Continuing with writers’ behind-the-scenes stories…

Warning: If you’re one of the sensitive readers the editors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living were protecting from naughty words, better plug your ears, cover your eyes, or simply skip this and come back next week.

CIG to Self-Sufficient Living really isn’t so much about self-sufficient living as it is about saving the planet through sane living. Most readers seem to miss that, which sorely disappoints me, because I leaned over backwards to weave that into the “self-sufficiency” theme the publisher wanted. (What makes it worse is that the very first sentence is “This book is not what you’re expecting.”)

In Chapter 1, “What’s It All About?” I list all the varieties of self-sufficiency, most of which are connected with Saving the Earth in one way or another. And I close out the chapter by saying if you don’t fit into any of those categories, maybe you’re not a crew member of Spaceship Earth. You’re just a passenger… or perhaps even a mutineer. “They refuse to accept the finite and nonrenewable nature of many of the resources we consider essential to our way of life.  They don’t believe that everything is connected to everything else, and that their actions, and inactions, have widespread repercussions. They are, in effect, mutineers. They are pissing in our ship’s freshwater casks, and we have no way to replace that drinking water. It’s time, and past time, to stop these mutineers. It’s time to become more self-sufficient.”

I wanted to emphasize, as strongly and dramatically as possible, that the most important reason for self-sufficient living is to save Spaceship Earth. That required strong language.

But in the edited version it came out “urinating.”

Although I’m an ex-Marine and have a very extensive colorful vocabulary, I’ve always been very careful about my writing. After all, my mother used to read what I wrote. But doggone it, “urinating” is such a  piddly word, where I wanted something bold and robust.

By some odd quirk, even though I had never used that word in more than 50 years of writing for publication, it turned up again in the same book. It was on page 205, in Chapter 16: “Adam and Eve Did It.” Their “Garden of Eden” was no garden: they were foragers. This chapter is about wild foods —and again, not so much about scrounging for them as a means of self-sufficient living-off-the-land, but to demonstrate how recently we have come to rely on industrial agriculture, and how easily we could go back to stalking wild asparagus after unsustainable agribusiness collapses.

The book mangles one of my father-in-law’s standard jokes. He would have said, “Some people prepare dandelions and any wild food like kidneys: they boil the piss out of them.”

Again, an editor questioned my choice of words. This time I admitted that it was merely meant to be humorous, and could easily be deleted. But I warned, “if you take out that word, leave out the entire joke, or it doesn’t make any sense.”

So what did we get in the book?

“Some people prepare dandelions and any wild food like kidneys; they boil them.” Anyone who thinks that says the same thing as the original is not an editor. An editor should know something about the function of a kidney, a little about cooking… and a whole lot more about humor.

Here’s a weird and overlong footnote: an example of why writing takes me so much longer now than it used to. It involves having a lifetime of memories, not all of which are accurate.

I vividly recall a passage from one of the first “farming” books I read. We Chose the Country was written in 1948 by Herbert Jacobs, a Madison newspaper reporter who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and was teaching at the U.W. School of Journalism when I was a student there —all of which is mentioned in CIG to SSL, for various reasons. Jacobs told of a neighbor who described how to sow alfalfa using a horn seeder— a sack suspended from your shoulder, with a long tube extending from the bottom. “You just swing it back and forth like you was pizzn.”

When I first read that in the 1940s (or so I thought) it was extremely daring language. To be honest, I distinctly remember pondering the meaning: having been brought up in a home where naughty words simply were not allowed, it took me awhile to figure it out.  I was definitely thinking of that when I wrote about the Spaceship Earth water keg problem.

So imagine my surprise (and dismay) when I decided to check the exact wording of that quote for this blog… and couldn’t find it. Here’s what that passage actually said:

“How do I work this thing?” I asked Tony.

“Nothing to it,” he said. “Swing it from side to side, slowly. Just pretend —“ and here he whispered in my ear, chuckled heartily, and whacked me on the back.

I’m absolutely certain I did not make up the word “pizzn.” However, Herb’s wife and daughter were nearby, watching the operation, so I assume that’s why Tony whispered. No doubt Katherine later asked Herb what Tony had whispered, and that’s when I heard it.

But that’s speculation, because I don’t have time to read the entire book again to solve the mystery, much as I’d like to. And I already got waylaid because I discovered that my copy belonged to my father-in-law, which means I couldn’t have read it before I met Diane, in 1953.

In addition, in the process of writing this I learned that an original copy is now worth $45, and it’s #5,087,536 on the Amazon “Best Seller” list, which makes even my 1990 book, The Place Called Attar, look pretty good, at #1,280,634.

But hey, enough of this. I gotta go.

—Jd Belanger

Friday Evening Note: Several people have told me the picture referred to in the blog posted this morning… isn’t here! My first reaction was “How the dickens did those cagey lawyers do that?” Then son John, the computer professional, said it showed up in Safari, but not Foxfire or Internet Explorer, because those two don’t recognize TIFF images. So I converted it to jpg. It lost something in the translation, but hopefully it will at least show up!

Some people seem to be fascinated by writers and their craft. I don’t know why, and I’m not one of them. But since my latest book — my eighth and no doubt last book — has just come out, it’s National Library Week, and I’m going to be at a “book signing” at the Gilman library this afternoon, this is as close as I’ll ever get to being a big-time author. So it’s a good time to share a few behind-the-scenes stories, which I’m sure every writer has.

