One of the things about being a professional writer is that while it's awesome to get paid for something you love and do all the time anyway, there are often times when your paycheck hangs on something you could not possibly care less about. I've been extremely lucky in my career to have written about subjects ranging from heart surgery to crazy ceremonial clocks, but that doesn't mean there aren't still times when I'm twenty minutes from my deadline going, "What the hell am I supposed to say about this monstrosity?"
So I always feel a mixture of glee and kinship when I find copy that is clearly a product of exhaustion and deadline panic. I felt it this morning when the fabulous Leigh sent me a link to Anthropologie's Crystalline Entity Necklace.
If you're not a nerdball Trekkie like she and I (side note: Want.), the Crystalline Entity was an enemy of the "It wipes out planets and we don't know how to stop it!" variety, a little bit like the Borg, but with more CGI and less fetish gear.
I could have written it off as a coincidence until I read the rest of the copy:
This vitalizing creation gleams with internal sparks as each gargantuan cut takes on a life of its own.
Yeah, that was totally written by someone who wanted to get back to his or her TNG marathon and/or fan fiction.
Happy Monday, everyone. I hope you get through today without having to do your professional equivalent of describing an ugly plastic necklace like it's an alien life-form.
I used to like how if it was alive it was an entity and if not it was an anomaly. I wonder if anyone's ever done an entity/anomaly count for TNG.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I realized I wasn't cut out for freelance writing when I found myself frantically trying to learn what mutual funds were so I could write an authoritative article on them. It was about then that I switched to proofreading. :)