Substantive editing sample 26:
The first date

The author of this quirky dark novel italicized many expressions I was tempted to unitalicize, and sometimes he used joined independent clauses with commas rather than semicolons—actions he insisted were his stylistic choices, derived from his admiration of authors Michel Houellebecq and Thomas Bernhard. I deferred to his insistent choices most of the time; it was his book, not mine.

I did have plenty to take care of, though. For one thing, I segmented many of his overly long paragraphs, thereby enabling readers to “take a breath.” I also dealt with ambiguous text. Check out the markup and commentary to see other places I polished his text.

Skip this sample and advance to the next one in the series.

This sample is presented here with the author’s permission.

Original
Click to go to the markup.

Monica’s choice of restaurant turned out to be a peculiar place (posh, I suppose) that served only artisanal cheese plates. We split at the door, she to touch up her makeup, me to douse my throat with gin, and reconvened just in time to be seated at a couch with a low table, the kind usually used to uphold disheveled piles of magazines. The menu offered a half-dozen combination platters composed from thirty cheeses from around the world. As it turns out, both of us were novices in the world of artisanal cheese. We ordered the plate of the day, basically whatever they had on hand at the moment or whatever arrangement the “chef” felt like slapping together. For pairing, our server suggested the Orvieto, a light, crisp Italian white which I found impossible to distinguish from Pinot Grigio. The place was small yet packed to the hilt; we had to wait almost an hour for the construction of our meal. Mostly, Monica talked about her students—in particular, Kate (née Martin), the star of her Digital Editing class. I was not unhorrified to learn that Kate and Monica were, inasmuch as the mentor-student relationship permitted, friends. They went to the cinema together occasionally; once, they had even had drinks afterward. It would not even have been immodest, I gleaned, to suggest that Monica had helped to facilitate Kate’s gender transition. “She says you’re not very nice to her,” Monica added offhandedly. “As a rule, I’m not very nice to any of my students. Treating them coldly prevents them from trying to befriend me.” “What’s wrong with befriending a student?” I pulled a grimace. Was she really so oblivious to the deadly specter of sexual misconduct? “I don’t really like kids,” I said. “Or young adults. Whatever. I find them crass, trendy and intellectually unreachable.” Monica laughed, as if I’d said something witty. “Still, you don’t have to treat them like lepers. Kate says you’re withholding—that you withhold praise.” It was true, of course. Never having been the recipient of praise in my life, I did not really understand how to go about heaping it upon others and only rarely felt inclined to do so. But I said nothing of the sort, as to go there with Monica would have risked tapping her endless reserves of pity. On the whole I was a pitiful creature, it’s true, and never more so than in the shadow of Monica Barnes, but this in no way translated to deserving her pity, much less desiring it. Which begged the question—what did I want from her? It was difficult to formulate in words or mental projections. I pitied her, that much was clear. By the time our cheeses arrived, we’d drained one bottle of wine; we ordered a second. Monica seemed relaxed, in her element. For my part, I had no precise idea where I was or what I was doing there, I felt a bit like a beetle on its back, legs flailing in the air, roasting in the indifferent sun. I was sweating. It was the gin. I went completely silent, focusing on the food. Some of the substances arranged in a circle around the plate—garnished with pine nuts, sun-dried cranberries and little ovular slices of firm Italian bread—were obviously cheese, while others were completely alien to me. There was one in particular that looked more like a fungus, with a ghastly (I want to describe it as pornographic) blue vein running up the center. The maître d’ had explained that this was normal, that the vein was in fact this particular cheese’s most covetable aspect; all the same, I left it alone. From the corner of my eye, I watched Monica intently as she ate. Her method of ingestion was the only thing that truly interested me about her. She pecked at the plate with affected hesitation, with an anxiety manufactured by unknowable (and perhaps unspeakable) desires, always