The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for March 2013

How To Deal With Bad Editors

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Five Songs:

Boys of Summer- Don Henley
Into The Mystic- Van Morrison
Reeling In The Years- Steely Dan
Mama Told Me Not To Come- 3 Dog Night
No Time- The Guess Who

Every writer runs into a situation in which they disagree with how their piece is edited.  It comes with the territory and it is important  to determine if there is a basis for being concerned or not.

Sometimes we fall in love with our words and lack perspective about whether the edits in question are helping or harming our work. It happens to the best of us.

But sometimes we encounter bad editors or have experiences with good editors that are having bad days.

My professional recommendation is to ask your editor to explain their thought process. If you aren’t antagonistic or aggressive a good editor can and should provide some insight into what they did and why.

What Happens If You Still Disagree?

The answer to this question is quite simple- lift your Smith-Corona above your head and smash it down upon your editor’s head. Don’t forget to pretend to sneeze or cough because you don’t want to get arrested for assault.

Never use your Macbook or any Apple product in this manner because the ghost of Steve Jobs will haunt you and those machines are made so poorly they’ll break on your editor’s head and you won’t even get the satisfaction of watching them collapse in a heap on the ground.

Alternatively you can always stab them in their carotid artery with a quill or a nice Montblanc pen.

Five More Songs

And When I Die- Blood, Sweat and Tears
When The Music’s Over- The Doors
Loose Ends- Bruce Springsteen
Eres Tu- Mocedades
Bad Company- Bad Company

My crack team of attorneys have instructed me to inform you that I am not truly advocating the use of violence against editors, good or bad and or celtic fans. They say I am supposed to tell you this was supposed to be a parody.

I am not sure if you found it to be funny or not. But I can say when I want to write something funny I can do so, hell I am funnier than you are and we aren’t talking about looks either.

Ask that wacky Shmata Queen and she’ll tell you I am humble and better at math than she is, but I digress.

Yep, I Encountered Bad Editing Today

Yes, you correctly guessed that I had a situation today in which I was forced to work with a bad editor. I am willing to put money down that they didn’t take the time to read my article.

That is not because it was perfect, because it wasn’t. I had a short deadline and turned it around quickly, but I know based upon the comments they didn’t read it through. Or if they did they weren’t careful and consequently they made a mess of things.

I didn’t fight with them about this because when I asked for an explanation they barked at me. You have to pick and choose your battles and this wasn’t worth it.

But that piece has my name on it and it represents my work so I am not ignoring it.

However when you work on short deadlines you sometimes face a situation in which you have to turn in good work and hope that editing can make it great and if can’t…

Well, sometimes chasing perfection can hurt you more than it helps.

What about you? What do you do when you encounter a bad editor?

How Much Influence Does Money Have On Your Life?

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Ice cased Adelie penguins after a blizzard at Cape Denison / photograph by Frank Hurley

This blog isn’t just a place for venting, story telling or discussions about business. It isn’t just an echo chamber to be used as a joint where we can rehash the same old stuff everyone else talks about.

It is here to serve as a chronicle of thoughts and ideas about life and as a historical document which can be used to see what life was like once upon a time.

When I pose questions about how much influence does money have on your life it is tied into other posts:

Some readers find it helpful to read those links because it helps tie everything together and some don’t because they can’t follow the thoughts and logic that lead from one thought to the next.

I am ok with that because this place isn’t for everyone and wasn’t designed to be.

How Much Influence Does Money Have On Your Life?

It is more rhetorical than literal.  Really it is me asking if you are the kind of person who is willing to fight to live your dreams or content to dream your life.

That’s not directed just at you either, the finger I am pointing faces me too.

Long time readers know some of this and are familiar with many of my stories. You know I have buried more than a couple of friends and am more familiar with how short life can be than I want to be.

You have read the posts in which I said I wasn’t satisfied with how my life was going and that I wanted to change things because it wasn’t working.

I made changes.

Life is different.

Life is better.

Money Is An Excuse and Good Life Experience

I used to think about all the things I would do and places I would go if I was rich. It was fun to dream.

Hard work and luck made things happen for me and there came a day where I had enough money to take those trips and buy those things but what I found was that I didn’t do a lot of what I had always thought I would do.

Some of it was because I was too busy working to go on long trips to far away places. It was easier to go on lots of little trips & say the big trips would come later when the kids weren’t babies.

I didn’t buy everything I thought I would  because I was trying to be responsible and  because I realized I didn’t care about some of those things.

I Lost It All

Things happened. Life happened. The money disappeared. The opportunities dried up.

Five years later I am back but things are different because I learned the difference between want and need and because I don’t use money as an excuse for doing or not doing what I need and want to live.

What about You?

Do The Thing That Scares You

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jagged-rock

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”Eleanor Roosevelt
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” Albert Einstein
“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”Albert Einstein

The beauty of blogging if you take it seriously lies in the ability to write down your thoughts and ideas about life.

It is the chance to explore what you really think and to let your imagination run wild. It is the chance to share stories about life and to consider not just the breadth of our experiences but the depth.

That is part of what I wrestle with, the depth that is. When you look at posts like If You Only Had One Day and ask me to give you serious answers I do my best based upon what i think I know at that moment.

