Motorcycle Roads

    

        When I turned 50 I decided I deserved a midlife crisis, so I bought my own Harley Heritage Springer and learned some beautiful backroads.

 This Harley impulse was fueled by my first ride that had launched my love affair with motorcycles. Sixteen years old, I was invited to Florence, Oregon, to celebrate my friend’s birthday with her family. We went to a high school dance and had a great time; then her cousin and his friend invited us to ride on their dirt bikes. At 11 p.m. we were flying through Oregon woods and back roads, having a heart pounding, terrific time. 

By 2:00, the boys decided we needed to go see the quicksand pits.  Having spent my youth watching Saturday afternoon Tarzan movies, I was already convinced that quicksand was a significant threat in adult life,

 but I swallowed my terror and rode along. Once there, the boys started running across a large pool of quicksand, causing the earth to roll in giant concentric waves from the impact of their footsteps. They could only stop in several spots where grass tuffets grew and the ground was firmer, so it became a game of base running on a dare. First and last time I have ever experienced quicksand. Got back to the motel after 4 a.m. and sunrise. 50 years later, I still remember the scolding…and we didn’t even tell her parents about the quicksand.

***One day I was climbing a long road through a state forest. The sky was wide open and blue, not even a hint of clouds; the road was lined with trees that were cut back from the road, so visibility was clear and there was no sign of people or life of any kind. With no warning, out of the proverbial empty blue sky, SPLAT. Somebody dumped a gallon of water on me. Not raindrops, a big slap of water that hit once and disappeared; no water before or after me on the road, just an abrupt glop of water in the face.

         It happened so fast, I didn't have time to react; I didn't even swerve or brake.  But what the hell? I rode on, slightly in shock, wiping my face. What hit me? From where? Less than a  quarter mile down the road, I had the answer.

From 200 feet up came a helicopter over the trees hauling a big canvas bucket full of water that had evidently slopped over.  The firefighting helicopter was scooping up lake water and dumping it on a forest fire...after baptizing me first.

***It was sunset and the sun had slid behind the mountains, leaving the western sky glowing. The air was soft and lovely, the perfect temperature for riding. Luckily for me, I had just crested a hill and was on a long straightaway doing 40. The darkness was settling in, when suddenly a vast cloud of white moths engulfed me, their albino white wings reflecting my headlights and blocking my view of everything else. I throttled back, but for almost a block (it felt like a mile)  the white fluttering wings engulfed me utterly, reflecting the headlights and blinding me completely.

        The hatch stretched on and on until I was terrified that I was running out of straight road; but I knew I couldn’t stop, someone might rear end me in the endless cloud. Oh God, when was it going to stop, I couldn’t see! Then came an experience that is seared into my memory. It happened in a split second, but I can see his face to this day. Cutting right through the moths and screaming up to within an inch of my helmet came… a bat. 

    His sonar kept him from smashing into my face.

    Luckily he was there and gone so fast, I could not react--which would surely have left me spread across the asphalt.

    I doubt he remembers me, but I can see his black, shiny eyes even now. No doubt he thought I was pilfering his snacks.

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In Loco Parentis ~ by Ruth Ross Saucier

 Maria and Tod were something like five and nine years old [okay, maybe seven and twelve; I’m getting old, don’t hold me to the details] when they came to stay with us in Seattle for a weekend.

They lived outside of a small town and we lived in Seattle, so we thought we’d share the big city with them, take them out to eat, play games, go to the theater, and see the city.  Share some culture.

 As recent grads of the U. of Washington, we were big fans of their theater program. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the UW had oodles of theater venues—theater in the round, a theater in a riverboat, you name it. Always inexpensive to attend, the productions were in small theaters so you always got a great seat and a fascinating look at plays from Shakespeare to modern.  The play scheduled for that weekend was completely unknown to us, but we booked four tickets and proudly took them to experience the sophistication of live theater. 

The title of the play was Hot L Baltimore.  Set in a gritty city hotel (the ‘e’ in the neon sign had burned out), it proved to be a bit more enlightening than we counted on.

Particularly so when our lovely second row seats had a perfect view of a scene when, yelling and bouncing, an utterly naked, well-endowed student actor playing a prostitute ran across the stage,  not once but twice. Uncle Fred lunged in an attempt to cover Tod’s eyes, but that failed utterly.

