Why did the author cross the road?
I don’t know. Why?
To catch the agent on the other side. Why did the agent cross the road?
I don’t know.
To catch the editor on the other side. Why did the editor cross the road?
Why?
To catch the publisher on the other side. Why did the publisher cross the road?
Okay, why did the publisher cross the road?
He was following the chicken.
Filed under 2017, joke by author, Monday morning writing joke
A writer and an elephant walked into a room. The elephant sat down in a chair and the writer sat down at the desk and began typing.
When the writer was done, he printed out the pages and placed them on the table, then left the room.
The elephant, read the pages, made some notations and other comments, then laid the pages back on the desk.
The writer came back into the room, read it and either nodded or wadded up the pages and threw them in the trash.
This went on for several weeks, then one day another tenant in the office complex asked the writer what he was doing.
“Working on a book.”
“What’s the elephant for?”
The writer said, “He’s my editor. My agent said if I didn’t hire an editor to help me with my writing, she’d never be able to sell my next book.”
“But an elephant?”
“He comes highly recommended and he works for peanuts.”
The tenant started to laugh, then stopped and asked, “Who recommended him?”
“My agent, the jackass.”
Filed under 2017, joke by author, Monday morning writing joke
An editor couldn’t believe a book he was helping to publish was written by a dog, so he requested a meeting. The dog and the owner walked into the office and each sat down in a chair.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” the editor said.
The dog yawned, which the editor took to mean go ahead.
“Since you are the first dog author I have dealt with, can you tell me what it was like to write this book?”
“Rough,” said the dog.
The editor decided he should be a little more specific. “What did you think of the line edits we sent to you for changes in the manuscript?”
The dog glanced over at his owner and then cocked back his head and howled.
The editor looked at his watch. He didn’t have much more time until his next meeting. He was finding it hard to believe this wasn’t some stunt cooked up by the dog’s owner. He sighed, glanced down at the contract, and asked a question he knew the dog wouldn’t be able to answer with a bark or howl. “As a first-time author, what do you think of our book advance structure and royalty payments?”
The dog immediately hopped from the chair to the editor’s desk, hiked his leg, and peed all over the contract.
Filed under 2016, joke by author, Monday morning writing joke
Step up, sit down, and read about one editor’s adventures in editing. If you are a writer, it is worth your time, and if you are a reader, it is also worth you time. And if you don’t do either, well, then, shame on you.
One day, Bantam publisher Irwyn Applebaum summoned me into his office and asked, “How do you respond when I say, ‘Tom Robbins’?” Without even thinking, I said, “one of the great prose stylists of his generation.” He said, “That’s what I thought. I want you to go out to Seattle and meet him. You might become his editor.” (Spoiler Alert: I did, and I did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
In past pieces in this series, I’ve tried to give you some idea of what life is really like from the editor’s point of view. I began writing “Adventures In Editing” because I rarely read about that aspect of the publishing business, and the little I did read described only a cookie-cutter, stereotypical, author-v.-editor relationship that tended to come from the author’s side of the negotiating desk: much of it seemed to emanate from Writer’s Digest
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Filed under editor
“Look at this,” one editor said, reading the cover letter of a manuscript. “He claims he puts fire in his writings.”
The second editor read a few pages of the manuscript and told the first one, “He’d do better to put his writings into the fire.”
Filed under Monday morning writing joke
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