JULIA PETRAKIS
- Guest Editor -
G'day guys,
Today I welcome an editor with a wealth of experience - Julia Petrakis. Julia has over 20 years of experience indexing for major commercial and academic publishing houses. She has also been a great supporter and activist for self-published authors - co-founder of www.indiePENdents.org
Welcome, Julia ...
TELL US A LITTLE
ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR BOOK-EDITING JOURNEY.
I am a 77-year-old widow and
mother of two 50-ish college educators and two over-21 granddaughters. My journey down life’s lane began when I
graduated from Harvard College with a major in biochemistry and a “minor”
(Harvard didn’t really have minors in those days) in English lit. For some 30 years, I jumped from lower-level
job to lower-level job: lab glassware
washer, clerical worker, secretary, and court reporter. Then in the 1980s, three things
happened: I divorced my first husband,
met my second husband-to-be, and became acquainted with the home computer. Computers, I said, are going to be the wave
of the future; it’s one wave, I am going to ride; and I bought my first
computer for $2,000 out of an Iranian’s apartment in Rosslyn, Virginia: a Columbia MC with 64 K of RAM and two floppy
disc drives.
My first interest was in on-line
research and I started up my own company, Facts OnLine, doing just that. Some years later, my by-then second husband
(a PhD in biochemistry but also a medical writer and editor) asked me one day
to take a back-of-the-book indexing job he didn’t want. “I can’t do that,” I said. “Sure, you can. Pick out words that are interesting, put page
numbers after them, and then arrange them in alphabetical order.” Well, of course, it’s not quite that simple,
but it was a beginning and I have been doing it ever since.
As the indexer, who is the
last-in-line in the publishing process, I also began to do quite a bit of minor
copyediting, telling my publisher what I found that hadn’t yet been fixed. My son, then a professor at American
University in Washington, DC asked me to copy edit as well as index his first
book and then his second book. And then
a friend of his asked me. So it went
until one day on a LinkedIn discussion board, writer Jasha Levi threw out some
off-the-cuff remark, I answered with an equally off-the-cuff remark, and very
shortly thereafter, I had suggested that I first edit some remarks he was
preparing for a conference and then that I edit a book that he should write,
expanding on the themes of the remarks.
And so he did and so I did. As a
result of working on Jasha Levi’s book, I learned about self-publishing and put
his book out first on LuLu.com and then on CreateSpace and as a Kindle.
I now continue to do
back-of-the-book indexing for academics and the Brookings Institution. I am a writing mentor in the Writing Center
of A.T. Still University. I edit occasionally for individual academic scholars.
WERE YOU A GOOD
READER AS A KID?
I guess so if precocious is
good. My only pertinent memory is of
starting a book report/presentation on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to the entire 8th grade class. Within seconds, I was told to sit down. The book was apparently not appropriate for
8th-grade girls. Of course, at the time,
I hadn’t understood most of the book or the reasons it wasn’t appropriate.
WHAT DO YOU
ENJOY MOST ABOUT BEING AN EDITOR?
I love taking awkward, poorly
written sentences and making them shine and at the same time, keeping the
author’s story and voice.
WHAT IS THE
HARDEST THING ABOUT YOUR JOB?
As jobs go, there is nothing hard about it
at all. I sit in a chair next to the
window, listen to folk music on my iPad, and read mostly interesting writings.
WHAT ARE SOME
OF THE BEST BOOKS YOU HAVE EDITED? WHY?
The two most interesting books I
have edited have been nonfiction. The
first, a book on the life of the Dahlits or Untouchables in India and the
second, Jasha Levi’s recent book, Requiem
for a Country: A History Lesson.
They were the best, I guess, because they touched on things I knew
almost nothing about, but things I was interested in knowing more about once I
started.
DO YOU HAVE ANY
TIPS FOR NEW WRITERS?
As an editor and end-of-the-line evaluator
for The indiePENdents, learn your punctuation -- what it is for and how to use
it. Of all the books denied The
indiePENdents’ Seal, the vast majority are denied the Seal because of poor punctuation,
because of commas, semicolons, and periods that have been thrown around like
grass seed.
DO YOU HAVE A
PREFERRED TIME TO EDIT?
I am a daytime worker, up and at work by
10:30 a.m. at the latest. Work with a
brief break for something to eat midway, and then on to 6 p.m., at which point
the brain seems to say, “Enough, Old Girl.
Go have your glass of wine and listen to the evening news.”
DO YOU HAVE A
FAVOURITE PLACE TO WORK?
At my desk, which is right next to a window
overlooking the garden and the birdfeeders.
I have two baskets on the back of my desk, one for each of the cats,
Larrie and Nieukitti, and often a blanket on the floor nearby for either or
both of the two basset hounds, Emma and Sophie.
The parakeet, Thomasina, is nearby and sings out when she hears the
birds outside my window. In the opposite
corner, is the small tank in which the nameless silver dollar fish has been
isolated for being a terrible fish-tank bully.
WHO IS YOUR
FAVOURITE ALL TIME AUTHOR. WHY?
It used to be Dickens. But now, after indexing a large book on Marcel
Proust’s writing, I am about to start the Proustian journey, and I may change
my mind.
WHAT’S THE
GREATEST COMPLIMENT YOU EVER RECEIVED FROM A WRITER?
“Your edits were impeccable!”
WHAT WAS THE
WORST COMMENT FROM A WRITER?
I have actually never had a bad comment
from a writer.
DO SOME OF YOUR
CLIENTS FRUSTRATE YOU?
No.
I remind myself (and them) that whatever I am editing is their
writing. They get to choose. I simply suggest.
OTHER THAN EDITING,
WHAT ELSE DO YOU LOVE?
I love learning and so whether it is
learning to put up a website or taking an online course in terrorism (which I
did several years ago), I love trying anything new.
DO YOU ALSO
WRITE?
Years ago, I did some short-story and
poetry writing. Nothing was ever
published.
ARE SOME MANUSCRIPTS
DIFFICULT TO REVIEW? WHY?
The most difficult are those in which the
word choices are poor, in which I know what the writer said isn’t what he or
she meant or what was meant wasn’t what was written. Trying to find the correct word choice while
still preserving the writer’s voice is sometimes very difficult and time
consuming.
DESCRIBE YOUR
PERFECT DAY.
When everything goes according to plan,
whatever the plan may be -- which, as we all know, is very rare, like most
other things that could possibly be described as “perfect.”
WHAT ARE YOUR
PLANS FOR THE FUTURE?
Keep going.
Clancy's comment: Many thanks, Julia. Keep going indeed. And, thanks for your support for self-published authors.
Love ya work!
Love ya work!
I'm ...
