Substantive editing sample 30:
The landing time

In this novel, not only did I need to check the location of an airport, contest illogical or self-contradictory phrases, correct a dangling modifier, and address questionable word choices, I also needed to repair one particular time incongruity in the plot (the time when the plane landed). You can see (in BLUE BOLDFACE ALL CAPS) how the author addressed my queries and comments in the markup.

Note that the author preferred to italicize many words and phrases I would have left without italics; he insisted this was his stylistic choice, reminiscent of the works of authors Michel Houellebecq and Thomas Bernhard. He also wanted “Sun” and “Earth” capitalized. Naturally, I deferred to his firm preferences.

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.

It was almost 3 p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport in Hartford Airport. The cold was unreal. Struck in the face by a frigid gale as soon as I stepped out to look for somewhere to rent a car, I had to wonder if the Sun had expired at some point mid-transit, leaving the Earth a spherical ice sculpture. Desert living had thinned my blood so severely that I feared any prolonged exposure to these 30° Fahrenheit conditions would stop my heart. From the blessed warmth inside the rental office, the world looked truly frozen, entombed beneath a high, blank, birdless sky. There was a bit of trouble with the car rental: I could not tell the clerk how long I intended to keep the vehicle. When he asked, I went blank, momentarily unable to remember where I was or what I was doing there. From his point of view, it must have looked like an early-onset senior moment. “Two days?” I said, lifting my hands in a gesture of helplessness. He deployed a reassuring smile and informed me that if I needed to keep the car longer they could always charge the extra days to my card. He was a savvy customer servant, this boy. Still, as I left with the keys to my compact model I felt no more confident in my plan. In a daze, I merged onto I-91 heading south. Although I had not lived any part of my life in Connecticut, the first sight of deciduous trees filled me with a sensation which seemed to coincide with what people mean when they speak of a homecoming. the next chapter, several pages later I stood at the window, zoning out on the choppy, brownish-gray expanse of Long Island Sound until my legs fell asleep, and then I decided to settle in, which only really consisted of pouring the contents of my single bag onto the bed and plugging in the laptop. I set the computer on the small desk in the corner. If I was going to get anything done, it would be here, where the quietude was attenuated only by the lazy hum of traffic along the quaint main street below, and occasionally broken by the tolling of a bell from the docks. According to the final message from Dresden, her mother’s wake was scheduled for the 23rd, at 4 p.m. So, I had roughly twenty-four hours to figure out if I had really come to Connecticut with the intention of attending the wake or if I was merely acting out. In the meantime, I thought I should get down to brass tacks on all this Kaurismäki business—I owed him that much, at least. Sitting at the computer, facing the window, I tried to empty my mind, to meditate on the obscure transfiguration of low-hanging clouds over the bay. I discovered Kaurismäki in the same year I met Dresden’s mother. (The two events coincide so closely that it is little wonder now that they’ve become causally linked in my understanding, however faulty, however incomplete, of my life thus far.) At the time, I was more or less finished with cinema; I was twenty-one years old. I’d spent too long delving into the pessimistic early works of Catherine Breillat, which are concerned with the transgressive opportunities available to bourgeois adolescents, and the pessimistic later works of Ingmar Bergman, which are concerned with only the void. I had put in a mere two weeks at a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, and since dropping out had remained only intermittently employed. Rather than submit to formal education, I’d decided to live the life of the young bohemian intellectual. Which, in my case, meant collecting food stamps while I spent my days reading for free in bookstores and my nights sequestered in a Section Eight apartment, suffering through books I’d taken out from the library: dry, old, difficult books I was at pains to understand; books one really only reads to expand one’s vocabulary; by Nietzsche, Cioran, Bataille—writers whose reputations were far more appealing to me than anything specific they had to say. I tried to abandon myself to literature, to throw out the TV (symbolically, at least) and be a pupil, a puppet, for genius dead men of letters. In truth, I rarely managed to finish any of these books. It was probably only through film, by nature a much more osmotic medium, that I managed to grasp the ideas of these thinkers; that is, vicariously, through the works of others who had already grasped them. I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not stumbled upon Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy—the pinnacle of film comedy. After flensing myself for so many years with the work of misanthropes, depressives and shock artists, Kaurismäki was a revelation: a way back from the brink of nihilism. Not all the way back, mind you. And not that Kaurismäki’s work lacks nihilism. The fact is that his worldview, at least as presented by the Proletariat Trilogy, is more gently nihilistic: subtler, more nuanced, more utilitarian in its pessimism.

