Doing chores

One more solid weekend of work and a couple more days after that and this book, or at least this stage of it, should be done.

Next the accumulated backlog of features to finish, and since a flurry of email has just established I'll be away from mid-May to late-June, there'll be all the May and June features to finish, too. I've just realised that the very long feature, which will involve long phone calls to Paris and London and whose deadline was set a year ago, will be due while I'm away. So there's that to tackle, too. And it's not even paid (what was I thinking of?)

Then, of course, there's the backlog of pitches. And pitches related to the new trip. The narrow window of opportunity to speak to editors of some monthly magazines is coming up.

And all the logistics related to the new trip, although much of that has also already been arranged in further flurries of on-line work, quick trips to travel agents, and telephone calls. There's still much to do, however. Tourism bureaux and tour operators to chase, and so on.

I'll be in Hong Kong part of the time, so there's all the arrangements to be made to meet up with editors there, too.

At least the taxes are out of the way (except for signing the paperwork, which is in preparation).

And then there's the mountain of background reading to be done before leaving (otherwise it has to be carried).

Is this starting to sound less like fun and more like an infinite series of chores yet?

It's a family joke that I only go away in order to get a good night's sleep (almost impossible at home, especially recently). But in this case the first peace and quiet I'll get for several months will be when I step on the airplane. I just pray I don't end up locked up in a hotel room finishing up stories or edits on stories several months old and about places thousands of kilometres away.

Two weeks on the couch with no deadlines. I've been dreaming of this for years.

Grounded

Doing tax calculations reveals not only how increasingly ill-paid this business can be, but just how much travel is necessary even to earn a modest income.

In 2005 I spent the following numbers of nights away from home:

Antarctica and Argentina 16
Australia 16
Canada and Canadian Arctic 13
China 42
Hong Kong 10
Saint-Pierre et Miquelon 3
Spain 10
UK 37

Plus 6 nights in flight (out of 42 flights taken).

That's 153 nights away from home on business. Five months on the road.

And right now I'm looking at piles of mouldering receipts in ten different currencies and three different scripts, all of which have to be made into some kind of presentable order, translated into English, and converted into local currency for my accountant by Friday.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

An evening off

For the last month, for reasons too complicated to go in here, I've been, Monday to Friday each week, a full-time father, getting frantically to work at about 8pm, and carrying on until very late, only to be woken shortly after dawn by an enthusiastic small boy wanting some attention. Weekends, when I've managed to get some relief, have been 16-hour days of solid work. I'm just about managing to keep up with the schedule required to get everything complete, but lack of sleep makes producing lively prose a real struggle.

Tonight I think I've finally run out of steam, and for a couple of hours before I fall asleep, instead of writing an account of visiting arts venues around central Shanghai, I'm going to have a change of pace. I should be writing to the PR agency employed by one tourist authority to prise out of its reluctant grasp some information I need--something that's astonishingly hard to do given than they are supposedly employed to give journalists what they need to publish stories. I should be writing to another to point out that it's weeks since I asked for some information, and that in less than two months I'll be in its territory so it's time to get things planned. I should be making further arrangements for that proposed six-week trip. I should be writing to yet another tourist authority with an enquiry to do with reviving a story that was postponed from last year due to lack of time. I have a mountain of personal correspondence to deal with (even I like to think I have some kind of a life outside child care and work). I should be tackling my tax affairs as I have a meeting with my accountant on Friday. I should be pitching more stories to editors--some pitches are long overdue. I should call an editor in Hong Kong.

Actually, I'm going to do that.

But after that I'm just going to sit and read for a while. My brain has truly come to a halt.

Not just any old thing of course, but either an account of the life of Feng Yuxiang, the so-called Christian General, or an account by a missionary of the Boxer Rebellion and Siege of the Legations, or an account of travelling up the Yangzi in the 1880s, all of which are relevant to future projects.

For more than six years now I've been dreaming of two weeks on the couch with no deadlines.

And my editor in London, if you're reading this, please forgive me. I'll be back in the saddle tomorrow night, I promise.

More fish wrap

A magazine calls out of the blue as a result of a recommendation, and after considerable questioning commissions a story on Beijing. The story is delivered at an optimistic length, cut on request, and then no more is heard, although a copy of the magazine eventually shows up.

