What a big baby!

Last night I pulled into the printer's parking lot about twenty minutes before they closed, with the PDF file for the new issue of Secular Homeschooling in my hands.

What really killed me, though I'm trying not to think about it, is that I could have brought it in first thing that morning. Except that it hadn't been ready yet. Even though I'd been up until two the previous night working on it.

Here's what happened.

Short version:

I'm a moron.

Slightly more detailed version:

Finally, everything was finished. Every article had been read over and every regular column had been put in its proper place. Every piece of writing I needed to do myself had been done; everything by everyone else had been received and formatted.

One of the things I like about editing this magazine is that because so many readers enjoy long in-depth articles, I don't have to cut for length in terms of any word-limit policy. If an article needs to be three thousand words in order to say what it has to say, or four, or five -- well, more power to it.  

I do have to trim now and then, though, for technical reasons. We'll lay it out and it'll be perfect, except that it dribbles over for several lines onto the next page. If it goes over a whole column or two, we'd fill in the space with artwork, or stick a really short piece right after, or see if that could be the page an ad the right size could go. But for just a few lines, it's a lot easier for technical reasons to make a little snip here and there.

For this issue, I was glad that it was pretty much only my own articles that needed this kind of haircut. I'd always rather cut my own work than anyone else's, because I know what I meant to say and I'm not going to inadvertently delete my own favorite sentence.

There was one piece in this issue that wasn't written by me and that absolutely needed a trim for formatting reasons, because it was part of the one department of the magazine where we actually do have space limitations. For some reason, when my husband (who's still introducing me to all the strange customs on Planet Layout) put all the articles that needed trimming up for me to work on in his computer, he left that one out. I think he still needed to do some work on the section in question. At any rate, we both knew that there was one article I needed to give a quick trim, but we both also sort of felt like I was "done" with that part of editing this issue.

When it comes to emotions versus intellect, guess who wins every time?

Having done all the trimming and article-order decision-making, I had to give the proofs of the issue one final going-over. That means me sitting on the couch late at night with a big stack of loose pages and a red pen, reminiscing about the good old days when I worked in retail and only had to worry about total strangers screaming at me because I couldn't find a book they wanted because they couldn't remember the title, author, or what it was about, though they were pretty sure the cover was red. Or brown.

Left to myself, I can read for hours on end, effortlessly and with great pleasure; but proofreading isn't the same as just plain read reading. First I have to tell my inner editor to piss off, because she keeps begging me to rephrase something no matter how many times I tell her that we're done with that part, already. All I need is help with spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

Which are the things I'm pretty good at. Except that after an hour or so of eagle-eyeing page after page after page, I start questioning my own understanding of the English language, which is sad since it's the only language I have other than a little French. I no longer have any idea how anything is supposed to be spelled. I've forgotten all rules of capitalization. Participles are dangling brazenly, knowing that I'm helpless to do anything about them.

So of course the job that I'd said I'd be done with in an hour, tops, has taken more like two and a half. It's almost midnight, and my husband still has to incorporate all the corrections I've just made into the master document. I could do that, but it won't get him to bed any earlier if I do, since he's the one who knows how to turn this whole thing into a PDF file and transfer it onto a CD for the printer.

He couldn't go to bed even if I could handle that part alone. I've been feeling hideously guilty for being so behind on everything around here -- the housework, the magazine, homeschooling, my toenails, everything you could possibly think of -- and so that morning, in some burst of wild ambition, I tore all the sheets off the bed and washed them, and I hadn't had time to put them back on yet. I'm a huge believer in multi-tasking and everyone doing what they're best at when times are tough, so it was much better that I wrangle the sheets and either wash or destroy the dirty dishes, while my husband put the last touches on the magazine.

So we were both making pretty good headway. At one point I came into the back bedroom to check something on my laptop -- one of the articles still didn't have the author's name on it, and I had to look up who'd written it. I opened up my "SHM 4" file folder, and looked death right in his grinning face.

"Oh, $#@&!" I said.

"What's wrong?"

Here was a lovely, funny little article by a woman who had a hilarious article in the last issue, and who was mentioned by name in an editor's note in the letters column as having an article in this issue.

And here was a how-to article about teaching elementary-aged children about science -- an article I'd been thrilled to get, since this not-back-to-school issue had managed to gather between its covers essays about teaching pretty much every subject I could think of, and this would round that out just perfectly.

And I didn't remember proofreading either of them.

Which means I hadn't read them.

Which means I hadn't emailed them to my husband to format.

