Margit > Recent Status Updates

Wonderful, amazingly descriptive, poetic prose!

"... the main thing I noticed was his hair: part toupee, part transplanted or sprayed-on, with a texture like fiberglass insulation and a dark brown color like shoe polish in the tin."

The descriptions are priceless! "They were a pair of white mice, I thought--only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constructor."

"I was silent. Andy, I knew, was loyal; I trusted him, I valued his opinion, and yet his conversation sometimes made me feel as though I was talking to one of those computer programs that mimic human response."

This book is awesome. It's refreshing, hilarious, and philosophical.

The author's style takes some getting used to, and it's often confusing and unclear who is speaking, since he doesn't use attribution. I like his use of dialects, but the italic neologisms he uses for beats are at times so confusing as to be nonsensical. However, I do appreciate the sense of immersion Bolen's style facilitates. He paints a vivid picture of the underworld of one of Vancouver's gangs.

Mystical and touching

"Opening his eyes, he watched an egret sail between the glass sky and the surface of the river, skimming low, its plumes pearly in the mirror-light, its reflection slipping through the shaky reflections of the artificial moons."

Chekov uses wonderful comical descriptions. A character describing his potential son-in-law in "A Boring Story": "He has prominent crayfish eyes, his tie resembles a crayfish tail, and it seems to me that the whole of the young man exudes a smell of crayfish soup."

"When you spend significant amounts of time with someone they offer constant feedback, becoming part of the patterning of your brain. In other words, part of you. But I take your point--constant feedback is not always deep feedback. A good measure of how much of you they've become is your level of distress when they're gone. If they form a large part of your patterning, then you'll experience a major culling..."

"I sit very still--I'm an experienced practitioner of the art of falling apart on the inside while appearing catatonic. It's one of my proudest adult skills."

"A relationship that doesn't last isn't a failure; it's just a time in your life that's come to an end."

"'...I wish I had a paid vacation.' Can't he see? You have to have something IN your life in order to vacate." (IN should be italic)

"As she talks her lips shape the night's darkness. 'I think we weren't really able to see each other through the fog of our own self-regard.'"

"If you can give a person just enough so that thirty percent of the time they believe you're who they want you to be--intelligence."

I thought curse words when I laughed SO hard on page 12. I thought curse words when my chest constricted and I blinked tears from my eyes on page 102. Damn, this book is good. It's very real.

"A Fear of Pheromones" has me wondering where the research is today, as this book is 40 years old.

Thoroughly enjoyed "On Societies as Organisms".

A lot of the information in this book is either outdated or not applicable to freelance editors, but Chapter 4, The Editor's Senses, gives some good guidelines for what to look for when line or copy editing.