Neurosis
try to keep a
realistic perspective on my sometimes neurotic pursuit of perfection. Once in
while though, you start to wonder what errant camp your mind has been visiting.
When the TV show Monk first came out, my children saw a definite correlation
and I acquired the nickname and no, I look nothing like Tony Shalhoub. The
jesting wore thin after a while along with their computer privileges. Absolute
power is good.
Finding the elusive middle ground where the book would be
‘good enough’ was just maddening. It’s your book with your name on it that you
wrote, you edited and you published. Does it not have to be perfect? Hey, I
tried, believe me. The hard drive was filled three times with files of cover
ideas. A typical file name might have read ‘Cover Half Black 23 16F.’ That
would have been the sixth version of the sixteenth variation of the
twenty-third design. No, I’m not kidding.
One day I spent eight hours trying to come up with this
silly design for something I just could not get right. That day I think Picasso
could have designed it for me and I still would have sneered. That wasn’t a
typical though. Design issues are just a matter of taste – you try something
and it clicks, or it doesn’t. The art of writing is where I struggled many
times with the ‘correctness’ of things.
In the Introduction to the book where I state that I
‘studied the works of others,’ it should be clarified that it was the editor’s
works I studied and not the writer’s style. I have my own style that suits me
fine, thank you. I was looking for things like sentence placement in regard to
where a supporting sentence should be located relative to a line of dialog
given who might have been speaking, for instance. Most of the time it was
obvious, but sometimes I found myself structuring the sentences in the manner
they seemed to be the least incorrect. And let’s not even open Pandora’s Box of
Punctuation. I know where commas should usually go, but sometimes a sentence
didn’t read right with one in its proper place. So I’d take it out. Then the
sentence read as I wanted, but wasn’t technically correct in structure. Would
anyone notice? Would anyone really care? Most likely the latter, which is the
conclusion I came to after comparing several commercial works. Sometimes there
was punctuation run amuck and other times it seemed to have been forgotten
almost entirely. I should also clarify that what I mentioned in the
Introduction about something being ‘terrible,’ was only by my own standards.
Perspective is subjective. There were other issues with setting up the files
for printing in the POD process that I won’t even get into.
Most times we are our own worst critics, which is why it’s
nice to have someone who will grab you by the shoulders once in a while and
shout, “Get a grip, man!” I was told many times that I was just too close to
the work and needed to relax a little. Relax? What’s that? A verb?
- Ranse
Parker