Every single paragraph has been rewritten. Indeed the elements in most sentences have been switched round.

Does this matter? No, but it's immensely irritating. I'm not exactly new to this business.

This is a minor publication, with a limited circulation, in a backwater (although it pays a pretty decent word rate). I write for far more major publications that change not a single word. Of course, every magazine is entitled to its house style (and this is where the pleasure of writing, or the sense of doing something resembling art if you're naive enough to believe in such a thing, is lost in the reality of the jobbing craft of fitting in with an editor's wishes). So live with it. Time tends to do the same thing. But then Time pays rather more, and although the magazine's a comic disguised as a vehicle for news, it does pay rather more and carry a great deal more prestige. On the other hand any errors introduced are seen by rather more people.

So it's time to chant 'Fish wrap! Fish wrap! Fish wrap!' Here today, the outer covering of your take-away meal tomorrow.

It's not in this case as if the juggling has produced smoother, more readable text. It's not as if errors of grammar have been corrected. The overall tone is the same, the sentence lengths the same, the readibility just slightly lowered as some of the sentences have been made rather clumsy, and muddied by pointless paraphrasing. Someone clearly just has too much time on her hands.

But what I dislike most is the random introduction of factual errors.

I refer to a dish with wasabi as being Hong Kong-style, which is precisely what it is. Wasabi is one of those fashionable ingredients some Hong Kong chefs have adopted, and wasabi with prawns seems to crop up fairly frequently there. The new version says Cantonese-style. Cantonese is a cooking school which knows nothing of the Japanese ingredient, and there are no Cantonese dishes that use it. You may think this a small matter, but it's a pointless change, born of ignorance, and if you know anything about the matter, then it makes me look silly and ignorant, too.

The name of one restaurant has been misspelled during the rewrite, which adds to the feeling of ignorance, and makes my attitude to what is a first-class establishment seem rather casual. I'll have to make a little apology next time I'm talking to the PR manager, although she'll fully appreciate it's not my fault. The interior description has been rewritten to include an element I didn't mention and I'm fairly sure isn't even there.

Then there's a mangling of a description of Beijing's hutong:

The city's intricate grid of boulevards has changed over the centuries. It used to be filled in by siheyuan--cozy dwelling for Chinese nobility built around central courtyards--threaded by narrow, winding alleys, called hutong.

I certainly didn't write that the houses were all for the nobility (which they most certain were not), and this mangled version now suggests that the hutong ran straight through the houses, which is plain daft.

Here, just for reference, is the original:

Beijing once filled the space between a grid of boulevards with cosy courtyard houses called siheyuan that lined thread-like alleys called hutong, traditionally ‘as numberless as the hairs on an ox’.

I'm not claiming this is great art, but it is at least an accurate description.

The lesson here is not only what a miserable business this is, but that when, as is usual when you read a newspaper or magazine story on a topic you know something about you find it full of errors and misunderstandings, it isn't always right to curse or mock the author. You should often be cursing the editor or the subs.

In this case the editor, who clearly knows nothing about China at all, could simply have sent me the text for a quick read-through. This would have taken moments, and saved the magazine looking silly, too.

So here's a multiple choice question. What to do about it?

a) Send a scathing note to the editor.

b) Refuse to work for the magazine ever again.

c) Get on with life (and say 'fish wrap').

Answer:

a) is always tempting for a few minutes at least, but what separates the professionals from those wet behind the ears is just letting it go. You can do this when you're a famous name whose appearance in a magazine helps sell copies; otherwise, forget it. And who knows what this editor might go on to edit next? Lack of talent is no barrier to progress in this business, and anyway the complete circumstances of this mess are unknown. The mess wasn't made out of ill-will, for sure.

b) is called 'cutting off the nose to spite the face'. I've taken Murdoch's money enough times, I'll take these people's. (Where is the cheque, by the way?)

c) You guessed right. It's that or find something else to do.

But I do object to being made to look like an idiot. If I want to look like an idiot I can easily arrange it myself, and often do it involuntarily, so I'm in no need of further assistance.