{"id":4004,"date":"2015-09-16T09:54:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T14:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/?p=4004"},"modified":"2015-09-16T09:54:48","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T14:54:48","slug":"revenge-of-the-imaginary-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2015\/09\/16\/revenge-of-the-imaginary-editor\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenge of the imaginary editor"},"content":{"rendered":"<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx3\/blog\/imaginary_editor_similar_names.jpg\" alt=\"The imaginary editor an similar words\" width=\"501\" height=\"652\" class=\"img_wide_open\">\n\n<p>First things first: my imaginary editor is armed again. It&#8217;s a development I can&#8217;t ignore.<\/p>\n<p>If you haven&#8217;t met this evil twin of my actual, non-imaginary editor, try looking <a href=\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/category\/imaginary-editor\/?order=asc\">here<\/a>. No promises, but it might help. <\/p>\n<p>Second things second: my imaginary editor has raised an important point. One has to be careful with words, and especially with names. The fact is that on my second pass through <em>Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom<\/em> I saw that I&#8217;d given the same first name to two different secondary characters. In each case, that name had seemed <em>perfect<\/em>. But those duplicate names would have stood out in a way that certainly didn&#8217;t serve the book; so one of them had to become Evelyn. It wasn&#8217;t a fate worse than death, or anything.<\/p>\n<p>Things are even more confusing in the case we see here. A Kiwi is a Kiwi is a Kiwi, but if two or more<em> kinds <\/em>of Kiwi appear together you ought to have a good reason for it; and you should make it clear which one is which, unless confusion is the <em>actual point<\/em>. Example: if three Kiwis walk into a bar and one of them explodes, it should normally be clear whether that was the fruit, the bird, or the New Zealander.<\/p>\n<p>All of this is pretty obvious. So in a scene where I blew up one of three otherwise non-flammable Kiwis I should expect that the reader might be confused.<\/p>\n<p>Third things third: I haven&#8217;t done that. There is no scene in <em>Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom<\/em> in which a Kiwi explodes. The reason I know that, even without looking, is that <em>there are no Kiwis in my book<\/em>. Not a bird, not a fruit, and not a New Zealander. They just aren&#8217;t there. Baboon? Yes. Something sort of like a squid? Yes. Kiwi? No.<\/p>\n<p>This seems to confirm what I&#8217;ve suspected for several weeks now. <em>My imaginary editor is editing an imaginary book<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what to do about it. For the past six weeks I&#8217;ve been doing my best to act on these editor notes, and now I discover that they&#8217;re <em>not even for my book<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I guess I have an obligation to look for the imaginary author who <em>should <\/em>have been getting these notes. Somewhere there&#8217;s an imaginary contract whose delivery dates depend on these changes. I just don&#8217;t know where to start.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe in New Zealand.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My imaginary editor has raised an important point. One has to be careful with words, and especially with names.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-imaginary-editor"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}