waiting to go in for another bite until I had done so first, calculating her intake to match mine—as if she was not hungry, as if she did not require sustenance to go on living. I was not shocked, I’d been married; it’s true, most women eat this way around men—especially men for whom they harbor intimate designs—but in Monica’s case, the case of a woman for whom food was clearly a vice, the masquerade was doubly ridiculous (I don’t think I’d ever passed her office during her allotted hours without spying a cupcake in her hand or an open, half-empty package of cookies on her desk). Near the end of the second bottle of Orvieto, which we had drained nervously as if to anaesthetize ourselves against some imminent torture, I detected a shift in the mood. Monica looked down at our plate, using a slice of bread to nudge a sun-dried cranberry toward the summit of a mound of goat cheese. She was done fucking around with me; it was time to get serious. “You never talk about yourself,” she observed. The subtext being, I suppose, that she wanted to know all about me. What was there to say? Those things which constituted the cornerstones of my existence were not exactly the kinds of things one talks about on a date, not a first date anyway. The last decade of my life essentially amounted to a haze of alcoholism, paranoid xenophobia and depression, punctuated erratically by the odd fit of suicidal gloom. Did she want to know that I could not really sleep without first draining at least a pint of gin? Did she want to hear about the time I called out sick from work in order to waste the day masturbating for six hours straight, until the pain in my chest forced me to stop? I’d been in and out of therapy for years, I must have seen a dozen different shrinks—not one of whom even pretended to give a shit. And who could blame them? There’s no fixing people; the work belongs to Sisyphus. My problems were so mediocre, so banal that to refer to them as problems was to flirt with hyperbole. For a while, at the behest of the last shrink, a woman (her femininity lent her the illusory sheen of compassion), I even resorted to keeping a journal—essentially a collection of sexual fantasies starring students or girls I’d lusted after in college or women I saw out in the street jogging, walking their dogs, waiting for the bus . . . It was this therapist, a true-blue Freudian, who’d helped me to see that I was afraid of women, and that the catalyst for this fear had been my father. To be precise, my father’s girlfriends, mistresses, whores, whatever they were to him. Throughout my adolescence, I’d observed a revolving cast of damaged, trashy, used-up women who came to our apartment—sometimes two or three at a time—to drink and do drugs with my father and then fuck. He would allow me to hang out with them earlier in the evenings. I didn’t understand their behavior, it was frightening, the way these women fawned over me, the stink of booze on their breath as they groped me playfully, hideously . . . Of course, this therapist was at great pains to pretend that my inane, sordid frustrations did not repulse her. I got the impression she believed I was making it all up: the night sweats, the day drinking, the noose that had dangled from my shower head for three or four years . . . So I was depressed—so what? Depression is everywhere, and generally no more distressi.g than acid reflux or an allergy to pollen; at certain times of the year it flares up without warning or apparent cause, leading to obsessive suicide plots, at which point one can always obtain a prescription for tranquilizers and, as they say, ride it out. I shrugged at Monica, munching on a hard sliver of what the maître d’ had referred to as Campo de Montalban. (All this incessant munching, so careful, so coquettish, so reminiscent of the manner in which a rabbit eats, it was a bold lie, and if in Monica’s case the lie was doubly ridiculous, then in mine the stupidity was tripled: I wanted the whole plate inside of me.) “Why don’t we talk about you instead,” I said evasively. “How’s Boots?” Monica lit up, ecstatic at this small piece of evidence that I truly cared: that I’d remembered the name of her cat. “Boots is fine. I just bought her a new stuffed rat to play with. You can fill its belly with catnip. She goes crazy, batting it around for a couple minutes—then she falls to the floor and drags herself in circles around the carpet until she falls asleep.” (She was giggling, demonstrating her cat’s antics with her hands, making them into little paws.) “Do you like animals?” she asked.

