First off, congrats to Dru, the winner of our latest prize pack from moi. :) Dru, contact me with your mailing address and I’ll get it right out to you. gemmahalliday (at) gmail (dot) com.
We’ll be posting another contest soon, this time with a fab prize from Leslie, including an advanced reader copy of her upcoming book, GUNS WILL KEEP US TOGETHER. I am so jealous!
Now, on to my neurosis of the week. I have a problem. It’s big. Huge. And probably the worst one a writer can have. I am a typo fiend.
I’ll admit I never learned to type in school – I’m of that generation that came after it was sexist to teach little girls to type in school (heaven forbid we all become secretaries!), but computers weren’t in every room of every house in America yet. And texting? R U CraZ? Years off still. So, I fell between the typing cracks. Yes, I’m a hunt and pecker. Granted, I can hunt and peck at almost 70 words per minute. Just some of the words aren’t quite the ones I meant to type.
My first drafts often have babies drying in their cribs, mysterious men diapering into thin air, and more times than I can count my heroine has barley made it to her car before a musked man chases her down while the hero stares at her heaving beasts. And I can’t tell you how many misplaced coma’s I’ve had in my lifetime. Oy.
But, I was glad to hear I was not alone in this affliction. Take listen (if you can follow alone) to Taylor Mali’s thoughts on typos, or "The Impotence of Proofreading".
So, fess up. How many other Typo Queens are out there?
~Gemma "Trigger Happy" Halliday
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The Typo Queen
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17 comments:
My favorite is the author who was going to continually "bone" is craft, as he stated in the Author Note. It still gives me the giggles.
But I can't laugh too hard, because I'm a typo fiend myself, and, even worse, it's awful trying to proof what you write yourself. Sometimes the fingers just get way ahead of the brain.
I have a lot of typos in my rough drafts, even though I'm a fairly good typist. BUT I do my rough drafts on an Alphasmart which is exactly like a keyboard and I hardly ever look at the screen when I'm typing. Which I'm sure looks kinda strange to people at the cafe who are watching me stare off into space and type at the same time. :)
Oh Gemma,
We're twins. My biggest mistake was in a contest. (Thank God it didn't go into the book that way.)It was in the book Divorced, Desperate an Delicious. Chase is hiding behind a shed at Lacy's. He's been shot and beaten up. He's been there a while. In this scene I had him look down at his bloody shirt. Okay...I forgot the r in shirt. One of my judges said . . . "Well, I guess he had to go somewhere."
So...I'm afraid you have competition for the crown of the Typo Queen. Or maybe we can both wear our crowns proudly.
Crime Scene Christie
Congrats, Dru!!!
ROFL, Gemma! I have a bad habit of somehow typing words backwards. No clue how I manage THAT. I'm sure I've had funny typos before, but I can't remember what they were now.
Lol! Bone his craft? Love it!
~Gemma
Jana - I use an alphasmart some days, too. Which makes for even worse typos, as the keys are so sticky on mine. Sometimes I just stare at a word trying to remember what the heck I meant to type there.
~Gemma
Christie - You kill me! That is so freaking funny!!
*handing Christie her very own sparkly TQ crown*
~Gemma
OMG Christie! Too funny!
I am actually the opposite. Typos drive me crazy. Actually I was reading a book recently and there was a mistake in it. I can't remember what book it was and wouldn't declare it if I did anyway, lol. So the character is handed a shirt and then a couple paragraphs later they say he is handed the shirt again. Normally I totally wouldn't remember such a petty thing but I recognized the mistake. I think that's the first time I've ever caught a mistake in a book.
Congrats Dru on winning the prizes! SO lucky! I guess I'll keep trying. :)
Congrats Dru!
I had typing in high school, but it was so long ago, I am doing the hunt and peck method also= lots of typos.
Rachel - I'm always amazed how things like that slip through when books go through SO many edits from so many different people. But, yeah, that sort of thing takes me out of the story, too.
~Gemma
I had typing in school and I'm not bad at it, but still typos slip in. Mine are primarily because I edited something but forgot to delete something else! You wouldn't believe how many of those I found on the manuscript I was editing this week (or maybe you would, Gemma, LOL) The only way I can see them is to read everything out loud and that's not much fun.
I am not very talented at typing either! Thank God for spell check! I do go on blogs everyday so you would think I was a great typist, but no! My mom was the one who got that talent! In high school I had two typing classes but got "D"s in both of them. I couldn't keep up and the assignments we had to do didn't correlate much to what we were learning so I did poorly on them. The teacher wasn't the greatest and was an old bitty!
Actually, I am not good at sewing either! Never liked to sew at all! My mom was again very talented at it. When I was in middle school we had to take a sewing class and I got an "F". Seriously, we were supposed to do weekly assignments and I thought they were dumb so I never turned mine in. When my mom saw my grade she was flabbergasted! Oh well,....
Hmm... I look forward to reading those this weekend, Jenyfer. ;)
Yeah, I do the same thing. In fact, in my first book, I did so much editing that in the final project my heroine ended up getting on completely the wrong freeway because I'd taken out a scene and forgot to fix that minor detail. Oops. Luckily only people in L.A. noticed.
~Gemma
I typo a lot for two reasons. One, I never really learned to type. I do use most of my fingers and I can be pretty quick. But my hands move across the board a lot more than they are supposed to and I will lose place with one hand or the other on a regular basis if I'm not paying attention. Two, one and types a lot faster than the other, which leads to some very interesting misspelling!
oh wow, what a great news to come home to. Thanks. My addy has been mailed to you.
Mrs Rubin was my typing teacher. I had her two years in a row and it was not pretty. I'm a good typist but if I type fast, the typos will appear.
Sounds like I'm one of the few that's good at typing. Alas I come from the generation of "you are going to be a secretary" instead of going to college like I wanted. So I spent 15 years at it. It's rare the book that I don't find a typo in but I actually like finding them - so how weird is that.
Christie, lol! that's too funny.
I'm good at typing. Sure, sometimes I get typos but not a lot.
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