories in which authors are sucked into their own novels, or their characters really come to life. But what if it happened to the copyeditor? And what if she was correcting more than just grammar and spelling?