Markup
Click to go to the result.

Monica’s choice of restaurant turned out to be a peculiar place (posh, I suppose) that served only artisanal cheese plates. We split at the door, she door—she to touch up her makeup, me to douse my throat with gin, and gin—and reconvened just in time to be seated at a couch with a low table, the kind usually used to uphold [consider changing “to uphold” to “to support” (or “to display”)] disheveled piles of magazines. The menu offered a half-dozen a half dozen combination platters composed from thirty cheeses from around the world. As it turns out, both of us were novices in the world of artisanal cheese. We ordered the plate of the day, basically the “plate of the day,” basically whatever they had on hand at the moment or whatever arrangement the “chef” felt like slapping together. For pairing, our server suggested the Orvieto, a light, crisp Italian white which white that I found impossible to distinguish from Pinot Grigio from pinot grigio. [(1) See the style sheet about the capitalization of wines; (2) I broke the paragraph here.] The place was small yet packed to the hilt; we had to wait almost an hour for the construction of our meal. Mostly, Monica talked about her students—in particular, Kate (née Martin), the star of her Digital Editing class. I was not unhorrified to learn that Kate and Monica were, inasmuch as the mentor-student relationship permitted, friends. permitted, “friends.” They went to the cinema together occasionally; once, they had even had drinks afterward. It would not even have been immodest, I gleaned, to suggest that Monica had helped to facilitate Kate’s gender transition. “She says you’re not very nice to her,” Monica added offhandedly. “As a rule, I’m not very nice to any of my students. Treating them coldly prevents them from trying to befriend me.” “What’s wrong with befriending a student?” I pulled a grimace. Was she really so oblivious to the deadly specter of sexual misconduct? “I don’t really like kids,” I said. “Or young adults. Whatever. I find them crass, trendy and trendy, and intellectually unreachable.” Monica laughed, as if I’d said something witty. “Still, you don’t have to treat them like lepers. Kate says you’re withholding—that you withhold praise.” It was true, of course. Never having been the recipient of praise in my life, I did not really understand how to go about heaping it upon others and only rarely felt inclined to do so. But I said nothing of the sort, as to go there with Monica would have risked tapping her endless reserves of pity. On the whole I whole, I was a pitiful creature, it’s true, and true—and never more so than in the shadow of Monica Barnes, but Barnes—but this in no way translated to deserving her pity, much less desiring it. Which begged the question—what did question: What did I want from her? It was difficult to formulate in words or mental projections. I pitied her, that much was clear. By the time our cheeses arrived, we’d drained one bottle of wine; we ordered a second. Monica seemed relaxed, in her element. For my part, I had no precise idea where I was or what I was doing there, I felt a bit like a beetle on its back, legs flailing in the air, roasting in the indifferent sun. I was sweating. It was the gin. I went completely silent, focusing on the food. Some of the substances arranged in a circle around the plate—garnished with pine nuts, sun-dried cranberries and cranberries, and little ovular slices of firm Italian bread—were obviously cheese, while others were completely alien to me. There was one in particular that looked more like a fungus, with a ghastly (I want to describe it as pornographic) blue vein running up the center. The maître d’ had explained that this was normal, that the vein was in fact this particular cheese’s most covetable most “covetable” aspect; all the same, I left it alone. From the corner of my eye, I watched Monica intently as she ate. Her method of ingestion was the only thing that truly interested me about her. She pecked at the plate with affected hesitation, with an anxiety manufactured by unknowable (and perhaps unspeakable) desires, always waiting to go in for another bite until I had done so first, calculating her intake to match mine—as if she was not she were not hungry, as if she did not require sustenance to go on living. I was not shocked, I’d shocked; I’d been married; it’s true married. It’s true, most women eat this way around men—especially men for whom they harbor intimate designs—but in Monica’s case, the case of a woman for whom food was clearly a vice, the masquerade was doubly ridiculous (I don’t ridiculous. (I don’t think I’d ever passed her office during her allotted hours without spying a cupcake in her hand or an open, half-empty package of cookies on her desk). Near desk.) [I broke the paragraph here.] Near the end of the second bottle of Orvieto, which we had drained nervously as if to anaesthetize to anesthetize ourselves against some imminent torture, I detected a shift in the mood. Monica looked down at