Life as a book coach

The gardens are heaps of brown damp earth edged by neatly trimmed lawns. The daffodils are finished for the year. Our garlic is up, and almost ready to pick. Spring-cleaning is almost done, except the garage.

Prince, Honee, Thumbelina, Clara, and Ducky, our hairless dogs love the spring because they can spend the afternoon outside without a coat, and without walking in dew-dampened grass.

Except for the fact that my office is still cold in the early morning hours, life is comfortable. It makes editing easier. Not that it is a hard task, but it is emotionally stressful. I am working on a book right now. It is a good one, but the author is new. There are so many mistakes the author should have found herself. Even mistakes grammar check would have found 'if' she knew how to set its features properly.

I find this part so frustrating. Protocol demands that I remain detached and professional, only marking grammar, formatting, punctuation, and prose errors, reconstructing paragraphs to improve the flow, and encouraging the writer to use stronger words, and vivid images.

Once again, I am faced with the challenge of explaining why you cannot tell a story, but must create a sequence of images, which the reader can see in their mind.All, without discouraging the writer, giving them writer's block, or making them trash the project all together.It is so hard to make writers see that a book must be marketable. If a bookstore does not buy their book, they loose. Writers never consider the bookstore as the focal point of their career. True, it is more likely to sell a self published book on the web, or at public engagements, but every authors dream is to land a space on a bookstore shelf. Even so, they do not want to write something the bookstore wants.

This, is why editing and working as a book coach is stressful. I would not suggest this career to anyone. Each writer considers their career is in your hands, and in a way it is. If you try to be a nice person, become their friend, and make them happy, they may be repeat customers. You may land their contracts for three, and even four unpublished books, but sooner or later a point will come where you must act as a professional - or the author believes their efforts are wasted, they are not talented, and quits.

That is why editors and book coaches watch the meanings of words change, hyphenated words become unhyphenated – to suit the new web language and amuse the elusive but all-powerful search engines. We learn how to explain, tactfully, why the academic grammar taught in university will not serve a fiction author well. We debate whether to write as people think, even if it means the occasional split infinitive. And, we celebrate our friends and clients achievements, when our own writing career suffers while we journey down the path we chose, eyes wide, never understanding why it gives us so much joy.

So, to clear my head, I spent yesterday afternoon over turning the garden. A garden is constant. As long as it is watered and weeded, the wild jack-in-the-pulpits will come up along the back. The row of daffodils break out in time to announce spring's arrival, and the ground cover will creep through the rock border within the next two weeks.I know that if I leave some garlic in the ground, I will harvest fresh garlic next year.

I know the dogs will try to eat the onions. And, the rabbits always eat the greens.

One afternoon soon we will go out as a family and plant beans. My daughter tosses her trowel aside and digs in the dirt with bare hands, animated over the sprouts and delighted in the smell of earth and fresh air. My son will dig the garden too big, ambition overtaking common sense. My husband will tack dozens of little sticks in the ground, winding thin white string between them, in the hopes that this year’s garden will look as orderly and productive as the neighbors always appears. Of course, they do not have dogs and children. What hope does a garden have when a litter of puppies discovers the wonders of grass, bugs, and fallen leaves?

Still, even though I have lived through more than forty springs, I cannot deny that I stand in awe of our earth's ability to re-create its birth each spring.