Markup
Click to go to the author’s review.

It was almost 3 p.m. almost three p.m. [I will have a comment about this time in the next chapter] when we landed at Bradley International Airport in Hartford Airport near Hartford. [Bradley International is in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, halfway between Springfield, Massachusetts, and Hartford (changing “near” to “just north” is an alternative).] The cold was unreal. Struck in the face by a frigid gale as soon as I stepped out to look for somewhere to rent a car, I had to wonder if the Sun had expired at some point mid-transit, leaving the Earth a spherical ice sculpture. [Evocative image, but it would still be Sun-generated daylight at three p.m. in late December (maybe the Earth had moved to a more remote orbit?). When narrator Gordon arrived in Arizona for the first time, he “was certain that the Earth had somehow moved closer to the Sun” (chapter 12), so this would be the opposite.] Desert living had thinned my blood so severely that I feared any prolonged exposure to these 30° Fahrenheit these thirty-degree-Fahrenheit conditions would stop my heart. From the blessed warmth inside the rental office, the world looked world outside the window looked [insertion of “outside the window” okay?] truly frozen, entombed beneath a high, blank, birdless sky. [I broke the paragraph here] There was a bit of trouble with the car rental: I could not tell the clerk how long I intended to keep the vehicle. When he asked, I went blank, momentarily unable to remember where I was or what I was doing there. From his point of view, it must have looked like an early-onset senior moment. “Two days?” I said, [consider changing “said” to “offered” “proposed” (to justify the question mark and the “gesture of helplessness”)] lifting my hands in a gesture of helplessness. He deployed a reassuring smile and informed me that if I needed to keep the car longer they longer, they could always charge the extra days to my card. He was a savvy customer servant, this boy. Still, as I left with the keys to my compact model I model, I felt no more confident in my plan. In a daze, I merged onto I-91 heading I-91, heading south. Although I had not lived any part of my life in Connecticut, the first sight of [insert “bare” here?] deciduous trees filled me with a sensation which seemed sensation that seemed to coincide with what people mean when they speak of a homecoming. the next chapter, several pages later I stood at the window, zoning out on the choppy, brownish-gray expanse of Long Island Sound until my legs fell asleep, and then I decided to settle in, which only really consisted of pouring the contents of my single bag onto the bed and plugging in the laptop. I set the computer on the small desk in the corner. If I was going I were going to get anything done, it would be here, where the quietude was attenuated only by the lazy hum of traffic along the quaint main street below, and below and occasionally broken by the tolling of a bell from the docks. According to the final message from Dresden, her mother’s wake was scheduled for the 23rd, at 4 p.m. the twenty-third at four p.m. So, I had roughly twenty-four hours [so, it is about four p.m. on December 22? But the plane landed at Bradley (at Windsor Locks, north of Hartford) at almost three p.m.: “It was almost three p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport near Hartford” (the preceding chapter), after which Gordon needed to rent a car and drive south to “Oldport” in southeastern Connecticut on the shore of Long Island Sound (let's assume that the fictional Oldport is between New London and Stonington; in the best driving conditions, it would take one hour and twenty minutes to get to his hotel on the waterfront); then he needed to check in and gaze out the window “until my legs fell asleep” before finally deciding to “settle in”—I recommend having Gordon reach Bradley International earlier than three p.m. The flight from Phoenix to Bradley is five hours; couldn't his flight have left Phoenix at about nine a.m., so that he would arrive at Bradley at two p.m. and would “settle in” at, say, about four p.m.? So that “I had roughly twenty-four hours” would be accurate (let me know and in the second pass, I will make the necessary change of “It was almost three p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport near Hartford” in the preceding chapter to “It was almost two p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport near Hartford”)] to figure out if I had really come to Connecticut with the intention of attending the wake or if I was merely acting out. In the meantime, I thought I should get down to brass tacks on all this Kaurismäki business—I owed him that much, at least. Sitting at the computer, facing the window, I tried to empty my mind, to meditate on the obscure transfiguration of low-hanging clouds over the bay. [I broke the paragraph here] I discovered I had discovered Kaurismäki in the same year I met Dresden’s mother. (The two events coincide so closely that it is little wonder now that they’ve become causally linked in my understanding, however faulty, however incomplete, of my life thus far.) At the time, I was more or less finished with cinema; I was twenty-one years old. I’d spent too long delving into the pessimistic early works of Catherine Breillat, which are concerned with the transgressive opportunities available to bourgeois adolescents, and the pessimistic later works of Ingmar Bergman, which are concerned with only the concerned only with the void. I had put in a mere two weeks at a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, and since dropping out had Massachusetts and, since dropping out, had remained only intermittently employed. Rather than submit to formal education, I’d decided to live the life of the young bohemian intellectual. Which, in my case, meant collecting food stamps while I spent my days reading for free in bookstores and my nights sequestered in a Section Eight apartment Section 8 apartment, suffering through books I’d taken out from the library: dry, old, difficult books I was at pains to understand; books one really only reads to really reads only to expand one’s vocabulary; by vocabulary; books by Nietzsche, Cioran, Bataille—writers whose reputations were far more appealing to me than anything specific they had to say. I tried to abandon myself to literature, to throw out the TV (symbolically, at least) and be a pupil, a puppet, for genius dead men of letters. [I broke the paragraph here] In truth, I rarely managed to finish any of these books. It was probably only through film, by nature a film—by nature, a much more osmotic medium, that medium—that I managed to grasp the ideas of these thinkers; that thinkers (that is, vicariously, through the works of others who had already grasped them. grasped them). I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not stumbled upon Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy—the pinnacle of film comedy. After flensing myself After I had flensed myself for so many years with the work of misanthropes, depressives and depressives, and shock artists, Kaurismäki was a revelation: a way back from the brink of nihilism. [“After I had flensed myself” is a repair of a dangling modifier, to prevent the syntactic misreading that not only was Kaurismäki a “revelation” and a “way back from the brink of nihilism” but that he had somehow (absurdly) done the “flensing”] Not all the way back, mind you. And not that Kaurismäki’s work lacks nihilism. The fact is that his worldview, at least as presented by the Proletariat Trilogy, is more gently nihilistic: subtler, more nuanced, more utilitarian in its pessimism.