Which means that in spite of the sheets finally being on the bed, we were no closer to sleep than we had been two hours ago, and it was almost one in the morning.

And the magazine was already just the right length. 64 pages. One of the unincorporated articles in question was a couple of thousand words -- and I wasn't willing to do without it.

I managed to communicate all this to my husband, and I have to say that part of the reason he still holds that title is that he didn't even blink. He waited for me to stop verbally stabbing myself in the gut for being such an opossum-brained idjit, and then he said, from the experience of having worked on company magazines for over a decade, "There's nothing you can do or not do that I haven't dealt with before. This is fixable."

So he just plain fixed it. One article I'd written was absolutely huge, and I would have been happy to cut a bunch out of it. There's nothing like being forced to sit down and carefully read every word of something you've written -- after having already read it several times in the course of writing and editing and copy-editing it -- to make you detest it enough that you'd be willing to kill every last syllable of it. If it had been any earlier in the evening, I think that piece would have died, or at least sustained some serious flesh wounds.

But my husband preferred to add the material I'd found and have this be a slightly bigger-than-usual issue; and since he was the one who had to stay up so late for a magazine that was only related to him by marriage, I thought he should have final say on that.

So we sat up and added the articles, and they fit pretty well; and at just before two in the morning, my husband handed me a CD with the PDF file of the current issue, and instructed me to read over the magazine and "make sure it looks okay."

I instructed him to put it somewhere painful. If I had to look at this issue one more time, I was going to murder it in its sleep.

An editor friend of mine once told me that when it comes down to the final proof before the printer of her own magazine, there's always a point where she thinks to herself, "Unless it says 'f-you, f-you, f-you,' it's ready to go. I'm done." I thought she was kidding until this particular two in the morning, when I realized that if anything, she was being far too rigorous. I would have been willing to give the occasional f-bomb a pass if it meant I could finally go to bed.

So I did, blearily happy in the knowledge that I could finally bring this baby to the printer in the morning.

I woke up to learn that although I've been feeling a lot better than the last time I posted here, I'm still not exactly well -- at least not well enough to be able to stay up until two and then get up at a reasonable hour the next day. Which I had to, since unfortunately we had a morning appointment that I couldn't break.

So I staggered around with the gut-wrenching nausea that had bid me a reluctant adieu earlier in the week and was now delighted to see me again. I brushed my hair and my teeth in lieu of breakfast. I was staring at myself in the mirror, trying to decide if I should fight with the bangs I'm growing out or just jam a hat on and risk a return of Super Headache, when something hit me.

"Oh, DAMN it!"

Which really isn't a nice thing to scream at eight in the morning in the room where, in our apartment, you're most likely to be overheard by people in the other apartments. But which was way nicer than what I was thinking of screaming.

"What's wrong?" my son said anxiously, running in.

"Nothing!"

I stormed into the back bedroom as if the whole mess were somehow its fault, picked up the phone, called my husband at work, and when he answered, screamed without any preamble:

"We never made the final cuts to that article!"

You know -- the one that had been waiting patiently for my attention right when I realized that two other articles were also waiting for a little love. The one that hadn't been in line when I was trimming everything else that needed help.

If I took the CD to the printer as it was, my readers would get an issue with an article that ended mid-sentence at the end of a page without being continued anywhere else.

And the best part?

It was an article in the children's section.

Here's how really moronic I am:

I was genuinely hoping that, on hearing this, my husband would say something like, "Oh, didn't I tell you? When I was formatting those two late add-ins, I just did some trimming myself. I hope you don't mind. There was a little repetition anyway, so I just deleted a couple of sentences where the writer basically said the same thing twice."

Yeah, that's what he said. And then Santa came and gave me a year's supply of chocolate.

No, what my husband really said was, "Oh, #$%@!"

What ticked both of us off was that staying up until two o'clock in the morning is fine now and then for a good cause; but staying up until two in the morning to only be almost done bites. And knowing that if you'd just stayed up until two-ten in the morning, you would be done...well, that burns with the flames of a thousand blue-white stars.

Well, again, he handled it really well. He didn't blame me, and he said he'd get home as early as he could so that we could finish up and I'd be able to bring it over to the printer before they closed and only lose half a day, instead of having to wait to bring it until Saturday (which, because of the way the printer works, would basically be like waiting until Monday to get the job started).

So I'm in labor as we speak, and issue #4 of Secular Homeschooling Magazine -- all 68 pages of it -- should come into the world early Tuesday morning.

Let's hope it's not as stupid as its mother.