A-1 Editing Service

Client Comments - Page 5

I grew up in downtown Madrid when the old city center was undiscovered by the hordes of tourists and hundreds of humble families called it home. There was a butcher’s shop a block away from our apartment next to a grocer, a small charcoal store, the parish church, and the school.

It may sound strange to you but in the fifties, many working-class flats in Spain had no heating, and the only source of heat in the bitter winters was a brazier under a table covered with a stout cloth. The whole family sat around the table, slipped their legs under the cloth, and enjoyed the lovely warmth, the company, and the smell, especially when my mother dropped a lemon or orange peel on the coals and its sharp aroma suffused the whole room.

The owner of the butcher shop was a rather cuddly old man¾at least he seemed old then¾and when business slacked, he moved to the back of the store where he made sausage near a window. As children, we used to stand by the opening and admire the way he cranked the shiny machine and lovingly smoothed the tripe as it became engorged with meat and spices.

I remember that on several occasions, he would stop, peer closely at the sausage, empty it, cut and discard a length of tripe, and start all over again.

One day I plucked up enough resolve to ask him why undo what, to me, looked like a perfectly good sausage. He stopped turning over the handle and looked at me over his specs. He pondered for a while and finally said, “Folks pay me with perfect money; hence they deserve perfect sausages.”

I never forgot his words. He had given me a masterful lesson about professionalism and honesty, regardless of the endeavor and however modest the work may be. The man was proud of his sausage and would not compromise with a slightly misshapen piece: his customers paid and he gave them his best. Which brings me to my editors.

No doubt you are aware by now that English is alien to me. However much I toil with prepositions and other devilishly unwieldy bits, I cannot seem to make inroads to master the intricacies of your language. A couple of years ago, I wrote a novel in Spanish and then had the brazen idea to attempt to translate it into English. Naturally I ended up with an arcane concoction of “Spanglish.”

Very proud of my efforts but heeding to the little sanity I had left, I set to engage a professional editor to polish the manuscript, just in case it needed an additional comma or two. I contacted a number of editing houses and got replies ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. One claimed that my novel was pure gold and could be published in no time¾naturally after a little touching up here and there; nothing too heavy, just a few dollars give or take ten thousand.

After sifting through the replies and a careful analysis with state-of-the-art devices such as crystal ball and rabbit’s foot, I short-listed three companies and sent them the first two pages of the manuscript for a trial. Two came back the same day with a few corrections. I read them aloud and, to tell you the truth, they sounded quite good. Then the third one arrived in the morning and posed a major problem!

At first, I thought that my monitor was faulty because the whole screen had a reddish glow to it. Then it sank in: the page was full of corrections.

With trepidation I accepted the changes, printed the final text, and read it aloud. It was a wonderful experience because it sounded like real English, but my mind is rather twisted so I compared the work of all three companies and could not believe the disparity of effort and the huge difference in quality since the fees were similar. I became suspicious: what if the two-page sample was a craftily-connived bait?

I sent the last company the first full chapter, forty pages of it, and waited. A few days later, the same red tint dyed my screen. This time, after scores of comments and indications, there was a laconic note from the editor. “The whole thing is numbing, I would drop the whole chapter.”

I was happy! I had found in A-1 Editing Service a firm of professional editors concerned with making perfect sausage, regardless of the tripe they had to discard. One hundred and twenty thousand words later, I have my novel in English after a painstaking line editing by an enthusiastic and professional team of experts who have coached me through a painful process with encouragement, constant attention at all times, and scrupulous accounting.

I know that my case is perhaps atypical because of my language limitations. I am a poor writer, but I know business and the priceless importance of professionalism, especially in an industry plagued with scams and con artists. I would recommend A-1 Editing Service to anyone who thinks that his or her prose deserves only the best.

Carlos J. Cortes
Barcelona, Spain
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