The Author’s Review
in BLUE BOLDFACE ALL CAPS
Click to go to the second-pass result.

It was almost 3 p.m. almost three p.m. [I will have a comment about this time in the next chapter] when we landed at Bradley International Airport in Hartford Airport near Hartford. [Bradley International is in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, halfway between Springfield, Massachusetts, and Hartford (changing “near” to “just north” is an alternative).] "JUST NORTH OF" IS FINE, ALTHOUGH JUST TO PROVE I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT, I'M FROM CONNECTICUT AND NO ONE THERE WOULD THINK OF THE AIRPORT AS BEING "NEAR SPRINGFIELD," BUT IT IS DEFINITELY, IN THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS, "NEAR HARTFORD" The cold was unreal. Struck in the face by a frigid gale as soon as I stepped out to look for somewhere to rent a car, I had to wonder if the Sun had expired at some point mid-transit, leaving the Earth a spherical ice sculpture. [Evocative image, but it would still be Sun-generated daylight at three p.m. in late December (maybe the Earth had moved to a more remote orbit?). When narrator Gordon arrived in Arizona for the first time, he “was certain that the Earth had somehow moved closer to the Sun” (chapter 12), so this would be the opposite.] CHANGE TO "I HAD TO WONDER IF THE SUN WERE DYING AND THE EARTH TURNING TO ICE." Desert living had thinned my blood so severely that I feared any prolonged exposure to these 30° Fahrenheit these thirty-degree-Fahrenheit conditions would stop my heart. From the blessed warmth inside the rental office, the world looked world outside the window looked [insertion of “outside the window” okay?] YES truly frozen, entombed beneath a high, blank, birdless sky. [I broke the paragraph here] There was a bit of trouble with the car rental: I could not tell the clerk how long I intended to keep the vehicle. When he asked, I went blank, momentarily unable to remember where I was or what I was doing there. From his point of view, it must have looked like an early-onset senior moment. “Two days?” I said, [consider changing “said” to “offered” “proposed” (to justify the question mark and the “gesture of helplessness”)] CHANGE TO "GUESSED" lifting my hands in a gesture of helplessness. He deployed a reassuring smile and informed me that if I needed to keep the car longer they longer, they could always charge the extra days to my card. He was a savvy customer servant, this boy. Still, as I left with the keys to my compact model I model, I felt no more confident in my plan. In a daze, I merged onto I-91 heading I-91, heading south. Although I had not lived any part of my life in Connecticut, the first sight of [insert “bare” here? OK] deciduous trees filled me with a sensation which seemed sensation that seemed to coincide with what people mean when they speak of a homecoming. the next chapter, several pages later I stood at the window, zoning out on the choppy, brownish-gray expanse of Long Island Sound until my legs fell asleep, and then I decided to settle in, which only really consisted of pouring the contents of my single bag onto the bed and plugging in the laptop. I set the computer on the small desk in the corner. If I was going I were going to get anything done, it would be here, where the quietude was attenuated only by the lazy hum of traffic along the quaint main street below, and below and occasionally broken by the tolling of a bell from the docks. According to the final message from Dresden, her mother’s wake was scheduled for the 23rd, at 4 p.m. the twenty-third at four p.m. So, I had roughly twenty-four hours [so, it is about four p.m. on December 22? But the plane landed at Bradley (at Windsor Locks, north of Hartford) at almost three p.m.: “It was almost three p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport near Hartford” (the preceding chapter), after which Gordon needed to rent a car and drive south to “Oldport” in southeastern Connecticut on the shore of Long Island Sound (let's assume that the fictional Oldport is between New London and Stonington; in