our plate, using plate and used [the “ing” form following a verb (in this case, “using” after “looked down”) works best only when the actions are simultaneous; when one action follows another (even only slightly afterward), regular verbs are better] a slice of bread to nudge a sun-dried cranberry toward the summit of a mound of goat cheese. She was done fucking around with me; it was time to get serious. “You never talk about yourself,” she observed. The subtext being, I suppose, that she wanted to know all about me. [I broke the paragraph here.] What was there to say? Those things which things that constituted the cornerstones of my existence were not exactly the kinds of things one talks about on a date, not a first date anyway. The last decade of my life [“The last decade of my life” would be the final decade before dying] The past decade of my life essentially amounted to a haze of alcoholism, paranoid xenophobia and xenophobia, and depression, punctuated erratically by the odd fit of suicidal gloom. Did she want to know that I could not really sleep without first draining at least a pint of gin? Did she want to hear about the time I called out sick from work in order to waste the day masturbating for six hours straight, until the pain in my chest forced me to stop? I’d been in and out of therapy for years, I years; I must have seen a dozen different shrinks—not one of whom even pretended to give a shit. And who could blame them? There’s no fixing people; the work belongs to Sisyphus. My problems were so mediocre, so banal that banal, that to refer to them as problems was as “problems” was to flirt with hyperbole. For a while, at the behest of the last shrink, a woman (her femininity lent her the illusory sheen of compassion), I even I’d even resorted to keeping a journal—essentially a collection of sexual fantasies starring students or girls I’d lusted after in college or women I saw out in the street jogging, walking their dogs, waiting for the bus . . . It bus. . . . [(1) A “four-point ellipsis” is appropriate here at the end of the sentence. (It’s really a regular three-point ellipsis following the sentence’s terminal period.) Three points would be appropriate at the end of a sentence (especially in dialogue) if the sentence “trails off,” though. (2) I broke the paragraph here.] It was this therapist, a true-blue Freudian, who’d helped me to see that I was afraid of women, and that the catalyst for this fear had been my father. To be precise, my father’s girlfriends, mistresses, whores, whatever whores—whatever they were to him. Throughout my adolescence, I’d observed a revolving cast of damaged, trashy, used-up women who came to our apartment—sometimes two or three at a time—to drink and do drugs with my father and then fuck. He would allow me to hang out with them earlier in the evenings. I didn’t understand their behavior, it behavior; it was frightening, the way these women fawned over me, the stink of booze on their breath as they groped me playfully, hideously . . . Of hideously. . . . Of course, this therapist was at great pains to pretend that my inane, sordid frustrations did not repulse her. I got the impression she believed I was making it all up: the night sweats, the day drinking, the noose that had dangled from my shower head for three or four years . . . So I years. . . . So, I was depressed—so what? Depression is everywhere, and generally no more distressi.g more distressing than acid reflux or an allergy to pollen; at certain times of the year it year, it flares up without warning or apparent cause, leading to obsessive suicide plots, at which point one can always obtain a prescription for tranquilizers and, as they say, ride it out. I shrugged at Monica, munching Monica, who was munching [who was doing the munching was ambiguous, but the suggested revision (and the next, parenthetical sentence) clears it up, making Monica the muncher (if it had been narrator Gordon doing the munching, then “I shrugged at Monica, munching” would need to change to “I shrugged at Monica and munched”)] on a hard sliver of what the maître d’ had referred to as Campo de Montalban de Montalbán. (All this incessant munching, so munching—so careful, so coquettish, so reminiscent of the manner in which a rabbit eats, it was eats—was a bold lie, and if in lie. And if in Monica’s case the lie was doubly ridiculous, then in mine the stupidity was tripled: I wanted the whole plate inside of me.) “Why don’t we talk about you instead,” I said evasively. “How’s Boots?” Monica lit up, ecstatic at this small piece of evidence that I truly cared: that I’d remembered the name of her cat. “Boots is fine. I just bought her a new stuffed rat to play with. You can fill its belly with catnip. She goes crazy, batting it around for a couple minutes couple of minutes—then she falls to the floor and drags herself in circles around the carpet until she falls asleep.” (She was giggling, demonstrating her cat’s antics with her hands, making them into little paws.) “Do you like animals?” she asked.