Things change. People Change.

Moments In Time

When you ask me if I fear depth I will tell you I don’t but I don’t want to meet it any sooner. As my grandfather once told me if death shows before I am ready I will do my best to kick his bony ass and send him along his way because I have things to do.

What I want is time to collect more moments in time. I want time to expand the depth of my knowledge and experiences in a variety of areas. It is why I want to live to be a thousand, I need time to expand that depth.

I need time to become an expert in more areas and the thought that I won’t have the time is what bothers me most.

It is not because I fear being forgotten because I don’t. I am confident that I am making a difference in the lives of others, perhaps it is not as many as I wish but it is better than nothing.

Do The Thing That Scares You

I have done it and I am doing it, perhaps not as aggressively as I would like to but nonetheless it is happening.

Steps have been taken, hard choices have been made and possibilities are explored with the hopes that they will turn into opportunities.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like I am living some version of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. If you don’t understand what that means all I can say is maybe one day we’ll get a chance to discuss it.

Someday when my children look upon this blog and or talk about my life I want them to see that I lived a life that was more than just doing what I had to do because that is not living to me.

Living involves reaching for the extra step and trying to run down the things that you really want, even if it means you have to take a risk.

Selfish Needs Are Necessary

The blog affords the opportunity to portray our lives as we wish others to see them. It gives you a chance to paint a pretty picture but my goal isn’t to paint a picture that portrays me in nothing but a positive light.

Nor is it to try to provide you with a platform for self or public flagellation either. I am human and that means I am a mix of things, some good, some bad and some in between.

When I think about life I see a need to try to include the opportunity to go after the selfish needs as well as those that are selfless.

Many people don’t like to do that because they don’t want to be seen as selfish, but sometimes we have to be, especially as parents.

As It Relates To Blogging

As it relates to blogging I still advocate the need to write about the things that you enjoy writing about. If you can’t include passion and personality into your writing you are missing out on the opportunity to share joy in the journey and to have fun.

And this is too much work not to have fun with.

What about you? What do you think?

The Trials and Tribulations of Triberr

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Look Into My Eyes, Deep Into My Eyes..
Look Into My Eyes, Deep Into My Eyes..

Some of the fine people that frequent this joint have asked me to provide them with information about blogging and Triberr. Since I have written about both I thought it might be useful to provide a collection of post for your perusal.

The 21 links below is not inclusive of all of the posts I have written on these topics but it is enough to give you a pretty good start on things and not wreck the ebook that hasn’t come out yet.

If You Only Had One Day

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Today’s (totally optional) prompt: What would you do with only 24 hours left to live?

A prompt like this works best when you strip away all pretense and write without any concern or worry about what people think, but I am not sure if I have that in me today.

It is not because I am afraid or particularly concerned about what people will think but rather that I am preoccupied with a long list of things to do.

I wonder about what I would do in this situation. I know what I want to say. I want to give the “noble’ answer about spending time with friends and family, about telling people that I love them and trying to make things better for the people I am going to leave behind.

But would I do that? Would I really go that route or would I be entirely selfish?

Would I go for things that I always wanted to do and try to squeeze all the fun I could out of the day?

I don’t know.

Part of me says I might just take it like any other day. Part of me says I would live the day like any other day and that I would just finish things out the way I always do.

But there is that wild spirit inside of me, the guy with the fire in his belly that loves life and does all that he can to suck the marrow out of each day–I don’t think he would be so restrained.

Part of it is because I have said goodbye to too many friends already. I have stood graveside and wished I had one more chance to ride with the top down along PCH.

Part of me says I’d want one more time in that room, a chance to have one last minute together…

This was my 5 minute Stream of Consciousness Sunday post. It’s five minutes of your time and a brain dump. Want to try it? Here are the rules…

  • Set a timer and write for 5 minutes.
  • Write an intro to the post if you want but don’t edit the post. No proofreading or spellchecking. This is writing in the raw.
  • Publish it somewhere. Anywhere. The back door to your blog if you want. But make it accessible.
  • Add the Stream of Consciousness Sunday badge to your post (in the sidebar). .
  • Link up your post below.
  • Visit your fellow bloggers and show some love.

A Song For Friday

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Six weeks of traveling on the road and hotel life has finally caught up with me and I am feeling a double dose of stir crazy. Some might wonder if I have gone completely mad to which I would respond, you have no idea.

Cue evil laughter.

Actually that presumes that there was a point at which I was sane and considering I have always known that cleveland is the land of evil chicks, bad sports teams and crazy monkeys I would say that at some point my mind was intact.

And now for a commercial break.

I am writing this post from my new desk in my new digs. Technically I took “possession” on Monday but my furniture didn’t arrive until today so I am still getting settled.

Words don’t convey how happy I am to be here or how good it feels to have my stuff again. I do well living on the razor’s edge but it is good to be in a place of my own and to lay down some roots.

This should help answer the questions of  those who have been wondering why I haven’t been around as much and have been slow to respond to things. I still have more unpacking to do and I need to figure out a few things so this is going to be another hit and run post, but I’ll be back later.