the best driving conditions, it would take one hour and twenty minutes to get to his hotel on the waterfront); then he needed to check in and gaze out the window “until my legs fell asleep” before finally deciding to “settle in”—I recommend having Gordon reach Bradley International earlier than three p.m. The flight from Phoenix to Bradley is five hours; couldn't his flight have left Phoenix at about nine a.m., so that he would arrive at Bradley at two p.m. and would “settle in” at, say, about four p.m.? So that “I had roughly twenty-four hours” would be accurate (let me know and in the second pass, I will make the necessary change of “It was almost three p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport near Hartford” in the preceding chapter to “It was almost two p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport near Hartford”)] "TWO P.M." IS FINE to figure out if I had really come to Connecticut with the intention of attending the wake or if I was merely acting out. In the meantime, I thought I should get down to brass tacks on all this Kaurismäki business—I owed him that much, at least. Sitting at the computer, facing the window, I tried to empty my mind, to meditate on the obscure transfiguration of low-hanging clouds over the bay. [I broke the paragraph here] I discovered I had discovered Kaurismäki in the same year I met Dresden’s mother. (The two events coincide so closely that it is little wonder now that they’ve become causally linked in my understanding, however faulty, however incomplete, of my life thus far.) At the time, I was more or less finished with cinema; I was twenty-one years old. I’d spent too long delving into the pessimistic early works of Catherine Breillat, which are concerned with the transgressive opportunities available to bourgeois adolescents, and the pessimistic later works of Ingmar Bergman, which are concerned with only the concerned only with the void. I had put in a mere two weeks at a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts, and since dropping out had Massachusetts and, since dropping out, had remained only intermittently employed. Rather than submit to formal education, I’d decided to live the life of the young bohemian intellectual. Which, in my case, meant collecting food stamps while I spent my days reading for free in bookstores and my nights sequestered in a Section Eight apartment Section 8 apartment, suffering through books I’d taken out from the library: dry, old, difficult books I was at pains to understand; books one really only reads to really reads only to expand one’s vocabulary; by vocabulary; books by Nietzsche, Cioran, Bataille—writers whose reputations were far more appealing to me than anything specific they had to say. I tried to abandon myself to literature, to throw out the TV (symbolically, at least) and be a pupil, a puppet, for genius dead men of letters. [I broke the paragraph here] In truth, I rarely managed to finish any of these books. It was probably only through film, by nature a film—by nature, a much more osmotic medium, that medium—that I managed to grasp the ideas of these thinkers; that thinkers (that is, vicariously, through the works of others who had already grasped them. grasped them). I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not stumbled upon Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy—the pinnacle of film comedy. After flensing myself After I had flensed myself for so many years with the work of misanthropes, depressives and depressives, and shock artists, Kaurismäki was a revelation: a way back from the brink of nihilism. [“After I had flensed myself” is a repair of a dangling modifier, to prevent the syntactic misreading that not only was Kaurismäki a “revelation” and a “way back from the brink of nihilism” but that he had somehow (absurdly) done the “flensing”] OKAY Not all the way back, mind you. And not that Kaurismäki’s work lacks nihilism. The fact is that his worldview, at least as presented by the Proletariat Trilogy, is more gently nihilistic: subtler, more nuanced, more utilitarian in its pessimism.

