The Wedding Runner

Repeated from the words and worlds of mint.

---

Five months after posting the opening of this story here and nearly two years after I first conceived it, The Wedding Runner is complete.  (Says a lot about my productivity.)  Like so many of my short stories, the initial idea came from a dream I had – in this case, a dream about running away, in and out of the ghost dimension, to save someone with a faintly bridal tinge.  The details of the original dream have faded as a result of being replaced by the imagery of this story, but that’s not all bad.

The Wedding Runner is available for reading and downloading here; now edited, brushed up and converted to the standardized pdf format that I’ve been using for finalized items uploaded to my blogsite (the words and worlds of mint) so far.

This story takes major liberties with traditional Chinese beliefs and practices.  But the root mythology is solid, and the representation, if not quite true to appearance, is accurate in spirit.  I watched a great many Hong Kong ghostbuster movies as a child, and I grew up with the traditions of Qing Ming and the Hungry Ghost Festival.  And I’m very glad to be able to express some of what I know about these superstitions and practices in my fiction.

Blame The Editor

Re-reading some books from my bloated collection of science fiction and fantasy, I spotted a variety of egregious typographical errors including inaccurate spelling, dropped punctuation, poor grammar, disordered headings and even the repetition of entire fragments of text – all amounting to what some editing books term mechanical distraction.  They certainly distracted me from the story.

After putting a few offending books down, I began to wonder who was at fault for allowing such errata (the plural verb, not the noun) to make it into print.  The author?  Most readers will probably blame the author offhand, and having seen some spectacularly ungrammatical manuscripts during my career as an editor, I know there are plenty of authors whose grasp of the English language is a little…slippery.  The printer?  That’s a close second, but the printer is, in fact, almost completely innocent when it comes to typographical errors.  Of the list above, the only one they might be slightly guilty of is text repetition.

Who else is in the line of fire?  The publisher, of course – being the one who released the mistake-filled book in the first place.  The bookshop, for retailing such a low-quality product?  Maybe.  But I wonder how many people will look right through the external layer of marketing and distribution, and pin the blame on the editor behind a desk in a back room of the publisher’s offices.

Having been an editor myself, I’m inclined to do the last.  The editor, after all, is the person who selects a manuscript for publication in the first place – out of the dozens, hundreds or, for large and well-known publishing houses, thousands that cross his or her desk every week.  If that manuscript happens to be totally devoid of any coherent plot or sensible information, the fault lies with the editor for doing a lousy job of picking it!

Even if the manuscript is complete garbage, once it’s chosen for publication it’s the editor’s responsibility to make sense out of it…or to give up and chuck it in the recycling bin where it belongs.  And that includes cleaning up the narrative, making sure the facts are accurate and the plot has no potholes, correcting the spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and generally getting it into a fit state for public consumption.  Nor does the editor’s job end there.

When a book is sent to print, a blueprint will come back to the editor for one final check, and that is when the editor is supposed to clean up any typesetting issues like repeated text or mismatched pagination.  Granted, the novel that set me off in the first place was printed quite some years ago, at a time when it wasn’t worth the time or cost involved in making blueprint corrections for a trade paperback – but the editor should still have kept the errors to a minimum before the book ever went to the printer.

So I blame the editor for errata in my reading material, and while mine may be a minority viewpoint, I’m fairly certain that even if other people – like the author and the publisher – draw flak for the poor quality of what appears in print, the blame ends up trickling down to the editor in the end.  If I received a mail from a reader complaining about multitudinous spelling errors in a book I’d written, my first reaction would be to call my editor and demand to know how all those errors got through.  If I were in the customer service department of a big publishing house and got a similar complaint, I’d start a trail of inquiry which would also lead right back to the editor.  And while, in the second case, the publisher will take the flak on the surface, I’m pretty sure that the editor who failed to exercise due diligence (term used liberally) will later find that his or her bonus has failed to arrive.

