Page 51 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas
“No, I should know my way around. Please, show the way. Where should we go first?”
“If it was summer, I’d say the communal bathrooms. That’s usually where people will shower right out of the lake or stop on a hike, but it’s pretty chilly right now. How about we head to the main cabin and get some actual food?”
“Oh, do you guys have dinner earlier here?”
“Nah, nothin’ like that, but it’s the holidays, so there’s always good, fillin’ eatings to be had. Besides, what better way to meet people than over something tasty?”
“I see the logic there.”
“I’m glad you do. Is there anything you want to do before we head out?”
I shook my head, steadying myself. I wasn’t panicked or anything, but I was a bit out of my element. I hadn’t gone on a vacation since… what, when I was seven and our unit went to the beach? It felt like an entirely different lifetime, because in a lot of ways, it had been. That was Juniper, not Jeannie, and I’d spent a lot of time figuring out exactly who Jeannie Wolfe was.
“Nah, I’m good. Lead the way. I’m a bit peckish anyway.” I didn’t mention that the reason I hadn’t eaten or drank much on the drive down was because I didn’t want to have to stop a million times to go to the bathroom, especially since car rides could be a little hard on Max’s back. Or he could get car sick. Or just flat-out achy.
My boy was healing, all right, but that didn’t mean things weren’t complicated. And once he was all better, I was sure there would be a load of new complications—like when he became a teenage boy.
Ugh, I didn’t know how it was possible to both be thrilled by something and dreading it at the same time, but that’s where I was. Yet another complexity of being a parent, I supposed.
“After you,” Remy said, bowing exaggeratedly.
“Why, thank you, kind sir,” I said, putting on a posh voice and curtseying.
“You are most welcome, fair lady.”
I snickered, which then made him snicker, then we started chuckling. It didn’t evolve into belly-laughter, but it helped put me at ease. Sometimes things didn’t have to be bombastic and over the top.
Sometimes there was joy in the quiet.
As a plus, the gentle mirth made the stroll in the cold to the main cabin that much faster—not that it was that long of a walk to begin with.
Wow, somehow it was even bigger than I thought. The entryway alone was as big as the front of my townhouse, and the support pillars were actual trees rather than hewn planks.
“You said your ancestors made this?” I knew so little of my family beyond the fact that we were really, really gullible and rarely leaders. Oh, and that we tended to be anemic.
“Yup. Although, I don’t know if this part technically counts as ‘ancestors’ considering it was made by two of my cousins’ grandpappies and some of my uncles. It’s one of the newer parts of the building.”
“Can’t say that anyone in my family has skills like that.”
“That’s fair. A lot of the trades have been lost to time, or have become so specialized because of technological advancements. I may be a landscaper, and I’d like to think I’m pretty good with my hands, but if you ask me to do anything involving electricity? It’s a little daunting.”
“I know what you mean. I was once hired to edit an absurdist romance novel between a sentient bolt of lightning and agroundskeeper. Laypeople would not believe the amount of research I had to put in just to make sure there weren’t any gaps in there. Thankfully, I got paid double as both a developmental editor and a line editor.”
“Well, let me see if I can remember this straight,” Remy said as he stepped forward and held one of the doors open for me. As always, such a gentleman. Not that it was a surprise. “A developmental editor is someone who looks out for plot holes, poor characterization, or ways that the story needs to be improved, and a line editor is more for the actual flow of the story, focusing more on word choice, sentence structure, and prose?”
I grinned. He’d actually listened to me that day at the ice rink. Not only that, but he had remembered, and as a parent in a very busy, busy world, sometimes that was half the battle.
“Impressive,” I said as I walked past him. “Now, do you remember what a copy editor is?”
“That’s the typo one.” He said it almost like he won a prize, and his enthusiasm radiated through me. It was a nice sensation. The kind a girl could get used to.
“Yeah, that’s the typo one, where I’m at my weakest. It takes a lot of work for me to make sure I’ve caught everything. With a developmental edit, I usually only have to read twice at most between drafts, line editing can occasionally take me three times if it’s a bit rough, but copy editing?” I let out a sigh. “Sometimes I read it forward, then backward; sometimes I take out individual chapters and read them forward and then backward. It’s a lot.
“And the crazy thing is, it’s even harder if the book is really good. When you get really into a passage or even a tension arc, it can be really easy to miss a grammatical error or a typo. Not to mention dealing with slang or an author inventing words.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Remy asked.
Not gonna lie, his keen interest stroked my ego. Sure, bookish people were often interested in my job or in the writing field themselves, but others usually only nodded and moved on.
