Various Happenstances of Seth

May 15, 2007

    Earlier this month, the final layout proofs for Rhode Island Curiosities (my upcoming book) arrived in the mail. I began to proofread them, and noticed that I didn't remember writing nearly half of the captions that appeared in this soon-to-be final version. This caused me enough grief that I ended up going through all five stages of grief as outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross*:

1. Denial: They paid me to write the book so I could be funny, so they wouldn't really re-write so many of my captions, right?
2. Anger: How dare they change everything? I am the author!
3. Bargaining: Okay, maybe I'll go upstairs and see if I can find my strongest captions and get them to revert to at least some of them.
4. Depression: I'm such a hack writer that I can't even write acceptable captions for my own book.
5. Acceptance: Editors always change things; that's their job. Books are always heavily edited, and the replacement captions are actually pretty funny, so I may as well just accept it.

    Still, I wanted to check my notes and see what captions I'd had originally. Even if they mostly weren't as good as the current captions, I figured one or two might be funny enough to argue for. And besides, I had (appropriately) a genuine curiosity to see how I'd initially captioned the photos, and whether I thought my captions stood up to the final ones. So, I grabbed the layed-out manuscript, went up to my computer, and loaded up my notes to see what I'd initially written.

    That's when I found out that the brand new captions were what I'd initially written. The editors hadn't changed my captions at all, I'd just completely forgotten what I wrote a few months ago. Good to know I can always rely on my memory**.

    Good grief.

<-- Consolation Pies

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    *Stage 1: I can't really have an umlaut in my name, can I?
     Stage 2: How dare my parents do this to me!?!
     Stage 3: Maybe I can reduce it to one dot.
     Stage 4: My name will always be wrong on Scantron sheets.
     Stage 5: Fine, I'll bear my umlaut. I know other people have umlauts too. And hey, I bet other people have this grief thing too. Maybe I should write about it.

    **I have a memory like a... you know... one of those... things... the ones with not a good memory.

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