What the NSA would find in my Google searches

by Libby Sternberg

I'm innocent! I swear, officer! 

Well, yeah, I was looking up stuff online about weapons and explosives and getaway cars and….

But if I don’t get it right, my boss will be awfully mad, see? They double-check our work all the time. No, no, my boss isn’t involved in anything nefarious. I’m telling the truth here! Yes, I had to get accurate info on Colt 1911s and 9mm guns and powerboats and Humvees for her. I wasn’t intending harm at all. Just the opposite.... Yeah, Plexiglas, too. I confess—I looked that up. No, no, I had no intention of…  Well, yes, I do keep referring to Chicago. No, I’m not planning to go to Chicago. I live in Pennsylvania. 

I’m just a suburban housewife, I swear, with no ties to terrorist….well, yes, you’ve got me there – I was Googling al Qaeda recently. And, yes, I did look up information about Navy SEAL operations. But I wasn’t building any connections or networks or…. I don’t even know how to speak the terrorists’ language, for crying out loud! 

Uh, what’s that? You have records of me using online translation software to look up some Pashto phrases and some Spanish ones, too? Um, yes, I’d forgotten about the…but, hey, since when is it a crime to speak Spanish?

As I said, I’m just a housewife…a grandmother, for Pete’s sake!  Well, uh, yes, I admit it, I also searched more than once for information about SIG SAUER guns! But…I couldn’t remember if the name is hyphenated.

No, hyphenated isn’t a weapons-making process! It’s a dash, see, like an en-dash… No, en-dash isn’t a code. It’s a typography designation for, well, something like a hyphen. Oh, good grief, I just told you that the hyphen doesn’t mean anything! No, “hyphen” isn’t the code word giving a green light to some plot to take down a Chicago building.

Chicago is the Chicago Manual of Style, see? No, no, it’s not some handbook for terrorist plots. It’s a book for copy editors. Like me. I copy edit novels, and some of them are suspense books, thrillers, and…we use Webster’s 11th, too.

No, no, Webster’s 11th isn’t a special cadre of bad guys. It’s a dictionary! I swear. Look it up! 

Anyway, these are our tools—copy editing tools! Not real tools! For the love of…. And sometimes I need to refresh my memory to see if words like powerboat are closed compounds or open compounds or hyphenated….

No, no, I’m not talking about compounds for training terrorists! I just told you about hyphens, right? And that’s part of being a copy editor, making sure you have the compounds right…. Oh, Lordy, can’t you understand, I’m a writer! And an editor! Nothing important!

When I research Colt 1911s, it’s to see if it’s a semiautomatic, as the author indicated. When I look up SEAL training, it’s to validate the author’s description of those programs. 

And Plexiglas…I bet you thought that was an un-trademarked word spelled “plexiglass,” didn’t you, mister? Nope, trademarked. Lots of common words are—Band-Aid, Dumpster, Jacuzzi, Formica, Styrofoam, even Realtor….  Yeah, that’s right. Realtor. Start uppercasing it, buddy. And lowercase the “x” in x-ray when you use it as a verb. But uppercase it when it’s a noun. Got that? 

And dash that dash in lighthearted—it’s a closed compound while light-headed is hyphenated…Write it down so you don’t forget, sweetheart. And when you’re taking down a suspect’s words, use hyphens to indicate stuttered letters, but em-dashes—longer hyphens—to indicate stuttered words, okay, bub? And watch out for those dangling modifiers, Smartypants, you with your “Googling all this violent stuff, we need to ask…”  “Googling all this” has to agree with the subject of the sentence, see, which you meant to be me. Get yourself some Strunk & White and memorize that section, Muscle Head. And stop using “like” when you mean to say “as if.” I might seem as if I’m engaged in suspicious activity. Not like I’m engaged in same. Got it, Officer Krupke? Don't get me started on punctuation, either, junior. We take the Oxford comma very seriously around here....

Are you yawning? 

