Even Editors Have Lives

Even editors have lives away from the computer. As compulsive about my work as I am, sometimes I actually stand up and walk away. I even turn off the computer. That’s what I’ll be doing next week when I move from this apartment to a new one in a beautiful older building near downtown Long Beach. I like Long Beach. It has architecture. Beautiful old Craftsman cottages and stucco houses also dating from early in the 20th century.

As I’ve been telling my friends, though, I gotta get outta this building. Because of the work I do, I need quiet surroundings so I can concentrate on semicolons and subject-verb relationships. My neighbors are driving me nuts. There’s the New Age enthusiast next door who’s friendly but drinks too much. When she’s drinking, she preaches to the man in the apartment above me. He’s deaf. I get to hear those New Age sermons. Late at night. Then there’s the large, loud, rude woman with the large, loud, surly teenagers. There’s the old man who apparently has AIDS dementia. He likes to get into everybody’s business, and then he phones the manager. He once phoned her seventeen times in one day. And of course there’s Mr. Balls-for-Brains. About whom I will say no more.

A long-time friend who’s been through three or four of my moves keeps telling me I should write a novel about this apartment building where there is just way too much drama. Put the neighbors in it, she says. That, of course, is the writer’s revenge: Be careful or you’ll end up in my novel. Romans-de-clef are written all the time. Some days, though, I think this building and its inhabitants would make a better movie. Maybe written and directed by the Coen Brothers. Or Tim Burton. Or, on loud days, Quentin Tarantino. So I’m moving the week after the summer solstice.

Meanwhile, I need to keep editing. I’m fortunate to be working with some extraordinarily patient authors right now. One is an elderly man who is rewriting his memoir. He’s led a very interesting life, but at this point, he keeps forgetting things. But he’s found help—a seventeen-year-old computer geek named Lorenzo. Now that my author and I can more easily send his chapters back and forth, we’re making significant progress on his memoir. Another author lives in Ontario. She and I have been working together—two books, several articles—since 2007. While I’m moving, she told me, she’ll be having houseguests, so she won’t be sending any new chapters. Another author with whom I’ve been working since 2005—two or three nonfiction books and a splendid novel—is on vacation, so I won’t get another chapter from him till mid-July. One more author is writing as fast as she can, but she has to do a lot of rewriting, so we’ve decided to pace ourselves a bit more slowly so we can both attend to our “real lives.” A new author lives in Reno and just sent me an email saying he’d be happy to drive his pickup truck over here to help me. I thanked him for his generous offer, but that’s just too far to drive. And finally, there’s the author who had a life crisis followed by a major insight. We’d almost finished her book (two edits so far), but now she’s decided to rewrite most of it. When I said I’m moving, she said she’s still writing. I am indeed fortunate to be working with these authors, all of whom understand the stress of packing up and moving.

So this week I’m editing in the mornings and packing in the afternoons. When I moved in here in 2001, I had twenty-six boxes of books. I don’t know yet how many boxes I’ll have when I move out. I’m also packing all 307 witches, my whole office, and the art on the walls. I have a lot of art on the walls, not only the collage I described in my January blog, but also real art by real artists. The manager of the building I’m moving into says I can hang anything I want on my walls. Little does she know……….

Yesterday afternoon, I went to my new apartment with graph paper. I measured and drew the rooms, including where the coaxial cable comes in and where the electrical outlets are. Tonight, I’ll make little diagrams of my furniture and figure out where everything will go—my office, my computer, my reference books, my seven or eight bookcases. The bedroom. The kitchen stuff. I’m tired already!

While you’re here, please go to Womens Radio and listen to my summer solstice interview, in which I explain how the gold and silver bracelets I always wear make me a walking spell. You can also read my first revisionist fairy tale on Womens Radio. I hope you enjoy it. I’ve just packed my shoes and purses. And another box of books. And another box of goddesses. Ya know, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll still be surrounded by boxes when I write my sun-entering-Leo blog.