This is the first Sunday I’ve had completely, blissfully, unencumberedly free in weeks, largely because I’ve been editing an incomprehensible goddamned survival manual on a freelance basis and I completely underestimated the work and brutally blew my deadline and I’ve been dicking around with it in every spare moment for almost a month and on Friday I was finally done. Or as done as I’m going to get.
The survival guides on this page, by the way, are not the survival guide I was editing. I don’t even know that book’s title or the author’s full name, and if I did I wouldn’t say it here. These books are for illustrative purposes, and the fact that I had two survival guides on my bookshelves (not that I’ve done more than skim them) is part of a display of general familiarity with the subject matter that got me the $25/hr. assignment, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
(This army manual above is cool. I broke a general rule about titles published by Barnes & Noble (this is only a sticker after all) because I like the mud splatter. That’s not design. That’s real mud. I hope it’s mud. The one on the right is more or less definitive. I should probably put one of them in the truck. You know, in case the truck and I have to parachute out of a crashing plane in the Himalayas or something. The other one’s fine right where it is. In the bathroom.)
I don’t know why anyone’s doing a new survival guide, there are dozens already out there, but the general gist I gathered from the totally inadequate instructions I was given was that this was a little on the Survival-for-Dummies side of the street.
I think people like these, and all the cable shows dedicated to the same topic, in direct proportion to the ever-more-vanishing possibility that they’ll ever find themselves truly, badly, threateningly lost. You can still do it, all right, but increasingly, you have to try. I personally have never been in a genuine survival situation. If ever I find myself in such, I’d rather rely on a gun and a single bullet than have to try to make sense of the raw copy I just spent three weeks trying to untangle.
My author is some former Special Forces dude who must have skipped the boot camp session where they diagrammed sentences. My job, which I was dumb enough to take on, was to organize the contents into some sort of semi-logical cohesion, apply house styles to the document, polish up the language and excise repetitions. Pointing out logical fallacies and red-flagging factual discrepancies and TKing just plain bad advice were not among my specified duties, but I took them on anyway, because one can hardly help it.
Other stuff just stumped me. Dig this:
AND at 180 degrees behind the UK, out in the middle of the pacific, is where the INTERNATIONAL DATELINE occurs. That is where one day becomes a new day first. So, it is chopped in half and each half gets a letter M & Y, so that means 1 letter of our 26 letter alphabet is not used, the letter “J”, since it was not common in many languages. That means we have 24 hours, 24 time zones, 1 letter left out and 1 zone gets 2 letters. All this comes into play when we look at the rest of LAT/LONG.
You follow? Try this:
This is applied basic trigonometry (or geometry for purists) – but this is the triangle formed from one eye down your arm to the point, then the short base line distance over from the eye change, then the distance back to you forms a triangle, so, this is how to apply it. Multiply that known size, by the amount of itself that it moved over by the eye/arm ratio of 10.
Granted, you’re losing something via lack of context, but trust me: You’re not missing much. I’d say 9 out of 10 sentences needed rewriting. Two chapters of this were mine, about 32,000 words.
I almost didn’t survive it. Heh. But it’s a hell of a lot better now. And I can pay for my new bike.
I’m available for freelance editing jobs, by the way. And I promise not to name you or your book on my blog.
One of the saddest results of the Patriot Act (at least, I’m guessing it played a role) was the demise of Loompanics Press, which billed itself as “the lunatic fringe of the 1st Amendment” and had any number of survival manuals among their offerings, along with lots of other weird stuff. My favorite Loompanics offering was “The Wild and Free Cookbook” written by a former Green Beret survival instructor. It was an excellent guide to wild-plant foraging and had some excellent game recipies, including the chapter on road-kill guidelines. The author didn’t advocate eating critters that had actually been run over, but if the car just bumped into it and knocked it over to the side of the road a few minutes before you came along…. one of the best guniea-fowl recipies I’ve tried.
Actually, there’s precedent for this in my life – my dad was the town butcher in a small Missouri town. It was the custom when Bubba bumped into Bambi with his pickumup coming home at night from Spud’s Potato Patch that Bubba would first bleed the deer out and then call the game warden, who would then wake my dad up in the middle of the night to butcher a deer for the geezers at the county old folk’s home.
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