As I said, I know you found all these things on my computer through random NSA searches, but I swear, I’m not a terrorist. I’m nothing! Really. Nothing. I’m a copy editor. Nothing…..

In addition to being editor-in-chief of Istoria Books, Libby Sternberg copy edits for a major romance publisher. She is also a novelist. Her latest book, After the War, is now available in print and digitally.

A Sentimental Journey: AFTER THE WAR by Libby Sternberg

by Libby Sternberg

Authors often talk about their "writer's journey," the path that led them to writing, the obstacles they faced along the way, the methods they used to overcome those obstacles, the self-examination that led to their works, to expressing ideas through stories.

My writer's journey began with After the War, the novel I just released through Istoria Books. Oh, it wasn't called After the War when I started it. At first, I called it The Conversion of Paula, then just Paula, then Margaret (for another main character in the book) and only after something like a dozen years did I light on After the War.

You read that right--a dozen years. I started writing this story more than a decade ago, just around the time I decided to stop denying my desire to be published and to get serious about becoming a real author.

My dad's WWII uniform

After the War began as the story of two women--Margaret (Sister Francis Marie) and Paula--in post-World War II America, both on journeys of love and faith. Paula was to be a Mary Magdalene-like character, fallen from grace and seeking...something meaningful in her life. Margaret was to be something of a zealot for whom faith was more a "bribe or even a dare." As I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote (at one point, I had at least three versions of the book printed out, from which I was cobbling the final story), other characters called to me. Tell my story, they shouted, whispered, beckoned. And so I did, adding in the tale of Margaret's nurse, her psychiatrist, her brother--Paula's husband--and that of the priest, Father Al,  who guides Paula to baptism.

But if this is a story of faith, it is not a theological treatise. After the War explores faith from the perspective of the ordinary man and woman, who wrestle with questions of the injustice of the death of good people, of sin and forgiveness, and try to make sense of what is expected of them, who God really is.

My mother

Throughout every iteration of the story, however, I found myself confronting another theme: the war. Specifically, how World War II touched the lives of each character and how its effects shaped their current lives. Eureka! I thought when I discovered this theme. Of course. Of course I was writing that story. I am a baby boomer. And like all baby boomers, I grew up in the shadow of the war. Or rather, in the great warm sunlight of relief that followed it. My father's Army uniform hung in the basement. My parents' wedding photo featured him in uniform and my mother in a fine suit. My friends had had parents who'd served in the war. It was a visceral presence in our lives.

So ultimately, the book became a sentimental journey exploring how all the characters' lives were shaped by the cataclysmic event of a world at war, whether they served in the military or not. As Father Al muses when thinking about his own losses, which were not from direct military actions: "That was the reach of evil. It touched the lives of far more than those who stared it down outright. It oozed as well as marched to claim its victims."

I hope all readers enjoy After the War, but I'd be particularly interested in hearing the reaction of baby boomers to its tale--whether it strikes a chord with them and takes them on a sentimental journey to that bright summer afternoon that was our youth, released from the perils our Greatest Generation parents had faced on our behalf..

___

After the War by Libby Sternberg

A decade after the war, its devastation still haunts them...

In the summer of 1955, a young nun awakens in Johns Hopkins Hospital after suffering an overdose, unable to remember the events that brought her there. As she recovers, she becomes the center of quiet struggles among those who surround her: her brother, a former GI still stung by betrayal during his years of service; her sister-in-law, a beautiful woman seeking love at any price; her confessor, a Jesuit priest who lost everything during the bombing of London; her nurse, a war widow whose sunny optimism leads to repeated disappointment; and her doctor, a psychiatrist beset by survival guilt and doubts about his profession's ability to heal. Suffering from unseen war wounds ten years after the fighting ended, they each find their way to a very personal peace.

"...a touching novel of faith and family...an evocative story of love lost and found, told with beautiful language and emotional clarity. A novel to savor."  Christy English, author of The Queen's Pawn.