I, Author's Editor

MANILA: An image of eternity? An image of fertility early in the morning. You're looking at a posterized image of my original shot inside a Pangasinan Solid North bus going to my hometown Asingan in Eastern Pangasinan, taken 27 February 2015 at 7 AM (I don't really remember but my Lumix FZ100 camera automatic digital record says so). Of course that isn't me, but it could have been. It's picture perfect!

Message? Whether you're an artist or a scientist or a professional or government employee or just plain somebody, if you just look outside of your box, you can see layers of hope, opportunities, sensitivities. And a wide expanse of creativity. All you have to do is reach out physically or intellectually or spiritually. If you are an author and need help, an author's editor should be showing near you. I'm not the first nor the last.

With this essay, I am officially closing and will be deleting soon the 24 essays and itself the blog A Senior For Writers, which I started 5 months ago, on 25 January 2015. Those essays are now part of this new blog of mine, which you're reading: iAuthor's Editor (blogspot.com). I'm still a senior for authors, but my emphasis now is in being an author's editor, not simply being a senior inspiring the authors whether young or old.

An author's editor is not a new idea, but I have reinvented it my way, the entries published in my blog The Suburban Dictionary as follows (blogspot.com):

You have been authed (pronounced outed).

author’s editor, an editor who assists authors in producing manuscripts in any of the arts and sciences, one who is himself a known and proven author and editor, with an impressive list of published works in print, online or both.

authed. New word, meaning any and all of the following:
author-edified, encouraged intellectually and spiritually.
author-edited, consulted with, counseled and corrected by an author’s editor.
author-educated, inspired and instructed by an author’s editor.
author-educed, assisted in drawing out new information and insights from collected facts, figures, assumptions and assertions.

The verb is authe, to author-emancipate a person, by an author's editor, where emancipate refers to being author-edified, or author-edited, or author-educated, or author-educed, or all of the above. – Revised 0800 hours 01 June 2015

I have a dedicated blog, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com, that today contains some 2020 of my essays, with an average of 1,000 words, each essay not just a hodgepodge of thoughts but with a proper Beginning, Middle and End; if you're not impressed, you're impossible!

I started my earnest blogging some 13 years ago. A Magazine Called Love is a collection of at least 2 million words in a single blog written by a single author. Computing, I see that I have been writing at least 3 essays for every 7 days in the last 4,732 days.

I don't think anybody can top that; that is why for a few years now, I have published my claim to the title of being the most creative online writer in the world.

And what motivates me to write so much so soon? In one word, sharing. The best way to multiply your love is to share it, and thereby I want to multiply all these my loves:

Love of reading. I learned to love to read in high school more than 50 years ago. If you want to be a better author, you have to read widely – there is no substitute for reading more than the next author. Degrees in literature are nothing.

Love of writing. I taught myself to write in college while I was training to be both an agriculturist and a teacher (UP '65).

Love of life. I learned organic farming on my own when I got employed at the UP College of Agriculture as a Substitute Instructor in Horticulture and I had all the time in the world to ransack the UPCA library, the Best in the East at that time. The book that opened my eyes to the new agriculture was Edward H Faulkner's Soil Development, wherein he wrote of the soil as living matter – to enable the soil to continue to produce more, you have to nourish the soil with living organisms of all kinds, from bacteria to worms to insects to molds. La Vida Loca, or some such thing. The Los Baños professors were laughing at me. Half a century later, they have embraced it, or something similar; today, they call it either organic farming, organic agriculture, ecological farming or ecological agriculture. I'm now going to call it living agriculture, because it deals with life from beginning to end: Life begets life. Seeds become food, food becomes us.

Love of creativity. As a writer, I learned to be creative with Rudolf Flesch's Readability Formula (1965) and Edward de Bono's lateral thinking (1975) using his Po technique. That explains my 2020 record of essays published online.

So now I know so much love I have to share, and the best way I know how is to write. And so I thank God for the personal computer and the Internet. I want to teach new agriculture, new creativity, new productivity even with an old personal computer and a senior citizen.

Yes, that's the author's editor that I now refer to myself.

By the way, an author's editor is both for popular and technical writing. That's me both. I started on the technical path when I (eventually) became the Chief Information Officer of the Forest Research Institute (FORI) based at the Los Baños Science Community in Laguna. I founded and edited FORI's monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat, the last which, I'm proud to say I patterned after the American National Geographic in both layout and style of writing.

You can put in there somewhere than the job of an author's editor also calls for ghostwriting. If there's something's strange in your neighborhood and you can't get your book out, who you gonna call? The ghostwriter!

For years, even UP Los Baños' technical journals cannot cope with the volume of already written research outputs within the university itself. The better ones are content with coming out every 3-4 months – when will those journals ever catch up with the research output?! Never, if they don't correct themselves. Among other things, they need a tried and tested author's editor to hasten the writing, reviewing and rewriting processes. Especially one who knows desktop publishing, another bugaboo of the publishing process.

The best defense is offense. The author's editor is "your first line of offense," says the Sounding Board (ANN, soundingboard.net):

Used by scientific writers for years, an author's editor is an experienced writer and copyeditor hired by the author to polish a manuscript before submission. This ensures less work rewriting for the author and for the publisher, as well as more control over the manuscript for the writer.

Written 01 June 2015