Lives of Editors and Such

Deanna Hoak has a long, and entertaining, post today about trying to nail down one little fact during a copyediting job. I don't do exactly the same kind of thing she does, but I completely recognize that feeling of "there is a right answer to this question, somewhere, and, damn it, I am going to that answer and get this done!"

My somewhat similar experience today was in finally nailing down the title to the witchy omnibus -- Ellen Asher and I stared at a computer screen while I IMDB'd Cagney, Bogart, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson looking for suitably hard-boiled titles. After about half an hour of bouncing mangled movie monikers off of each other, we finally wandered over to a list of Raymond Chandler titles and got one we liked and which worked. (And which the author nixed about an hour later. But either she or her editor had other suggestions, one of which was fine with us.)