Tonight my friend, Mike, pointed out that I had descent spelled wrong in the title of yesterday's post. I fixed it with great haste and a bit of humility.
So, right up front, I have to confess that spelling (correct spelling, that is) is not one of my virtues. Back in what feels like a previous lifetime, when I was in my twenties, I went to engineering school, and we had a saying: "I are an engineer, no got good english." Well, that was one of our sayings. We had lots. This saying of ours raises the question of whether engineers are naturally bad spellers or whether bad spellers make good engineers. But I'm wandering from the topic.
Needless to say, this spelling problem of mine makes writing coherently difficult. I read and re-read, and re-read again, and still I miss words like descent. Damn that spell checker for not knowing what I meant.
This poses a huge getting-published problem for me because from what I hear, the publishing world isn't what it used to be. No longer does the publisher provide an editor, at least not to no-name newbies. So my novel has to be pristine, has to be error-free, with every word spelled correctly. Words like decent versus descent, what with my suspect spelling skills, make editing a novel a daunting, time-consuming task. (Mike caught that one too. I had used verses instead of versus.) Both are real words. Both are in spell checker. In both cases. It's for this reason that I've farmed out the final proofing on my novel to friends like Kim and Kathleen and Dustin. At least they're my friends for now. They may not like me so much at the end of this process.
With that said, for this blog, if spell checker doesn't catch it, I may not catch it either. I'm not trying to be flippant about it, just honest. You can understand and forgive me (maybe post a comment) or you can laugh at what an idiot I can be or you can even get annoyed and go away, but I hope you'll persevere and experience this process with me, until I get published.
So to Mike, thanks!! Keep up the good work.
To Kathleen, Kim, and Dustin, I'm sorry, in advance. You know I love you. And you must love me, a lot, to commit to such an effort.
With all the hard work you have put in on this blog, I thought you deserved a comment. The new picture, or rather the new version of the same picture, is a nice improvement on the previous version where we could not really see you nor the Seattle skyline well. Good luck with the editing!!
ReplyDeleteSometimes I catch spelling errors on my blog months later. An inherent problem when you're your own editor.
ReplyDelete