My First Job

A version of the following was originally published in Paste Magazine under the title "Lessons of a Publishing Industry Bottomfeeder."

Some people get an education that prepares them to be a captain of industry, or that sends them out to do important scientific work to cure world hunger or horrible disease. I got an English degree in Buffalo. At the time that I graduated, finding a job in Buffalo with an English degree led me, and many others, to a “book doctoring” firm, editing and critiquing the work of hopeful authors with money to burn, a word processor, and delusions of mediocrity. Starting at $5.50 an hour, how could I refuse the opportunity? That might not seem like much, but in Buffalo, you could live like a very poor king on such a salary.

The building that housed our office was an ideal workspace, located as it was next to the runways of the Buffalo airport. The thick faux wood paneling helped keep out the noise that couldn't be muffled by the Styrofoam drop ceilings. That might have intimidated some, but things were looking up a month after I was hired, when the staff of fifteen or so moved the entire office to a much bigger office – two doors down in the same building.

The job itself was truly a test of whether laughter could preserve sanity or whether it just drove you further into madness. I spent my days trying to meet my 600 pages a week plus one critique quota, reading the mostly hopeful drivel of people who believed the old adage that everyone has a book in them. Everyone also has an appendix in them, but most people are kind enough not to remove it and scare others by dangling it in front of them.

First of all, let me say that if you are an aspiring novelist who sent something to Buffalo to be edited, please stop reading here. If you don’t, the horrors described hereafter may drive the last atom of hope from your heart. But for me, I am nearly ten years gone from the job, and the wounds are still fresh.

There were books that were simply bad and formulaic, like the romance novels. Then there were the books that were bad in an almost entertaining way, like a seventy-five page story about the first years of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers that suddenly turned into a murder mystery with five pages left, or the sci-fi novel about the Canadian space program that helped repopulate the Earth. You see, the Earth was in such bad shape that they had to build a spacecraft in space, one that would take them to Alpha Centauri and back. Canadians, space, environmental concerns – all that and romance too! Well, someone had to be on the ship when it came back hundreds of years later.

Then there was the soul-sucking trash. One book I was forced to read was about four members of a gynecological office, three men and one woman, who go on a private boat ride. Two of the men and the women are then mesmerized into being taken advantage of by “Ralph’s tremendous penis” (a phrase that I believe actually appeared in the book. I once swore if I had time to get a band together ever again, I would name it “Ralph’s Tremendous Penis”). There were eight or nine hundred pages of frolicking in the stirrups, followed by another couple of hundred pages of revenge by the woman. The resolution involved local anesthetic and a surgical procedure that would have provided a wonderful transplant for some lucky recipient, had the results not been flushed down a drain. That, as I have described it to you, was a week and a half of my life that I will never see again.

Every day, someone in the office bore witness to genuine, breathtaking stupidity. Often they would stand up from a manuscript, their eyes wide, shaking like they had just been given terrible, secret news and walk out laughing madly. One editor was knocked out of commission for nearly an hour by the misspelling, “Carnage Hall”. He would reflect on this often, laughing and muttering it under his breath, “Carnage Hall. Carnage Hall”.

We often felt like veterans of foreign wars, sometimes easing the pain of our common experience with a lunch time bitching session at Burger King, or pondering the shape of the Arby’s logo (which, thanks to my friend Jay, I can never look at the same way again). If Steven Spielberg ever makes a movie about us, it will start with our boss wheeling out manuscripts to thirty people, telling them each we’re desperately behind, and handing them what looks like the unsorted evidence presented to the Warren Commission.

There was an endless supply of stuff to read. In the back was a dreaded room stacked high with manuscripts, and when you finished one, you’d go back for another. Sometimes our boss would take pity on us. If we’d just read a thousand-page steamer, we’d be given one of the short, afore-mentioned formulaic romance novels. They were bad, but were a relief in that they had no aspirations beyond providing the page count necessary to some day prop up impossibly creamy airbrushed forms in period costumes rolling in hay.

Even given all of that, the worst thing about the job was writing the critique. There, we had to be diplomatic. After shredding the work of a clueless author, sometimes reading the most offensive passages aloud to our co-workers, we then had to sit down and tell them how to make the work better. “Burn it” was a popular thought, never written down. “Please get laid soon”, “Try reading other books and comparing them to yours”, and offers to pay for medication were also popular dream responses. But in the end, we had to roll up our sleeves and find a way to “polish a turd,” as the phrase goes.

To be fair, I’m sure I steered my share of people in the wrong direction. It was like the literary “Wonder Years” – I was fumbling through right and wrong in my first job out of college, critiquing the life’s work of a probable shut-in after one day on the job. I’d like to think I got it right most of the time, and it didn’t take the strongest of editors to realize the service was the equivalent of fantasy camp for people who have always just known they could write a book. But the plain truth is, they didn’t just dream, they got of their butts and turned their dreams into honest-to-goodness nightmares. That’s more than I’ve done with my book ideas to date.

I hope that all of the authors of the hundred or so books I read (but who could count?) in my time as a book doctor will have moved on. They will have gone back to their jobs, some of them quite successful, others at doing something that keeps them away from a word processor. And if perchance I ever see a novel on the shelves about Canadians in space or Ralph’s tremendous penis, I can smile to myself and think, maybe I had something to do with that.