The Complaining and Bitching Thread

Mine usually last 1-2 days. If I'm on day 2 and the Imitrex/Tramadol hasn't worked, it's time to go to urgent care. Usually an IV bag and some Reglan sets me straight. One time they had to give me Dilaudid. That was...interesting, and it's not an experience I'd like to repeat. I'm on prophylaxis now, so they have cut down quite a bit. But I still get 3-4 a year, usually around ovulation.

 

Preventative medicine. I'm on a beta blocker.

 

What a wimp. Where I'm from that's good summer work. My friend's bro ended up paying his way through college with it after he got too old for spinach picking and pea vining.

 

If you send me your shitty drafts of your query letter to me in a Word file, and I piece together a decent draft from that and send it back to you in a Word file with a request to make some minor revisions, why would you make revisions and then copy and paste the letter into a message instead of sending it to me in the Word file (after the due date, I might add)?

When simple a $40 job goes wrong.

 

To be clear: You shouldn't send the first draft of anything to an editor unless they specifically ask for that (which I think is an odd request and is probably rare).

I would never send a first draft of anything to anyone.

 

I don't want to see a first draft either. Students are required to use my revisions checklist to catch and fix their own errors (improvement cycle 1), and then I read it after that. We conference. I make checks on lines that have errors as we conference, ask the student if they recognize the error (real time document editing makes this really easy), and if they don't, I tell them what it is and they have to figure out how to fix it (improvement cycle 2). Then they have to read their work out loud to see if there are any additional errors, especially in fluency. This usually catches any remaining errors from previous improvement cycles. Only after 3 improvement cycles do I accept their work as complete. Each phase has documentation that goes with it, too.

 

Very early in my career, I stopped assuming that writers know what self-editing is.

There is one specific manuscript I remember maybe in my first year. It was back when I still edited on hardcopy. The pages ran red when I was done with it—every single page. It was like the elevator scene in The Shining.

 

My students are high schoolers, and my revision sheet is one I've refined from one a mentor gave me.

 

#irony