ATWS Reflection on Contributions to the Good of this Book

            I began this project as a lowly designer assigned the job of typesetting a book. Autonomy in this role was pretty extensive- mostly, I just scratched something together, flipped my computer around, and asked the other designers, “Do you like it?”

            And by default they’d just go, “Yeah, I like that,”

            So then I’d think twice about the design and remake it. Then I’d show the new design and people would say, “Yeah, I like that, maybe move the title half a centimeter up.”

            So I did, and that was that.

            But since I was now the only person holding the formatting, I got roped into handling the manuscript. I won’t say it was a very difficult task. Mostly it was just clerical page-shuffling, and though there was a lot of work, I didn’t really have to put much thought into it. People would pass me their stories, I’d format them, people would give me a story order, I’d rearrange the stories, people would demand each story formatted on an individual document, and I’d roll it out in an hour or so. I was nicknamed the Clark Clerk.

            And I’m sure my work, however menial, was helpful to a lot of other people. Alana needed me to modify the formatting of her piece. Aaron needed me to put all our copy editing annotations in the book. Bobby and Kathy wanted me to change all instances of their name to the more casual form. I was the secretary, and everything went through me.

             But I’d prefer to be credited with helping with the small odds and ends that we all chipped in to solve. Whenever something came up that wasn’t on any group’s to do list, we just grabbed whoever was available and asked them to write a blurb, or arrange the author biographies, or resolve a question in grammar. Whenever I was on site and finished with whatever I was explicitly responsible for, I’d be working on refining copy edits, helping people write their author bios, or just trying out some sentences for the back cover. Those are the matters that needed thought, inspiration, and teamwork. All this secretarial stuff was just my assigned work. The odds and ends were the real challenge.

            Sometimes the odds and ends were downright nightmarish. You already saw what a mess we went through to get Word to export right. But that certainly wasn’t the only problem Word gave us- for one thing, we couldn’t get the page numbers to function. Word can organize documents into sections, it’s just that nobody knows that, so nobody tells Word where the sections are. Of course, if you want different styles of page numbering in different parts of the book, you need to divide each part into sections. I had to learn pretty advanced level Word in order to get this piece to function, and even now, the Word doc is a stew of poor formatting, sections I don’t know how to remove, and haphazard eyeballing of margins.

            I’ll admit I did from time to time seek problems where there were none. We were all desperately afraid of some small error in the book being missed by editing, so some of us became brutally perfectionist. Every single change to grammar had to be triple-checked. Every piece was run through over and over until everything checked out. We went through three runs of copy editing and countless book-wide checks for common errors, and I’ll admit I made these checks drag on far beyond what was reasonable in search of consensus on perfect grammar. Given we were copy editing on the day before due date, that maybe wasn’t productive.