My husband, being sure that his sister would never ever forgive him, swore his nephew to absolute secrecy. On our return home, as a reward, a bribe, and a treat, we made banana splits for dessert. But we couldn’t really find any dishes that would work well, so we christened them “bread pan sundaes” and served them up in loaf pans.

The following morning we were awakened early by Tod bellowing from the kitchen, “Can we have bread pan sundaes for breakfast?” Still recovering from the antics of the prior evening, I considered the ice cream as a variant of milk, the banana as a fruit, the nuts as protein, the virtue of not having to get out of bed, and yelled back, “Sure – just don’t tell your mom!” 

But of course, when Mom appeared later that afternoon, our born-chatterbox nephew ran to greet her and the first words out of his mouth were, “Mom, Mom, I saw this naked lady and had bread pan sundaes for BREAKFAST!”

 Pretty sure she forgave us—eventually.

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Meet our Members

Ruth Ross Saucier

Ruth lives under the watchful gaze of the Olympic Mountains, somewhere out west of the waters west of Seattle. Today, after 40 years of writing, editing, and wrangling a variety of nonfiction and fiction, she is retired to a life of writing, editing, and investigating any and all curiosities she deems fascinating.

To learn more about Ruth and read her prior blog posts, please click HERE

Get to Know our Members ~

Ruth Ross Saucier was born and raised on the continental U.S., where its only fjord meets its only rain forest. A cynical dreamer from the age of three, she began college still vaguely dreaming of being America’s first woman astronaut. However, a traumatic encounter with third-quarter calculus found her relinquishing her spacey dreams, rejecting her mother’s sensible advice, and majoring in Russian literature.  Ultimately she recaptured some common sense when she reverted to type and finished library school. 

A generalist by nature, she rejected the notion of a Ph.D., preferring instead to know a little about a lot of things, the perfect temperament for a community college library dean. Today, after 37 years of writing, editing, and wrangling a variety of nonfiction and fiction, she is retired to a life of writing, editing, and investigating any and all curiosities she deems fascinating.

   

She lives under the watchful gaze of the Olympic Mountains, somewhere out west of the waters west of Seattle, with two elderly rescue Chihuahuas, Chrissie Maybelle and Beedler Bee. 

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Five recommendations: how much editing do you need? ~ by R.R. Saucier

R. R. Saucier, Editor, Writer, Observer

No matter what you edit or write—fiction or non-fiction--this story has something for you, since it seems unlikely you’ll ever get more than 200 highly-educated editors to submit edits on your work.

What happened. I have the dubious distinction of having been the main author and editor of a College Self-Study report* for accreditation. Dubious distinction, because this sizable document is definitely not a barn-burning best seller, never going to be a gripping read--but it is a critical document for any college.  

To get employees to read the document, we incentivized** editing drafts of the chapters. Over 200 employees of the college submitted edits, several submitting more than one chapter. That’s a lot of viewpoints from a lot of intelligent, educated people.

  

The results turned out to be fascinating.     

There were almost no duplicate edits (less than 1%). Think about that. No matter what kind of edit—content, fact-checking, grammar, punctuation, style, word usage, spelling, formatting, consistency, citations—there were virtually no two people finding the same errors, making the same suggestions, offering up the same solutions to the same problems. The people behind the edits were college faculty, staff, and administrators. Nearly all of them held college degrees, everything from an associate’s to Ph.D.s—with bachelor’s and master’s degrees predominating. Not a slouch in the bunch, as my mother would have observed.

We’re not talking mistakes here.  Sure, some of the submissions were either wrong or not consistent with our publication style sheets. And let’s face it, take a look at the over 1,000 pages of the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s enough to intimidate the hardiest grammar nerd, so mistakes are going to happen. But we’re not talking about whether they got it right or wrong. The edits were for different issues…each hopeful editor was finding unique problems according to their own understanding of language and editing.

Brain maps. The edits submitted were consistent (i.e., the same people submitted the same kind of edits). Unique brains make for unique editing. If you have a big-picture, organization-oriented brain, you submitted edits that had to do with content, organization, and structure. You rarely touched a misplaced comma. These big thinkers were our developmental editors; they were rare, but we cherished anything they caught.

