Thursday, September 10, 2009

THE NIGHTMARISH EDITOR

Slow getting going this morning. Had another exhausting sleep. I was madly editing a manuscript in my dreams all night. It was a simple premise that kept repeating itself all night. That manuscript must have been five hundred pages! Apparently I had submitted it to a publisher and then an editor returned it, demanding that I get rid of every the in the work.

With word processing, that should be an easy task. Simply type the in the Find option and then contemplate what kind of change is needed so the sentence doesn’t go Tarzan. (I like to swing on [ ]vine. I feel stronger than all of [ ] monkeys.) Of course, in a dream word processing options don’t come to mind. I had to sift through every page and search line by line to detect each occurrence of the offending word.

This utterly inane dream/nightmare arose from a crossword puzzle I did last week. The clue was “Most commonly occurring English word” and the three-letter answer: t-h-e. Now I have a dilemma: either I give up writing or I give up crosswords. (In reality, I think there is a third option: I say no to a third glass of white wine when dining with my aunt and cousin.)

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