like mother, like daughter

[calimac]

You never know what you might get asked to do next. Having successfully indexed a friend's book, a task that had me sweating blood for a few weeks, I found myself asked by her five-year-old if I would index her book.

This was flattering, but a little daunting in its own way. Five-year-old's book is a 20-page story featuring a frequently changing kaleidoscope of characters. There is nothing resembling an overall plot, but there are a few recurring themes.

I am kind of busy these days, but it's not fair to ask a five-year-old to wait very long. So I enforced a couple hours of break time from my other jobs to look over this opus carefully and figure out how to index it. It was exciting to read: something new on almost every page.

You can get some idea of her interests and the kind of book she wrote by looking at the result. Some of these are the specific words in the book, but others are more the author's themes.

airplane, pink, 1
Barbie, 1-5, 16-20; dances, 3; doll, 4; draws, 3; fights, 17-18; and racecars, 3, 19; things she loves, 3-5
Barbie's dad, 19-20
birds, 5
boats, 17
Brittany, 8-10; dances, 8, 10; sings, 9
castles, 6-7
caterpillars, 1, 9
cats, 6-7, 14-15
clouds, 5
dancing, 3, 8, 10
Derrick, 7
doll, 4
evilness, 3
fighting, 11, 17-18
flowers, 5
friends, 2, 4, 10, 11-12, 14-15
gardens and parks, 5, 7, 16
Genevee, 7
green song, 9
Hannah, makes racecars, 13; paints, 11-12
Hello Kitty, 14-15
houses and home, 2, 15, 16-17
jump-n-jammin, 14
kitty. See cat
Lisa, paints, 11-12
machines, 16
Mello Kitty, 14-15
painting, 11-13
park. See gardens and parks
Piston Cup, 20
queens, 6-7
racecars, 3, 13, 19-20
rain, 4-5
Randoulph, King, 6-7
Sally, 3, 16. See also Barbie
Sienna, 2
soldiers, 17-18
songs and singing, 6, 8-9
trash collection, 17

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

That's so sweet! And my, she really packed a lot in, didn't she?

Now I want to read her book

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

That's a "tell the story through non-narrative means" style I've never seen before.

I'd be interested to see how you'd index (...thinks for a minute of something non-taxing for you) some well-known SF short stories.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You think there's such a thing as non-taxing indexing?

If I were going to index a story, it'd be "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", because I want to make an entry for the most intriguing one-bit walk-on character in all SF, Raoul Mitgong.

But Harlan would have to ask me real nice, and I don't want him to ask me anything.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I ought to have said "less taxing."

But what I really want is to see a short story composed entirely as an index.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure if indexing a story would be less taxing. Non-fiction is at least usually more straightforward about subject.

"short story composed entirely as an index" - my spider-sense is tingling. Something vaguely akin to that has been done, I'm sure, though I may be thinking of Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist", a short story made up entirely of a list of ... you guessed it.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Apparently J.G. Ballard has done this in a story called ... "The Index"! Which is described as "a story told in the form of an index to a nonexistent biography."

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Of course it would be Ballard. The story seems to be collected in Ballard's book War Fever, which I will now track down.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

She sure packed plenty of goodies into a twenty page story!

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I love this story, and the index!

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Wow. I think she's going to have to write another one, because there was no indexer in this story.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

It looks like a great index, and one certainly gets the flavor of the story from the index and the fact that the whole book is only 20 pages!

I've done quite a bit of indexing, and everyone has been satisfied with my work. I could make more money at it than I do at copyediting. But it's exhausting, isn't it?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, and what makes it so is the intense intellectual effort required to grasp and consistently organize the material. A more mechanical index ("Make me a list of the proper names in this text") might be tedious, but it wouldn't be exhausting, because no real cogitation would be involved.

And that, I suppose, is why bad indexing prevails so often. Like many bad things, it takes much less work than good things.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

It is also why mechanical indexing is not going to replace people like you and CAK any time soon.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Congratulations. I don't believe I have ever seen a cute index before. I wonder if this qualifies for Guiness?