Baz's Blog: madman's dream + stitching together the mag

Baz's Blog

For some reason I was struggling with the cracked idea that hauling five expensive fibreglass fishing boats to Pittwater for Australia’s Greatest Boats would be more difficult that writing about it.

I was wrong. I know the computer was, in some madman’s dream, supposed to give us the paperless office, but of course we now generate more paper than ever, simply because we can, and for me that complicates matters.

The thing is, you get in such a sweat about making a mistake in a big feature like this, or at
least I do, that I print every layout over and over gain, looking for a comma or full-stop in the wrong place – ‘subbing’ they call it - until the machine that churns out these colour pages is glowing like charcoal and barking like a seal.

Strangely, when you’ve read the raw copy, subbed it, then checked it again on a PDF file, you can’t see the mistakes. You see what you hope is there, not what’s actually there, one reason writers so often make lousy sub-editors.

And I’m a lousy sub-editor. I hate it like I hate speed cameras, drivers whose brains seize at roundabouts, artists who use white captions on a white background, and everyone whoever decided that ‘SBS’ should stand for ‘Soccer Bloody Soccer’. So I leave subbing to people better equipped for it. Which is just about everyone.

Funny thing is, despite all the fretting about possible mistakes and technical errors, somehow the TB team puts the mag together on time every time, a fact that after all these years still amazes me.

And the result of all this hard slog isn’t too shabby either and you can see the result, issue 260, at your newsagent.

In issue 261 of TrailerBoat you’ll see “AGB: The Sequel”; part two of
Australia’s Greatest Boats, where we launch the best aluminium fishing craft in the country and put them through the wringer to find a grinner.

It’ll be out September 22. Don’t miss it!

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