Long time no speak. The tenterhooks I hung from pierced deep. Mute nostril anxiety.

The publisher requested I take a third test last Wednesday using an actual chapter from an actual manuscript currently in production - "one of our better ones," they said. The edit must be light. I had 24 hours.

Except I really had far fewer, because the request arrived midafternoon Tuesday and I wouldn't begin the edit until the next morning: my wordmind is uncooperative late in the day; by evening it is all but absent. 'Twas ever thus.

So instead I prepared for the edit by whipping through a printout of the chapter to get a sense of it, make some marks, and to research the quotes and sources for accuracy. If this was one of their "better" manuscripts, I was loath to imagine what the problem submissions must look like. The work was turgid, flabby, meandering, almost unreadable. Several quotations contained errors. It would be a drag - or an adventure. Surely the latter.

I was able to sleep that night (a miracle!) but awoke at 4:30 to record a dream. My gut said get up and edit now, so I did. And good thing - I worked until 25 minutes before deadline at 1pm my time (3pm theirs), with time out to feed animals, breakfast my brother, take a walk midmorning to clear my head.

I changed out repetitious words lest they enrage or hypnotize the reader, changed the voice from passive to active when it seemed warranted. I removed detritus and tightened the language (I had been told "judicious pruning" was OK to keep the book length within bounds). To preserve the colloquial tone I relaxed the few sentences that were arch and academic. And of course I caught every error and corrected for style.

A moderate edit of bad writing, with fact-checking and a spit-shine thrown in for good measure.

And from Wednesday through late yesterday afternoon I heard not a word back. Until, in response to my gentle inquiry, I was told they'd gone with another candidate. That my editing was heavy-handed, the extent of the rewriting unacceptable (although "excellent"), and if they ever came across a manuscript so bad it needed a "complete re-do" they'd let me know.

I was stunned. I had simply edited. I had not done anything substantive, no developmental reorganization, no rewriting whatever. It wasn't a light touch - I am not accustomed to let embarrassing writing stand, for both author's and publisher's sake - but it was far from heavy. It was a moderate line edit of the kind I spent thirty years doing before dropping out due to illness in 2002.

I did shed a tear for the loss of anticipated income, but I did not feel sad. I know I am good; I know I knocked that infernal chapter out of the park. (I also know I was a physical wreck by the end of the series of tests: am I really up to resuming this work?) But publishing has changed a great deal in ten years. It was revealing that, when I searched for correct spelling of a name in the test "Acknowledgments" in the first test, I found the final version of it in a scan of the book page at Amazon. It was rife with errors (including the dreaded possessive "it's") - in the published book!

Publishing really is broken. And I'm still out of work.

The I Ching tells me to write a book, instead. I'll keep sending resumes (help! I need a paycheck!), but for now it's back to the projects for me.