Amanda Cockrell

 

This season of carols, I find it easy to get lost in that old music, and wish for the millionth time that I could sing.

 

I am almost, but not quite, tone deaf, with just enough ear to allow me to sing horrible, vaguely recognizable versions of songs I love. I always appreciate it when people sing in groups and I can sneak in quietly. I can actually get closer to the right note if I sing with someone, but not alas actually on it. My husband knows more weird old ballads, my favorite genre, than almost anyone else. His repertoire includes dismal train wreck songs ("murdered upon the railway and laid in a lonesome grave"), songs about seal lovers and cabin boys who turn out to be girls, and Hank Williams classics. And Christmas carols, oddly. He's not a fan of Christmas but even my Jewish husband gets caught up in their song, and surely we can agree on "O Come, O Come, Emanuel," a carol for all eventualities.

 

In my twenties I worked as a copywriter for a rock radio station and listened to Top 40 hits all day whether I wanted to or not. It was years after I quit that job before I could turn on the car radio, scarred by too many repeats of "Wildfire" and "Kung Fu Fighting." By night I hung out with boys who sang folk songs. Maybe that is the basis of my occasionally unfortunate susceptibility to guys who sing, including my husband, who is one of the fortunate instances. Another semi-serious crush was on a guy with an angel's voice who's now a priest. A Lutheran priest, I might add, I'm not that bad. He insisted that he could teach me to carry a tune, and he did get me closer, but the ear just wasn't there. It's like being color-blind maybe. You just don't have that fine tuning. Another was the kind of guy who leaves you wondering what in holy hell you thought you were doing, but oh, he could sing.

 

It was my husband who, in the long ago before we were married, introduced me to Jimmie Rodgers and to Richard Fariña and to folk music that went beyond the pop versions of the Kingston Trio. I read somewhere that you imprint on the music of your adolescence, and nothing else ever sounds as good to you. That would explain a lot.

 

My normal approach to revising a manuscript:

 

     Read editor's notes. They are lengthy.

     Stomp about swearing and listing the many ways the editor is Wrong.

     Read notes again.

     Decide that maybe a third of them are sort of reasonable and I can do those.

     Begin at beginning of notes, as that is the easiest way.

     Decide that more than I had thought are sensible, and a couple are brilliant.

     Find four to stand my ground on.

     Decide that maybe I should do one of those too, because it's not half bad.

     Decide that it's not half good either and I will revisit it.

     Write cogent summary in defense of not doing the other three.

     The fourth one now somehow looks much more intelligent than it did.

     Do that one too.

     Admire the difference all this has made to a previously lumpy manuscript.

     Decide that I am adamant on the last three.

     Send it all off and have a drink.

 

     All of which is to say that a good editor is a godsend, and should be rewarded in heaven with the pleasure of removing the extra apostrophes in all those damn Christmas cards from the Baxter's.

     If you are a writer, you know the value of a good editor, or you should. No one is the best eye on their own work. I have read too many self-published books lately that prove that, clogging an otherwise good novel with clunky syntax, erroneous word choice, and characters who vanish for no reason halfway through the book. Writers who get too famous for their own britches also do themselves no favors by deciding that they are too good to need an editor. I've read a bunch of those too.

     So this is my Christmas carol in praise of editors, having just completed the above process for a book that will be out this spring. Thank you, Kit Nevile of Canelo, long may you inhabit the right hand Markup column.