Result
Click to go to the next sample in the series.

Monica’s choice of restaurant turned out to be a peculiar place (posh, I suppose) that served only artisanal cheese plates. We split at the door—she to touch up her makeup, me to douse my throat with gin—and reconvened just in time to be seated at a couch with a low table, the kind usually used to support disheveled piles of magazines. The menu offered a half dozen combination platters composed from thirty cheeses from around the world. As it turns out, both of us were novices in the world of artisanal cheese. We ordered the “plate of the day,” basically whatever they had on hand at the moment or whatever arrangement the “chef” felt like slapping together. For pairing, our server suggested the Orvieto, a light, crisp Italian white that I found impossible to distinguish from pinot grigio. The place was small yet packed to the hilt; we had to wait almost an hour for the construction of our meal. Mostly, Monica talked about her students—in particular, Kate (née Martin), the star of her Digital Editing class. I was not unhorrified to learn that Kate and Monica were, inasmuch as the mentor-student relationship permitted, “friends.” They went to the cinema together occasionally; once, they had even had drinks afterward. It would not even have been immodest, I gleaned, to suggest that Monica had helped to facilitate Kate’s gender transition. “She says you’re not very nice to her,” Monica added offhandedly. “As a rule, I’m not very nice to any of my students. Treating them coldly prevents them from trying to befriend me.” “What’s wrong with befriending a student?” I pulled a grimace. Was she really so oblivious to the deadly specter of sexual misconduct? “I don’t really like kids,” I said. “Or young adults. Whatever. I find them crass, trendy, and intellectually unreachable.” Monica laughed, as if I’d said something witty. “Still, you don’t have to treat them like lepers. Kate says you’re withholding—that you withhold praise.” It was true, of course. Never having been the recipient of praise in my life, I did not really understand how to go about heaping it upon others and only rarely felt inclined to do so. But I said nothing of the sort, as to go there with Monica would have risked tapping her endless reserves of pity. On the whole, I was a pitiful creature, it’s true—and never more so than in the shadow of Monica Barnes—but this in no way translated to deserving her pity, much less desiring it. Which begged the question: What did I want from her? It was difficult to formulate in words or mental projections. I pitied her, that much was clear. By the time our cheeses arrived, we’d drained one bottle of wine; we ordered a second. Monica seemed relaxed, in her element. For my part, I had no precise idea where I was or what I was doing there, I felt a bit like a beetle on its back, legs flailing in the air, roasting in the indifferent sun. I was sweating. It was the gin. I went completely silent, focusing on the food. Some of the substances arranged in a circle around the plate—garnished with pine nuts, sun-dried cranberries, and little ovular slices of firm Italian bread—were obviously cheese, while others were completely alien to me. There was one in particular that looked more like a fungus, with a ghastly (I want to describe it as pornographic) blue vein running up the center. The maître d’ had explained that this was normal, that the vein was in fact this particular cheese’s most “covetable” aspect; all the same, I left it alone. From the corner of my eye, I watched Monica intently as she ate. Her method of ingestion was the only thing that truly interested me about her. She pecked at the plate with affected hesitation, with an anxiety manufactured by unknowable (and perhaps unspeakable) desires, always waiting to go in for another bite until I had done so first, calculating her intake to match mine—as if she were not hungry, as if she did not require sustenance to go on living. I was not shocked; I’d been married. It’s true, most women eat this way around men—especially men for whom they harbor intimate designs—but in Monica’s case, the case of a woman for whom food was clearly a vice, the masquerade was doubly ridiculous. (I don’t think I’d ever passed her office during her allotted hours without spying a cupcake in her hand or an open, half-empty package of cookies on her desk.) Near the end of the second bottle of Orvieto, which we had drained nervously as if to anesthetize ourselves against some imminent torture, I detected a shift in the mood. Monica looked down at our plate and used a slice of bread to nudge a sun-dried cranberry toward the summit of a mound of goat cheese. She was done fucking around with me; it was time to get serious. “You never talk about yourself,” she observed. The subtext being, I suppose, that she wanted to know all about me. What was there to say? Those things that constituted the cornerstones of my existence were not exactly the kinds of things one talks about on a date, not a first date anyway. The past decade of my life essentially amounted to a haze of alcoholism, paranoid xenophobia, and depression, punctuated erratically by the odd fit of suicidal gloom. Did she want to know that I could not really sleep without first draining at least a pint of gin? Did she want to hear about the time I called out sick from work in order to waste the day masturbating for six hours straight, until the pain in my chest forced me to stop? I’d been in and out of therapy for years; I must have seen a dozen different shrinks—not one of whom even pretended to give a shit. And who could blame them? There’s no fixing people; the work belongs to Sisyphus. My problems were so mediocre, so banal, that to refer to them as “problems” was to flirt with hyperbole. For a while, at the behest of the last shrink, a woman (her femininity lent her the illusory sheen of compassion), I’d even resorted to keeping a journal—essentially a collection of sexual fantasies starring students or girls I’d lusted after in college or women I saw out in the street jogging, walking their dogs, waiting for the bus. . . . It was this therapist, a true-blue Freudian, who’d helped me to see that I was afraid of women, and that the catalyst for this fear had been my father. To be precise, my father’s girlfriends, mistresses, whores—whatever they were to him. Throughout my adolescence, I’d observed a revolving cast of damaged, trashy, used-up women who came to our apartment—sometimes two or three at a time—to drink and do drugs with my father and then fuck. He would allow me to hang out with them earlier in the evenings. I didn’t understand their behavior; it was frightening, the way these women fawned over me, the stink of booze on their breath as they groped me playfully, hideously. . . . Of course, this therapist was at great pains to pretend that my inane, sordid frustrations did not repulse her. I got the impression she believed I was making it all up: the night sweats, the day drinking, the noose that had dangled from my shower head for three or four years. . . . So, I was depressed—so what? Depression is everywhere, and generally no more distressing than acid reflux or an allergy to pollen; at certain times of the year, it flares up without warning or apparent cause, leading to obsessive suicide plots, at which point one can always obtain a prescription for tranquilizers and, as they say, ride it out. I shrugged at Monica, who was munching on a hard sliver of what the maître d’ had referred to as Campo de Montalbán. (All this incessant munching—so careful, so coquettish, so reminiscent of the manner in which a rabbit eats—was a bold lie. And if in Monica’s case the lie was doubly ridiculous, then in mine the stupidity was tripled: I wanted the whole plate inside of me.) “Why don’t we talk about you instead,” I said evasively. “How’s Boots?” Monica lit up, ecstatic at this small piece of evidence that I truly cared: that I’d remembered the name of her cat. “Boots is fine. I just bought her a new stuffed rat to play with. You can fill its belly with catnip. She goes crazy, batting it around for a couple of minutes—then she falls to the floor and drags herself in circles around the carpet until she falls asleep.” (She was giggling, demonstrating her cat’s antics with her hands, making them into little paws.) “Do you like animals?” she asked.