The Second-Pass Result
Click to go to the next sample in the series.

It was almost two p.m. when we landed at Bradley International Airport, just north of Hartford. The cold was unreal. Struck in the face by a frigid gale as soon as I stepped out to look for somewhere to rent a car, I had to wonder if the Sun were dying and the Earth turning to ice. Desert living had thinned my blood so severely that I feared any prolonged exposure to these thirty-degree-Fahrenheit conditions would stop my heart. From the blessed warmth inside the rental office, the world outside the window looked truly frozen, entombed beneath a high, blank, birdless sky. There was a bit of trouble with the car rental: I could not tell the clerk how long I intended to keep the vehicle. When he asked, I went blank, momentarily unable to remember where I was or what I was doing there. From his point of view, it must have looked like an early-onset senior moment. “Two days?” I guessed, lifting my hands in a gesture of helplessness. He deployed a reassuring smile and informed me that if I needed to keep the car longer, they could always charge the extra days to my card. He was a savvy customer servant, this boy. Still, as I left with the keys to my compact model, I felt no more confident in my plan. In a daze, I merged onto I-91, heading south. Although I had not lived any part of my life in Connecticut, the first sight of bare deciduous trees filled me with a sensation that seemed to coincide with what people mean when they speak of a homecoming. the next chapter, several pages later I stood at the window, zoning out on the choppy, brownish-gray expanse of Long Island Sound until my legs fell asleep, and then I decided to settle in, which only really consisted of pouring the contents of my single bag onto the bed and plugging in the laptop. I set the computer on the small desk in the corner. If I were going to get anything done, it would be here, where the quietude was attenuated only by the lazy hum of traffic along the quaint main street below and occasionally broken by the tolling of a bell from the docks. According to the final message from Dresden, her mother’s wake was scheduled for the twenty-third at four p.m. So, I had roughly twenty-four hours to figure out if I had really come to Connecticut with the intention of attending the wake or if I was merely acting out. In the meantime, I thought I should get down to brass tacks on all this Kaurismäki business—I owed him that much, at least. Sitting at the computer, facing the window, I tried to empty my mind, to meditate on the obscure transfiguration of low-hanging clouds over the bay. I had discovered Kaurismäki in the same year I met Dresden’s mother. (The two events coincide so closely that it is little wonder now that they’ve become causally linked in my understanding, however faulty, however incomplete, of my life thus far.) At the time, I was more or less finished with cinema; I was twenty-one years old. I’d spent too long delving into the pessimistic early works of Catherine Breillat, which are concerned with the transgressive opportunities available to bourgeois adolescents, and the pessimistic later works of Ingmar Bergman, which are concerned only with the void. I had put in a mere two weeks at a liberal arts college in western Massachusetts and, since dropping out, had remained only intermittently employed. Rather than submit to formal education, I’d decided to live the life of the young bohemian intellectual. Which, in my case, meant collecting food stamps while I spent my days reading for free in bookstores and my nights sequestered in a Section 8 apartment, suffering through books I’d taken out from the library: dry, old, difficult books I was at pains to understand; books one really reads only to expand one’s vocabulary; books by Nietzsche, Cioran, Bataille—writers whose reputations were far more appealing to me than anything specific they had to say. I tried to abandon myself to literature, to throw out the TV (symbolically, at least) and be a pupil, a puppet, for genius dead men of letters. In truth, I rarely managed to finish any of these books. It was probably only through film—by nature, a much more osmotic medium—that I managed to grasp the ideas of these thinkers (that is, vicariously, through the works of others who had already grasped them). I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not stumbled upon Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy—the pinnacle of film comedy. After I had flensed myself for so many years with the work of misanthropes, depressives, and shock artists, Kaurismäki was a revelation: a way back from the brink of nihilism. Not all the way back, mind you. And not that Kaurismäki’s work lacks nihilism. The fact is that his worldview, at least as presented by the Proletariat Trilogy, is more gently nihilistic: subtler, more nuanced, more utilitarian in its pessimism.