12-29-2007, 11:51 PM
As some of you may realize, CF and LCF, they work for me. Seriously. I send them a monthly paycheck. I do this so they can help me copyedit. Copyediting in the martial arts is a dreadful thing. There are cultural elements, egomaniacs, translation issues and a whole horde of really horrible writers. I do a fair amount of copyediting too, sometimes a pre-copyediting pass and a post-copyediting pass, just to try to hammer some of these monsters into shape. So I get this offer to copyedit a book for a qigong master that I do not like - this master saw my skepticism of him the moment we met and told me I had a 'waterfall of qi' pouring out of my face and he'd never seen that before and didn't know of anyway to help me. It was like this mindfuk curse because I was actually in a bad way at the time. Anyway, the manuscript is about 120 pages double-spaced, and it's a recipe for building a cult. It's qigong psycho, akin to how PRC views Falun Gong. There were already two, maybe three editors, who worked on it, so I had notes, both digital and handwritten. One bailed out - she really tried but you can read in her comments how it's messing with her. She wants to beleive but the bullshitomer is honking like a fire alarm under your pillow. He even has a paragraph on how one of his past employees mystically got a great job (due to his qi influence) and had to leave. She probably ran like hell offering that as an excuse. There's some downright scary psychotrips in this one. It's a total manifesto. One of my favorite pre-edits is a change of reference from FBI to CIA. Brimming with uncited qi anecdotes and accusations against science for being bound by three-dimensional philosophies. The sentence structure and psycho babble put many to shame. Anyway, it was utt$ so that's cool. I did the best that I could, given the nature of the beast. I'd feel awful guilty if this guy goes on to lead some suicide cult or something. :oops:
Shadow boxing the apocalypse