Writing, editing, design

I’ve reached another milestone in life. It was bound to happen. It’s a biological reality. Doesn’t make it any easier to take. I have been rendered invisible to young women.

Can’t say as I am handsome, never was, but at least women would take a look, check me out. Occasionally a few would even flirt with me, an act that does wonders for one’s ego. No more. Old men don’t have egos.

It’s not because I am married, either. I don’t always wear my wedding ring because it hurts me when I carry a briefcase, which is often. And anyway it never stopped them before.

Now, as I fade away — less hair and what I have is getting lighter and lighter — women tend to look through me. As if I weren’t there. I am a jogger, a customer, a fellow shopper whose cart is simply in their way. They look at the cart, but they don’t look at me.

I guess I have become seen as an asexual being. Trouble is that inside I still feel 23 or 33, certainly not 63. I look at women, even much younger women, no differently than I did in my salad days.

To them, however, I apparently don’t exist. This is the real inconvenient truth. I know I am not missing anything, but it would be nice to not be invisible.

The keyboard is mocking me again. All the words I need are right here, nearby, but my fingers can’t seem to find them. I mean, c’mon — all the letters and punctuation — they are all right here. I just sit and stare with the vain hope that maybe the keys will organize themselves into words. I am going to lie down on the couch again until it happens.

Has anyone else noticed that consonants, especially the T, seem to be disappearing? It’s as if we are breeding a group of American Cockney. Examples:

It’s not the Tennessee Titans (ti-tenz), they are the Ti-uhns. The second T is dropped. It’s impor-ant (and don’t get me started on “impordant”). It’s not Twit-ter, it’s Twit-er.  I am blanking out on the other examples I have heard recently, but you get the drift. The T seems to be the worst because it requires a little extra work with the tongue. Maybe it’s all those tongue studs….

Not only are we losing our ability to read at any great length and write accurately (my student journalists seem to think that close counts and gross factual errors are — meh….), we seem to be getting lazy in our spoken word as well. Can texting be ruining that, too?

UPDATE: I think the R is going away as well. More and more, I hear people say fo-ward instead of forward.

I have decided to move most of my design posts to my newspaper design site, News Design School. When I talk about design here, it will be more about how writing and design (and editing) work together to enhance communication.

I have a number of writing projects going right now, so stay tuned for the next post, coming soon.

Instead of trying to keep up with three — and sometimes four — blogs, I am now going to do all my posts here. Soon, I will move over all the posts from my general blog and my newspaper design blog. from News Design School.

As part of my re-focusing of my writing, editing and design work, I have decided to move more aggressively into videos and podcasts. Got a new mic and new tripod for camera.

I am backing out a bit on Twitter. Tiring of the crowds and spam. Complained in a tweet about all the p*rn and int3rn*t m*rket1ng (hey, why take a chance here???) “followers.” Immediately, I was hit with four tweets from IMers and two from young girls who wanted — to quote the Bard — to “make the beast with two backs” with me.

More soon.

What’s the difference between a writer and an artist — an artistic writer that is?

The artist doesn’t care about what the reader thinks. He is not writing for the reader — he is writing for himself. It’s rather like the argument I have made about art vs. design, which needs to be functional for the user, unlike art.

Those of us who write mostly non-fiction have to care about all sorts of things that the fiction writer/artist doesn’t have to consider.  Many people will disagree, I’m sure, but that’s how I see it.

People who write for others, and do so poorly, are hacks. I think I will work out a Writer Taxonomy, including the above categories and others as well. Watch for it soon.

I like to worry about odd things. These thoughts usually come to me in that crease between falling asleep and being asleep. Sometimes the damn things actually wake me up.

The latest was the difference between re-writing and editing. Can writers edit or do they only re-write? If an editor does a heavy-handed job, is it really a rewrite? When does it reach a point that an editor deserves a co-byline? Should editors even be allowed to edit that much?

I worked one summer as a copyeditor at a ski magazine. The editor had accepted a freelance article that was so badly written I had to take a heavy blue pencil (yes, it was that long ago) to it. The story was as much mine as the writer’s. We should have sent it back to the author.

As a writer, I always re-write — probably too much. But do I edit my own work?

I know it doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying about it.  I have to quit this post. The Muse just raised her head from the couch and inquired about proofreading.