{"id":3417,"date":"2026-03-13T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T13:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3417"},"modified":"2026-03-10T14:22:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:22:26","slug":"a-jitters-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2026\/03\/13\/a-jitters-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"A Jitters Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Tuesday morning, two days before leaving for the Tucson Festival of Books<\/a>, but I\u2019m nervous\u2014nervous about leaving and nervous about maybe NOT leaving.<\/p>\n

The news this morning is all about delays and possible flight cancellations at SeaTac. So will all that work out? We\u2019ll find out for sure on Thursday morning. That means I have another whole day to worry about this while I\u2019m also working on\u2014make that trying to work on\u2014the copy editing for The Taken Ones which arrived in my email Monday morning.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m having some issues with that, by the way. I\u2019m a girl from the West. I suspect the copyeditor isn\u2019t, and there are some linguist issues at work here. Where I write \u201cSeattle PD,\u201d she changes it to \u201cthe Seattle PD.\u201d Yes, it\u2019s the Seattle Police Department, but it\u2019s not \u201cthe Seattle PD.\u201d There\u2019s no THE there! And in my frame of reference people graduate from high school and college. Evidently in other parts of the country people \u201cgraduate high school or college\u2014no from, and that bugs me.<\/p>\n

One of my first experiences with this kind of issue happened during copyediting of a long ago Beau book in which he visited a Seattle bar where they were playing country\/western music. The copy-editor changed it to country and western music. I put an all cap STET on that.<\/p>\n

For non-English majors, the word stet stands for \u201cdisregard the previous correction.” It\u2019s supposed to be written in lower case, but I capitalized it in that instance because I really meant it! I also sent along the following explanation: \u201cIt\u2019s shit\/kicking, country\/western music, not shit and kicking country and western music.”<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m doing copy-editing. Will I finish before Thursday? Probably. No, make that a maybe. In the meantime, sitting on the side table next to my writing chair is a brand new packet of Sticky Notes.<\/p>\n

While I\u2019m gone\u2014assuming I really AM gone\u2014our daughter Cindy will be here to look after her dad, but our daughters have also been lobbying for me to have more help in caring for Bill, so we\u2019re bringing some in. They\u2019ve been shadowing me for a time or two, but I\u2019m concerned about things being done right, so I\u2019m going to leave sticky notes here and there with checklists of things that need to be done in a certain order. Make that check lists of things that I want done in a certain order.<\/p>\n

Does that make me OCD? Probably. Controlling? Yup, that, too. Unwilling to let go? After five years, of trial and error, that\u2019s definitely a yes. I guess I\u2019m a \u201cmy-way-or-the-highway\u201d kind of girl. Or maybe, at my age, I\u2019m just \u201cset in my ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

At any rate, my blog is supposed to be a window on my world, and this week the person in my world is a bundle of nerves.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned next week, and I\u2019ll let you know how it turns out. Now I\u2019m going to write up some of those Sticky Notes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Tuesday morning, two days before leaving for the Tucson Festival of Books, but I\u2019m nervous\u2014nervous about leaving and nervous about maybe NOT leaving. The news this morning is all about delays and possible flight cancellations at SeaTac. So will all that work out? We\u2019ll find out for sure on Thursday morning. That means I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Jitters Blog","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,165,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-festivals","category-traveling","category-tucson"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-T7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3417"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3419,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions\/3419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}