Chapter 16 015

Laura met a boy when she was in college.Saying it was the boys would not be precise enough, it was a graduate student who gave them basic English classes.And a baby.A baby would not be precise enough, a shadow, a smudge on an ultrasound, and a protest of the following: "I can't be somebody's father, I'm not prepared for that. I never will be. "It wasn't this protest that mattered, it was Laura's loss of fertility.This accident has been pushed into the footnotes of her life by her.She never mentioned it to anyone, including her father. After graduating from college, she was hired by Harlequin, an American romance novel website, to do text proofreading for those romance stories.Later, he switched to editing detective stories, and later entered the lucrative business of freelance reviewing.The manuscripts were varied: memoirs, biographies, handbooks, and more.Her job is to ensure correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and to compile a style sheet for each manuscript that includes ideal spelling and usage.This kind of work is boring, but it can make a living.Even if it is occasionally challenging, it is caused by an author who deliberately makes things difficult.

One particularly troublesome author insisted on ending many sentences without any punctuation: no periods, question marks, exclamation points, or even ellipses.Laura dutifully went over his article, adding every punctuation that should be used, only to elicit an outcry from the author. "How dare you do that!" began every one of his emails.Laura tried to explain to him that every sentence needed a sign of the end.But the author not only refused to accept this, but fired back with overwhelming emotion, "Not everything has an end! Open your eyes!" Ironic.After several confrontations full of gunpowder, the publishing house had to make concessions.Later, those reviewers complained in private about the poor quality of the typesetting, "full of errors like riddles," they said.

Does everything have an end? Poetry can be free from syntax and ignore punctuation.But what about prose?What about biography?Should my father's life be flat until his deathbed with an exclamation point shaped like a raised eyebrow, or with a question mark shaped like a hook waiting for an answer?Or use a full stop that represents perfection?Or is it an ellipsis that expresses more meaning? Laura, who also indexes publications, is busy indexing the biographies of several people for a series titled "Life Lived": all public figures, all women—an athlete, a soldier (deceased) and a country singer.To highlight surnames and proper nouns, to count major events and honors and so on.Indexing is a complex business.what's importantThe last name, of course, and the city, a specific location like New York rather than a generic location like a kitchen.Do you want to lump the protagonist's early work in advertising and marketing into one category?Or list another subtitle called "Early Work"?Need a separate entry for an occupation like "Advertising"?Or use a sneaky trick like "See: Marketing"? (The answer is "no".)

Indexing someone else's biography is not a particularly pleasant job.One day Laura called her father to complain: "For me, the most important things in a person's life are precisely those things that are not indexed. There is never such a thing as 'memory', 'regret' or even 'love'. Seemingly insignificant entries, some are just 'Education' (Secondary to Postgraduate), 'Awards', etc. The index never seems to be able to get into people's inner world. There is never a title that can represent the hopes, fears that people have ever had , a dream, a memory, a smile, anger or beauty, it can even represent an image that was once in the mind, a memory: an open door, a window, an image reflected in the glass, the smell of rain, etc. Never No such things, just a collection of proper nouns and famous names. Why is the index entry limited to the life of a single person? Why not include the lives of others who are intertwined and bound us like a web?"

To her various questions, the father's answer was: "I think you are too tired, you should drink less coffee and relax." Laura laughed and accepted her father's suggestion.She immediately took the elevator downstairs and swam a few laps in the pool.My eyes are sore from swimming. And now she's still sitting at her desk, still indexing other people's lives. "You, I love you." Why did he say that?