The middle-ground folks submitted grammar, style, usage, or logic issues. Occasionally they dipped into the minute details of a proofreader, but mostly they stuck to copy editing level issues.

And then there were the proofreaders. Heaven preserve them, because every little bitty error, every missed period or extra space, was theirs to pounce on and eradicate. While they crossed over into usage or grammar on occasion, they almost always caught the myriads of little things the copy editors overlooked.

When it came to overall editing, though, there were five or so of the 200+ who were really good at it; five born-again editors…and they weren’t always professors. They were administrative assistants and other staff who were excellent editors with skill sets that ranged more widely across the three kinds of editing and eyes that saw much more than all the rest. 

After all that we had a pretty darn good draft. But then we hired a technical writer to go through it again, and guess what? After every chapter had been read by at least 20 people, she submitted even more edits than any of the five amateur born-again editors.

Conclusions.  Some random deductions in pursuit of an answer to How Much Editing You Need:

1. You need more than one editor. You need a lot of them, unless you’re really good to start with and you hire one or more really good professional editors on top of that. People with a penchant for editing and a skill set to match are rare beings. So just having Mom read your stuff like she read your 8th grade report on Venezuela isn’t going to cut it.  
  
2. You need editors with different brains than yours—ones that see issues you don’t. There are three types of editing largely acknowledged by the writing world [developmental, copy editing, proofreading], and there’s good reason for that. Circumstantial evidence from this experience says your brain is going to be good at one of the three and maybe okay at a second. You need good editing brains from all three categories–because no matter how good you are at [pick one], you need someone to double check your work. So just because you hired a pro who is a really good editor, doesn’t mean that pro is the best editor for you. 

3. Education doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good editor.  While colleges have long acknowledged the need to teach writing across the curriculum, just because your history teacher grades your paper on grammar, doesn’t mean she’s as good at it as your English teacher. Your degree in geology, geography, philosophy, or foreign cultures doesn’t always mean you can write, much less edit. Even English teachers come in flavors, some specializing in literature, some in language. You need people who have the skills and temperament to be excellent editors, and that isn’t necessarily a function of college degree…so your uncle the brilliant biologist who publishes groundbreaking research may be the family prodigy, but it doesn’t make him a great editor.
  
4. You need to polish your own skills. Why? If you’re hiring a pro, shouldn’t they get it done? Think about how many times the accreditation manuscript was edited. Every time new eyes brought different refinements and error corrections. The adage about seeing the forest for the trees (or vice versa) applies here.  The cleaner the manuscript, the more chance an editor has of getting all the remaining issues right. Even editors are human, and if they are faced with a barrage of errors, some are going to slip through. Ask your editor(s) to suggest common problems for you to unlearn. They will thank you for it, you will get a better result, and you might just save on editing costs down the road!  AND,

5. You’re in charge if you’re publishing your own stuff.  So when one of your many editors says, “This is wrong,” you need to take their word for it if you haven’t polished your own skills. As the ultimate judge of what needs to happen in your manuscript, you are a little like that gifted basketball player who decides he doesn’t need to know math or contract negotiation or physical therapy, he’ll just hire help.  But that only works if you know enough to figure out who to trust, who is good at their job, and who to hire. 

In summation.   Buy your own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and learn how to use it. Figure out the mystery behind apostrophes (please!) and use the Oxford comma (or I will hurt you). Solicit a group of readers to give you feedback and keep the ones that are useful. Find a good editor [or two] who knows what you need. Polish your own skills--because dammit, Jim, you’re a writer!***

* The self-study is an exhausting and exhaustive document that describes how well a college fulfills strict standards. Self-Study reports are mandatory if your institution wants to be accredited [judged worthwhile]. Regional accrediting organizations [that are, in turn, certified by the U.S. Department of Education] examine your report and visit the college to verify the college’s claims. And yes, colleges have been ordered to change or be closed if they don’t pass inspection. So why do colleges go through this process? If they want to award federal financial aid, they need to be accredited—and you should never give a college your money if they can’t prove their accreditation by a regional association certified by the US Department of Education. If you’re suffering from insomnia, feel free to try the report at this website: Olympic College-Accreditation Report    Go to “Reports and Self Studies” and click on the link for 2013 Year Three self-evaluation.

