The, you fucking shithead. The.
This is a short and sweet one-man show, but it packs quite a wallop.

David Mack, the author of several Star Trek novelizations and other assorted works, is displeased with the copyediting of his current book. According to him, the editor was much too heavy-handed, essentially rewriting his material. So he calmly informed his publisher and they sorted everything out in a manner that left all parties involved satisfied.

Oh wait, I mean he posted a threatening rant on his public journal. I always mix those two up!

Die, Stupid Copy Editor, Die!
31 May 2009 in Personal | No comments

Some stupid (and luckily for him/her, anonymous) copy editor apparently took it upon him/herself to almost completely rewrite the manuscript for my latest novel, Star Trek Vanguard: Precipice. I learned this when I was handed a stack of pages slathered in so much red ink that I thought it had been left at the scene of an ax murder.

This idiot copy editor is going to wind up wasting a week of my time, because that’s how long it’s going to take me to go through the novel page by page with an eraser, undoing the damage this motherfucker has wrought upon my prose.

Jackass copyeditor who did this, whoever you are, if you read this, don’t ever fucking touch one of my books again. And pray to whatever god you believe in that I never find out who you are or where you live.

Die, you fucking shithead. Die.

Shockingly, David received some private negative feedback about this post and deleted it. But don't worry—the one he replaced it with is longer, whinier, and just as entertaining.

Note to Would-Be Commenters
1 June 2009 in Personal

For those of you who might not yet have noticed, I moderate all comments here on my official blog. In practice, that means if you come in here looking for a fight, I can simply decide not to let your comments see the light of day.

To those of you who felt as if it were your right to go all high and mighty on me because I needed to vent after seeing what an overzealous copy editor did to my latest mauscript, spare me your indignation and your insults.

The ms. went to production with a cover sheet from my line editor that specifically requested a “light” copy edit with queries. My editor is the one who gave me the erasers to fix this mess.

What came back was a wholesale rewrite, including arbitrary changes of sentences, deletion of sentences and paragraphs, recasting of sentences, and a host of other intrusive changes that, in the world of professional publishing, are outside the purview of a copy editor. Those privileges are reserved for a book’s line editor (i.e., the editor who acquired the book and works directly with me).

I have been writing books professionally for 10 years. I know the difference between a proper, light copy edit and a heavy-handed writer wannabe who imagines he or she can write my book better than I can. I do not object to the many sensible notations that most copy editors make, or the myriad small errors they help me fix. I do, however, object when one of them takes it upon him/herself to second-guess my creative choices.

Contrary to popular belief, even in this modern digital age, much of the book publishing industry still operates on hard copy with handwritten notations. It’s an industry in which traditions die hard. That is why I have the original ms. on my dining-room table, marked up in red pencil; that is also why I have a pair of erasers that I am using to undo invasive and uncalled-for changes.

To the person who thought they were being impossibly clever by pointing out typos in my Twitter comment about this mess, it might behoove you to keep in mind that Twitter is an informal medium. Also, in Internet-gamer parlance, such typos — particularly “teh,” which was done deliberately — are often intentional and used to convey both intense feeling and humorous intent.

The reason I can’t simply write “STET” on the ms. is that, in my experience, doing so is rarely sufficient to prevent the unwanted edits from being carried forward by production. The only real insurance against the propagation of unwanted changes is literally to erase them from the ms.

Lastly, to all of you who deigned to lecture me that because I choose to use my personal forum to vent my rage rather than scream out my window and create a public disturbance that would bring the local constabulary to my door, and to all of you who therefore concluded that I must not be much of a writer, I would just like to point out that you are confusing two unrelated issues. The manner in which one vents in anger bears little relation to how one composes prose in a calm state of mind. To evaluate a writer’s oeuvre based on such an offering would be tantamount to judging all of Hemingway’s or Brautigan’s respective works based on their suicide notes.