Some concern the fabled love-hate relationship writers have with editors and publishers. Since I’ve spent my entire professional life wearing all three hats, I’ve felt relatively immune. Yet, there are moments…

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Raising Chickens was released last week, and I got my author’s copies the other day. (And this book was finished — met the three-alarm red-hot super-important deadline — last July.) One of the first things I noticed was the caption on the first picture, on page 2. “Chickens run wild in many places in the world, even in cities: on the streets, in grocery store parking lots, and sometimes in front of restaurants where a certain colonel is known for chicken of a different kind. Here are some feral chickens in downtown Panama City, Panama.”

Okay. A little bland, but nothing wrong with it — unless you know the whole story.

My point was that raising chickens ain’t rocket science. (Maybe I went overboard on this throughout the book, because the editors seemed to want to make everything 10 times more complicated than it has to be.) There are lots of places where chickens flourish on their own, even where some people try to discourage them, such as Key West Florida and much of Hawaii, as well as places where you’d least expect to see them, such as in front of a KFC. And I had a knock-your-socks-off photo to prove it, thanks to Staci Walker of Danville, Illinois.

The editors (there were seven of them) found the picture as hilarious and fitting as I did. But when they stopped laughing, they said the company lawyers would never go for it.

Not to be thwarted by such a minor detail, I contacted KFC. Their PR people had to run it through legal, of course. But when that all-important deadline came up and I hadn’t heard from them, I had to put some pressure on them. The lawyers tossed off a noncommittal “we will neither license nor give permission to use this photo.”

Well, to me, in lawyer-speak, that simply meant they didn’t want to get stuck okaying the picture. It certainly didn’t say we couldn’t use it. (And how could they stop anyone from showing a picture of an advertising sign, taken on a public sidewalk, anyway?) But I knew the Alpha (Idiot) lawyers would side with their KFC (chicken) colleagues, and with the deadline looming, I decided to fight it with my own (and only) weapon: words.

The cutline I wrote said chickens run wild in many places, even where a certain colonel is known for chicken of a different kind. But I added, “The prissy square-toed lawyers wouldn’t let me show you that picture, but here’s one of some feral chickens in downtown Panama City.” I thought that added a little more punch, and sort of an imaginary visual. But the prissy square-toed editors deleted it.

Here’s Staci Walker’s picture — the one the lawyers didn’t want you to see.

Staci Walker took this picture on Grand Cayman.

By the way, the Panama photo used in the book is credited to David Chase. His name really is Chase Davis. That is most likely my fault, which is another story, but it shows it ain’t easy being an editor.

There’s more — much, much more. I won’t bother mentioning the “contest” they’re running to find the “most popular” Idiot’s Guide. For one thing, I just found out about it, and it ends at midnight tonight (April 16). In addition, it involves becoming a “follower” of @IdiotsGuides on Twitter, which is all Greek to me, and sounds kind of fishy. But that’s nothing, compared to some of the other insider, behind-the-scenes stuff that goes on.

Maybe I should write a book. — Jd Belanger

Words fascinate me. I’m intrigued by the many ways they can be used, beguiled by subtle differences in meaning, tantalized by how they can be joined together to form different ideas. I’m delighted to learn a useful new word I wasn’t previously familiar with.

At the same time, or perhaps consequently, I abhor their misuse.

As a writer, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to misuse words (and phrases and grammar) myself, and as a reader, even more occasion to see others misuse them. And as an editor, I’ve developed some “favorite words to hate.” Many, of course, involve aspects of country living.

At the top of the list is “baby chick.” A baby chicken is a chick. A grown-up chick is a chicken. So to me, “baby chick” is as grating as saying “baby baby chicken.” It drives me up a wall, especially when I don’t have the editorial power to change it. And it seems to be becoming more common, even in ads.

This type of use or abuse first came to my attention with the term “hot water heater.” Why on earth would anyone want to heat hot water? It’s already hot! You heat cold water.

Back on the farm (or more likely, in the classified ads) we encounter such gems as “bails” of hay. Bails are the handles on pails, or what people pay to stay out of jails. Hay and straw are made into bales.

A tricky one for many people, apparently, is the difference between the weather outside and the castrated goat or sheep wether in the barn. (Another question is whether your spell checker knows the difference: Mine won’t accept wether at all. But spell checkers are another topic altogether.)

Apostrophes are in a class by themselves. Sign painters in particular seem to think that every word that ends in “S” deserves its own apostrophe. However, the most jarring transgression involves its and it’s. It’s means it is, plain and simple. The possessive its does not have an apostrophe. This mistake has become so common you’d think that even a grizzled old editor would be getting used to it, but it still has the power to drive me mad.

Some words are hard to spell because we learned them by hearing them spoken, not by seeing them written. My all-time favorite is this category is the lady who wrote about her “toboggan bird” goats. (For you goatless readers, the breed is Toggenburg.)

Does any of this make any real difference? I would have to say yes, not only from the standpoint of having spent a lifetime of stringing words together to convey certain ideas, but also in the interest of clear communications under any circumstances. And then there is the simple question of protocol and propriety: misusing language seems somehow uncivilized, even impolite.

And yet, most people really don’t know the difference. I still do a bit of magazine proofreading, and by force of habit, I “proof” everything I read, which is often maddening. But I recently encountered a paragraph that helps put my problem into perspective. If nothing else, it demonstrates why proofreading is such a strenuous job.

I cdnuolt blveiee ?taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The ?phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at ?Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ?ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the ?first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ?taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This ?is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by ?istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?

What’s even more amazing to me is that I can’t type “Taht’s all for now from byeond the sdiewalks,” without over-riding my computer. The thought of a stupid machine correcting an intelligent human is just a bit frightening to a guy living with as few machines as possible, beyond the sidewalks.—Jd