** In order to involve the college personnel—to incentivize them to read and review the report before it was submitted—we asked our Foundation for some prizes. Why? Because everybody at the school has a full-time job and helping edit the report was not on the top of anyone’s urgent list (except, of course, mine). If you read and edited a section of the report, you were entered in a drawing for a $700 Apple gift card. That got a lot of attention. There were multiple sections, so you could have multiple entries. 


*** Dr. Leonard McCoy, Various, the original Star Trek.

Editing and Control: Musings ~ by R. R. Saucier, Editor, Writer, Observer

     Old School Control. Let’s talk control. As an editor, I can’t help but note that the job description for editing has morphed since self-publishing became a viable option for writers. In the ‘70’s, I was a grunt for the publishing wing of the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Manuscripts were scrupulously combed through. The attention to detail was superb: every word, every bit of punctuation was dealt with at least three times, sometimes more. Despite working with highly educated academics, the editor’s way was gospel. Sure, there were freelancers then and people who wrote term papers – but professional publications were subject to editorial control that was lodged firmly with the editor.

     Control in Free Fall. Today, I work with a lot of authors who are self-published. Some of them have been professionally published, some not. But the power equation has changed. If you hire me to edit your work, I will give you my very best effort and will let you know when the edit is a matter of grammar or opinion. You remain in charge, having relinquished no control at all. You can accept my work, ignore it, and ultimately, decide whether I’m the editor for you. 

     Professional publishing today still retains a high degree of control, however. Try enforcing how you are edited when you are dealing with a publishing house, and you better have good rationales for your choices or great sales! Curiously, many have argued that some famous, professionally-published writers are allowed too much leeway (read: control) over their works. Once their profits soar some readers feel their work suffers, seemingly from a lack of – you guessed it – editing. In other words, some writers can handle control and some cannot. 

Derry, Emily, Amelia at two weeks

     Diverting Uncontrolled Anecdote. I’ve always been a cynic. I gave up on Santa by the age of three and religion by the age of six. I have always believed that control is an illusion; the moment you feel you have it, you’ve got a surprise coming. Falls under the adage, tell God your plans if you want to hear him laugh. Or, as Leia said to Governor Tarkin, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” [Star Wars 4, if you’re counting.] 

     My husband and I had two miniature schnauzers. When one died early of Addison’s disease, we were utterly bereft. We went puppy hunting, having convinced ourselves that our surviving female schnauzer, Liesl, needed company… a ridiculous notion that I doubt either of us really believed. We adopted two male schnauzer puppies that summer; both were charming and a tad precocious.  

     When Liesl went into heat we consulted our vet, who averred unequivocally that the four-month-old boys were too young to father a litter, we were safe. As he was a professional and we were vulnerable, we believed him, but even so, we still kept the two of them separated. Ten days later we were sure the heat was over. And, after all, he was too young anyway, so we relaxed our control over Liesl. Shadow, who had not been informed he was too young, immediately proved the vet wrong. It took him about three seconds to figure it out, and that’s all it took. As Dr. Ian Malcolm would say, “…life, uh…finds a way.” (Jurassic Park, 1993)

     
     My husband wanted a little black female puppy; Liesl, ever his dog, produced three little black females. (Yes, schnauzer pups are born black and achieve their real color with time--but I’m convinced she did it just to please him, like everything else she did). And yes, you guessed it; we ended up keeping them all for a total of six: Mom, Dad, Uncle Snickers, and the three little girls, Emily, Amelia Peabody, and Derry.  

Derry, Emily, Amelia at one year.

     You need some.  Don’t misunderstand. We need control. Control throughout life is vitally important to success, personality, and self-fulfillment. Babies who lack control of language are utterly frustrated until someone figures it out for them. Seniors in nursing homes desperately strive for whatever tiny bit of control they can eke out of that environment; if they lack it utterly, despair is often the result. Children must be given choices and understand that they have control over their choices if they are to become functioning adults. A total lack of control is often cited by those who attempt suicide. Mid-level managers with little or no control who are surrounded by co-workers who are at loggerheads must be ingenious negotiators or risk total frustration.

  So, you gotta have it. Just don’t fool yourself about how much you really have, or you could end up being a schnauzer pack leader. Or just a member of the pack, because, after all, control is tricky--especially with schnauzers.