When I was little, I was a worried kid. I was afraid of a lot of things, but mainly robbers (by some weird irony, Home Alone, with tiny little Macaulay Culkin, was one of my favorite videos), kidnappers, and fire. The fire thing started when they started doing “Fire Prevention Week” in school (in fact, I remember having that as early as pre-school). If you didn’t grow up in the late 80’s/early 90’s or have a kid who grew up then, Fire Prevention Week was a week in October when firemen went around to all the schools to talk about fire safety. It was mostly stuff like the famous “stop drop and roll” mantra, but I remember one particularly sadistic fireman telling us this:
“If there’s a fire in your house—even a little one that you or your parents put out yourselves—you should call the fire department. Because sometimes, a spark from that fire can live inside the wall until everyone goes to bed at night and then it can come back to life and set your house on fire while you’re asleep.”
Now, it has since been confirmed that this is actually true, but if you ever want to scare the shit out of a 6 year old, there you go. I tried to get my dad to prop a ladder outside my bedroom window so that I’d have a fire escape route, but that would be an easy way in for the robber/kidnappers! Such a dilemma!
When I hear people say they wish they could go back to childhood, where they had no responsibilities, no bills, blah blah blah, it makes me shudder. I was an extremely stressed out kid. (Although I wouldn’t mind having a scheduled naptime again. That was pretty rad.) I’ve definitely mellowed over the years, but I’ll tell you what keeps me awake at night now:
Errata.
I’m serious. The other night I woke up at 4am and I couldn’t fall back to sleep because I kept thinking about people finding mistakes in my patterns. And it’s not like this is an unfounded fear—it’s happened before. It continues to happen. And it frustrates the HELL out of me.
When I first started publishing patterns, I didn’t know any other designers (don’t get me started on the Designers forums on Ravelry). I didn’t know anything about tech editors, but I’d heard something about test-knitting, so I had my patterns test-knit. Once they were published, people still found mistakes in them. Then I heard about technical editors (for those unfamiliar, a technical editor (tech editor, for short) is someone you can send your pattern to and they’ll go through it for typos, they’ll do all the math and make sure all your stitch counts are accurate, make sure the charts match the written directions, all the materials you need are listed, and everything else you can possibly check to make sure the pattern is completely clear and correct).
So I went on Ravelry and looked around and sure enough, there were lots of tech editors advertising their services. But I’ll tell you this: the number of completely unqualified “technical editors” out there is ASTOUNDING. I’ve lost count of how many I’d been through before I found one (very recently) who seems to do a really conscientious job. Even the qualified ones sent me back patterns with errors. And even though they were technically my own errors to begin with, I paid someone to GET RID of them. The most frustrating part is that it’s not the tech editor’s name that goes on the pattern in great big letters—it’s mine. Whatever kind of job the tech editor does, it reflects on me.
Oy, see, I’m getting all worked up. It’s a scary thing, relinquishing control over a pattern and trusting someone to make sure the thing is actually knit-able. And that’s kind of the problem, for me. The whole thing is so tied up in emotions (fear, shame, anger) that it becomes hard to deal with it in a reasonable way and I want to just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
It’s hard to come up with any kind of neat conclusion because the problem of errata and technical editing HAS NO CONCLUSION. It NEVER ENDS.