“Virtual Reality” and “Three Little Words”: A Guest Post by Linda Jay

I am pleased to present two humorous anecdotes from Linda Jay, a copyeditor and copywriter in Sonoma County, California. Linda has decades of experience editing book manuscripts as well as blogs, website text, magazine articles, and PR material of all types. She has edited books from business to zombies. She also writes PR and marketing copy for book jackets, websites, blogs, bios, magazine profiles and feature stories, email blasts, and brochures. Linda’s parents wrote radio scripts for programs including The Shadow. For more information about Linda Jay, see her website.

 

Three Little Words

It’s the early 1980s, and my (late) husband and I are attending a computer conference at the now-Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Apple Computer has one of the marketing tables outside the auditorium, so I’m browsing through their material. Yowza!  All interesting stuff … except the content of the Apple internal newsletter, Five Star News, leaves a lot to be desired.  I pick up my sample copy, take my ever-present red pen (editors ALWAYS carry one), and start circling corrections that should be made on the pages.

Do they have a copyeditor? Not listed on the masthead.  Hmmmmmmmmmmm. And I want a freelance copyediting job. I wonder………….. I think about what one word would sum up the Apple culture. Of course. “BRASH” comes to mind.  I myself am not, by nature, brash. But I want to see if the Five Star News editor would hire me to proofread/edit the paper every month, AND put my name on the masthead each month.  

So I make an appointment with the editor, I take my marked-up newsletter, and I march confidently into his office, throw the paper onto his desk, and declare, “You need me!”  He is stunned at my bold approach. Within a few minutes, he hires me as a freelancer who will have her name on the masthead. Mission accomplished!  The gig lasted a year, although I was never asked to meet the others on staff, who were all bona fide Apple employees.  

 

Virtual Reality — Sound Effects for The Shadow  in My Parents’ New York Kitchen

When I was a kindergartner in Manhattan, sometimes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons my parents, Verne and Helen Jay, would rehearse sound effects in our kitchen. They were writing freelance radio scripts broadcast nationwide on NBC, and several shows  — such as “Flames of Death” and “Death in the Tomb” for The Shadow — involved sound effects.

Whether it was sirens, screams, bodies falling onto cement, or vault doors slamming, my parents were pretty proficient at producing the authentic sounds. I thought this was just a normal part of what parents did.

But when several neighbors with worried faces knocked at the front door on a Tuesday afternoon, asking what was going on inside, I thought differently. My mother, an aspiring actress as well as a writer, would draw herself up to her full 4 feet 5 3/4 inches and walk slowly to the door, with a haughty attitude.  As she slowly opened the door, she would gaze at each neighbor. “Yes? Is something wrong?”  They responded, “What on earth is going on in there?”

“Oh, that,” she would say nonchalantly. “Think nothing of it. We’re just rehearsing.” And then, her voice rising and her manner changing to almost-glee, she would add, “FOR THE SHADOW!!,” while she v-e-r-y slowly closed the door. 

With the perspective I have now on the entire scene, I can see that truly my parents did not realize that their virtual reality was everyday work to  them, although somewhat bizarre to the neighbors. And yes…this was my reality as a somewhat puzzled kindergartner in Manhattan.