Editors sure get a tough deal, and they aren’t often recognized for it.  Then again, who else can we really blame for problems in publications?

---

Repeated at the words and worlds of mint, my alternative blog set up to host my GeoCities refugees and track my newer creative efforts; while I consider merging both blogs because it might make more sense.

Bloat!

There have been perennial complaints about how feature creep makes software bloated, filled with redundancies, bug-prone, requirement-heavy and generally unmanageable – in particular Microsoft’s OS and Office suite.  I realized recently, however, that feature creep isn’t just a bugbear of software.  It haunts so many aspects of daily life that it’s actually frightening.

Take, for example, women’s clothing.  I happened to walk through the ladies’ officewear section of a Giant hypermart branch one afternoon, and I noticed that an overwhelming percentage of the selection featured: (1) puffed sleeves (2) ruffles (3) tucks and gathers (4) puffed hems (5) fancy prints (6) all the above.  Those tops which were of plain cut and unembellished design were, inexplicably, more expensive than the ones with ruffles and tucks.  And the simpler the design, the more expensive it seemed to be.  A fluffy, puffed, frilled blouse cost about one-third as much as a plain white long-sleeved shirt.

It reminded me of an article on slimming down software which I once read in relation to Microsoft’s offerings – something to the effect that the developer tries to cater to the taste of as many users at once as possible at as low a cost as possible, and does so by simply cramming everything into one large cheap package.  And the explanation in that article reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, in which everyone is made equal by dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator.

Feature creep in ladies’ fashion!  Well, that’s nothing new.  So many women seem to like fussy clothing.  But then I moved on to the stationery section, and once again it was incredibly difficult to find a file of plain design.  Everything was brightly coloured and heavily decorated – and the plain items were, once again, the expensive ones.  Perhaps the manufacturers thought that people who want to use design-free stationery work in high-paying jobs where fancy prints are frowned upon.

That in turn brought me to the topic of gifts – and I didn’t even want to go near the knick-knacks section.

I have never been a fan of gifts.  To me, gift-giving and card exchanging for no particular reason is, like feature creep, a commercial enterprise embarked upon in the evangelistic spirit of verifying your friendship with as many people as possible – a la Friendster.  Constantly exchanging glittery presents just because they look cute devalues the whole idea of gifts.  When people give me knick-knacks, I don’t know what to do with them besides stuff them, embarrassedly, into some sheltered corner where they hopefully won’t collect too much dust.  The same goes for ornaments – which I consider another form of feature creep in daily living.  Like the abominable folder sharing feature in Windows Live Messenger, they are something I can do without.

For the best example of feature creep in daily life, look at your own workspace, whether real – like your desk – or virtual – like the hard drive of your computer – and see how many things you can spot that have no earthly use other than gathering more dust.  How many things have you not touched within the last six months?  How many things have you not even looked at within the last six months?  How many things are there whose absence you wouldn’t even notice?

Beyond your desk: how many memberships do you have that you never draw upon?  How many cards that you never use?  How many mailing lists are you on whose mailers you never read?

On the bright side, feature creep in real life is more easily addressed than feature creep in software.  To deal with the latter, you need basic technical skills at the very least and probably the abilities of a professional hacker/programmer at the other end of the scale, and then you’re open to lawsuits and nasty legal tangles.  The former, however, can be handled with a large rubbish bag, some cleaning solvents and a deaf ear to present to outraged gift-givers asking where that knick-knack they gave you went to.  And then you sit there in the resulting blankness and wonder why you suddenly feel agoraphobic.

Feature creep in software originates from misguided manufacturers.  Feature creep in daily life also originates from misguided manufacturers, but ultimately, you have the choice of what to buy and what not to buy, what to subscribe to and what not to pay for.  After all, daily life comes in small pieces, unlike software that comes in one grotesque, gigantic 50GB chunk that you can’t break down.

Incidentally, Bloat is the name of a poison in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, one which causes the ingestee to explode suddenly and messily.  More of a blast than a creep?