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Sunday, October 2, 2011

The End is Near

Well, the end of the copy-edits are near, I think.  (A copy-editor would probably say "is near" in that last sentence.)

Doing the edits hasn't been that bad, just finding the chunks of time in which to do them has been hard!  (And getting over the embarrassment of some of the silly mistakes I make...like the occasional forgetting of a WORD!  An essential word!  A word needed for sentence sense!!!  So, um, yeah, glad I don't have to look the copy-editors in the eye right now.)

But I am struggling with a capitalization issue.  It deals with the Gaelic spelling of a creature in Celtic folklore. I seem to be capitalizing this word all of the time...and according to my copy-editors, I don't really need to.  So I started thinking, "Well, self, why are you inflicting capitalization where none is needed?"

No easy answers, of course.

But I thought, maybe, just maybe, I was subconsciously copying an old folkloric style.  Perhaps, long ago, such words were always in caps and I was inadvertently doing the same. So I pulled out a bunch of old Celtic folklore books (got Celtic folklore questions?  I'm your go-to-gal.) to have myself a look-see.

But I got distracted from my search when I found this poem by Irish poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy (who supposedly wrote poetry while working for the British Museum.)  This is part of a larger poem called "Ode", this part is an ode to writers:

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.

World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

And after than, I really have no other words.

hrh

P.S. I love when I am searching for one thing but find something even better!  (I guess I did have a few other words.)

7 comments:

Kelly Polark said...

What a beautiful poem!
I love poetry. After Jon and I finish our mg, I'm going to take some time to revisit poetry, my first writing love.

Tricia J. O'Brien said...

Oh! That poem gave me a shiver. Words. Stories. I love them, darn it.

MG Higgins said...

What a wonderful poem. I can get so lost finding things I wasn't originally looking for that I forget what I was looking for in the first place. I need Google bread crumbs to find my way back.

Sherrie Petersen said...

Great poem! I often find things that I wasn't looking for when looking for something else. Bad habit, the way I distract myself :)

Susan R. Mills said...

I love it! What a treasure you found during your research!

Christina Lee said...

LOVE it--- and what a lovely thing to get distracted by!

And yes, it's definitely embarassing what we find/forget in our manuscripts!!

Catherine Denton said...

You always leave me smiling. I'm glad you're almost finished with your copy-edits. And what a beautiful poem to find in your search. (Although now I'm left wondering if the Celtic folklore DOES capitalize on those words. ;)
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