dear editor

[kaigou]

I know you're very busy, and I know your publishing house probably isn't big enough to pay for an editor as well as a copyeditor, so here's a small trick I learned years and years ago, before the advent of spellcheckers. To find the especially prickly homonym-type spelling errors (such as the kind we're now cursed with, thanks to Word's auto-correct feature), read the story backwards. It's a great deal harder for your brain to superimpose a mental auto-correction when the next word you read is not the logical 'next' word in a sentence.

Then you'd probably be more certain of catching peculiar spelling mistakes like, "the thundering hoard," which to your many-times-read eyes was probably an invisible mistake. I've never read this story before, and believe me, that error leapt out at me with full force.

On the other hand, you might be relieved to read that I may be the only one who reads that and also thinks immediately of my dogs. Sachiko is big on hoarding all her toys, after all, and while I may grimace at having what's supposed to be a spectacularly tense high point in the story interrupted by thoughts of a dog bed littered with toys, I also find it an apt description... just not the one the author intended. Somehow, the visual of an army of monkey, bear, and frog plushies thundering their way across the plain to save the day is just not fitting with a medieval action/thriller.

Muchlove,
me.

ps. While you're at it, please inform the author that there are plenty of other time-appropriate words to use than just varlet, and that at two-thirds the way through the story, I'm beginning to get a bit varletted out, kthxbai.

ETA: Just found one that needs to go down on The List: ...a lone rider separated himself from Winthrop's writhing thong, coming to a stop mere feet from Gareth... I'll ignore the general awkwardness, but... WRITHING THONG. We'll also ignore that my first word choice for "a group of men on horseback excited about news" would not necessarily be "writhing" but... THONG.

The visual, people, the visual. IT BURNSSS USSSS.

Comments

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

One wonders what book you are reading . . .

I'm off to Radcon this weekend. Fun will be had. Sleeping . . . less so.

Di

[l-clausewitz.livejournal.com]

Yeah. What book?

[tiercel]

I, myself, have always been especially fond of "baited breath."

[misshallelujah.livejournal.com]

...a lone rider separated himself from Winthrop's writhing thong

God... no.


Just... no.

[christeos-pir.livejournal.com]

The Writhing Thong

I think my ex used to tend bar there...

[hokuton_punch]

... okay, I did actually laugh the fuck out loud at writhing thong. XD Oh man. Priceless.

May I never allow such a typo to get past the beta stage. *devoutly hopes*

[okaasan59.livejournal.com]

Writhing thong for the win.

[ramenkuri.livejournal.com]

A lone rider(!!) appearing from Winthrop's writhing thong. Truly fearsome visual.

[rogue53.livejournal.com]

O M F G! It was a good thing that I had put the hot chocolate down before reading this post, otherwise I would have had to go take another shower!

*writhing thong*

Oh, Lord, preserve us!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Came to visit you after the fun conversation on kythiaranos's page, and here you had the very homonym pair my husband and I were joking about the other day! He saw the hoard/horde mistake in an article about Mac aficionados ... forget exactly how it was phrased... maybe "the hoards of Mac lovers"--and they weren't talking about stashes of old computers, either....

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

The worst (other than the, uh, thong) is the one I keep seeing as the top hit everytime I search for some set of general terms like "fantasy" and "urban" and something else, can't recall now. But it's basically a snippet via google that says, "this book is larded with..." and that's where I grind to a halt. Because the last thing I'd want associated with my writing would be lard, and then I think of the coffee can under my grandparent's sink where all drippings went, and I just go.... ewwwww.

Ffffttt.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Hahaha---the thong was really the best :-D

Yeah, the whole lard imagery. Yang Guifei (Tang-dynasty beauty) was supposed to have skin like lard, and while I could see what the image drives at (white, smooth, pearly, even)... it just doesn't work in our modern age...