Cleaning Up My Act

I've been cleaning out my office, purging old, useless STUFF.

Every now and then, I come across a long-forgotten nugget.

For instance, yesterday I found a letter I received from the Italian

publisher of How to Steal a Dog, outlining the changes they were making when translating the text from English to Italian.

Here are some of the more interesting ones:

We changed the following Mama's action because in our opinion it's not a good example for young readers:

p. 63: "The bread we had in the milk crate in the trunk of the car had turned green with mold and Mama tossed it out the window." We changed to "...Mama threw it in the bin."

We think it's better to eliminate all references to religion:

p. 138: We eliminated "My other car's a broom. Honk if you love Jesus." [note: That was a bumper sticker.]

In our books, we normally try to not refer to smoking and beer. [editorial comment from me: Um, I've BEEN to Italy. No smoking or beer? Maybe I went to the wrong Italy.]

p. 31: "The man who had been working on his car was sitting in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette." We changed to "...was sitting in a lawn chair drinking a soda."

p. 31: We eliminated the following line: "I didn't look at the man when I passed him, but I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke."

p. 45: We eliminated the following line: "Cigarette butts were scattered on the floor beneath it."

p. 45: We substituted "beer bottles" with "bottles."


We would like to change some words because for us they are too hard:

p. 37 and 88: We eliminated the word "idiot."

p. 58: We changed "dern world" to "stupid world."

p. 119: "Mama would kill us," we changed to "Mama would punish us."

p. 138: "I like to died when I saw" was changed to "I like to sink." [editorial comment from me: Huh?]