The Enemy — a Blast From The Past post from 4-28-12

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday I echoed the following on my facebook page.

Of course, long time readers of my blog are giggling and going “How Sarah” though I assure you I don’t make these mistakes on purpose.  I make them through a combination of two things: incipient dyslexia and the fact that these posts are normally made either late night or early morning.

Needless to say no more had this comic gone up than someone chimed in with that hoary old chestnut of “Anything worth doing is worth doing well” and someone else came in to defend her vigorously on the grounds that “not proofreading or spell checking your blog shows a lack of respect for yourself and your readers, and whether its paid or not, I should be offered the best the blogger can produce.”

Um…  ’Mkay.  So, let’s examine the economics of my life, particularly now that indie publishing has come into “how I make my money” even if, so far, in a very minor fashion.  And that Indie publishing takes time.  And then we’ll explore that lovely Puritan aphorism about what is worth doing.

To begin with – and by way of confession – I haven’t done any indie publishing in a couple of months.  The conjunction of my trying to finish overdue books with the end of school year stuff that affects even parents of young men (as in, graduation ceremonies, award ceremonies, making sure they have their stuff for finals, making sure they don’t forget their own heads while very busy with other stuff) has joined with a spate of breaking stuff in the house, and odd health stuff to rob me of the five hours or so a week that I need for my labor of putting up my short story (and novella) back list.

I’ve also been, I’m sure you noticed, more laid back with the blog, having got more guests in and such to fill in my inability to blog every day.

This is just as an illustration of how close to the bone my time management is.  Throw in a wobble in one area and other things have to give.  They have to, because I still need to eat, go to the bathroom and — occasionally — sleep.

However, most of the year – when not in crunch time – I do blog every day.  I blog for three reasons.

First because I suspect a lot of you would never have heard of me except through this blog.  In that sense this blog is like an extended meet-the-author chat session which will, hopefully, lead to better sales for my paid work.  Eventually.

Second I blog because I’m a kinetic thinker.  I know that sounds weird, but I’m the sort of person who can’t figure out how to assemble a piece furniture, except by doing it.  I learned my letters through copying them, memorized stuff by copying it, and think best by typing.  Sometimes the sort of moral/philosophical stuff I blog about here is me trying to unknot a dilemma in my current book.

Third, I blog as a sort of free-writing exercise.  Lots of disciplines advise this as a cure against the block.  Five pages in the morning, or whatever.  This blog serves that principle for me.

Having found over my years of keeping a blog at livejournal and writing in it only when the spirit moved me that the only way to develop a following is to make it into an habit for the reader – and for that it needs to be daily – I strive to post something every day.  Having given up on the idea of just echoing things, because what I have to offer is more analytic than breezy, I tend to make rather long posts.

So, every morning I roll out of bed and write 2 to 3k words at a sitting.  (Unless I have time to do them on Sunday afternoon, and then I burn the entire afternoon writing five posts.)

I try to make sure of several things as I’m posting them: that they’re interesting or quirky – which is judged by whether they interest ME – that they make internal sense, that I check any obvious references (though sometimes one escapes me mostly through my knowing something that just ain’t so), and that my spelling and grammar are understandable.

This last involves my running a spell checker, then reading over twice – once before and once after it’s posted.  (Don’t ask me why, but some mistakes only become glaring when it’s posted.)

Contrast this with the process I go through before I send a short story to an editor (let alone publish it.)  There I not only do the spell checker, but I print it out, go over it carefully not just for typos but for flow of language, then enter the changes, then print it out and do it again, then have a friend or ten read over it and see if he/she/they can catch any other typos or places where my logic went awry.  Even for a very short short, this will take something like three hours not counting friend/s time (which I pay back by doing same service for them.)

Now imagine me doing this, every morning, with my posts.  They take about an hour to write, even short ones, and maybe half an hour to check.  This means I’m working on them 10 hours a week.  Add in even just two prints/checks and the friend pay-back time per blog, and I’d be working 30 hours a week.  For free.

For free, you say?  But I thought you did it for publicity.  And besides there’s that button up there for donations.  Uh.  yeah.  The button nets maybe $25 a month, [Now up to about $100 a month, still mostly for the fiction — thank you to all my subscribers.  I REALLY appreciate it, and it’s not bad pay for 10 hours — though it’s usually more like 20.  Eh. — a week.  SAH 2014] on a good month, most of it, incidentally, for the fiction.  As for the publicity, I THINK it’s working, (if I ever think it’s not, the blogging stops, of course) but it’s an indirect and slow process.   What do I mean by that?  Well, most people – understandably.  Would I be complaining? – will first buy my books used, to try out.  On those I get nothing.  Then, because I still don’t have any indie novels, they will buy the traditionally published ones.  Again, not complaining.  But I get at most a few cents per book.

My goal is to grow the audience so that eventually when I bring novels out indie, the money comes to me and is significant.  It’s worth a gamble.  BUT right now (two kids in/entering college, four cats, and in a precarious job market for both writers and mathematicians – I’m not seeing a huge influx of pocket money from this endeavor.  As is it is costing me money because when I’m blogging everyday I’m not writing my non-fiction articles, which do  pay (even if not crazy amounts.)

Ten hours unpaid a week and a small financial loss is doable, given what else it serves.  I consider it a loss leader.  Thirty hours means my output of the stuff I DO get paid for is cut in half, or I give up sleeping – I’m sorry to disappoint perfectionists, but I don’t feel a need to kill myself to please them.

So what about “Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well”? – note the well, not PERFECTLY.  A friend of mine who is a professional editor, and one of the best editors I know (I hire him when I can afford to.  It isn’t often) once told me that even if you have a team of copyeditors working for you (which he did at one point, since he worked in scholastic publications where the scientific writing had to be checked and rechecked a number of times) and have each copyeditor initial each line, to ensure they didn’t just glaze for half a page, a careful reader will still find typos.

Having had over twenty novels published, which go through WEEKS of my checking them, then paying someone to check them, then sending them to my (sometimes excellent) editors/publishers, who then pay someone to copyedit and have someone else in the office check the copyeditor’s work, AND finding any number of typos in the printed book, I’m here to tell you it’s true.

If you definition of “doing well” is “Perfect” you’re going to do one of two things.  I’ve seen both among writers, and they’re both deadly. One is to forever rewrite the same novel (or, heaven help us, the same short story) over and over and over again for years.  The other is to do nothing because you can’t “do it well.”

Either of these in fact are illustrations of “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Does this mean I don’t have respect for my work or my readers?  Oh, please.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t even spell check what I put up.  (Okay, sometimes I typo the titles because I type those directly into the browser.  I usually catch it, though.)  I certainly wouldn’t try to make sure it makes internal sense.  And my readers would be my four cats and maybe my husband when he has time.

Look, it takes a certain amount of work to get something 90% done.  And then another equal amount of work to get it the other 5% to 95% of perfection.  (You’re never going to get to 100%.  It’s part of the human condition.  Deal.)  For the books I do the other 50% of the work.  (It takes me as long to check/edit/polish as to write a book.  And I’m a relatively clean first drafter as my first readers can attest.  But the final pass is detail work and FUSSY.  I’m willing to do it for books – and stories – because those are hopefully going to be around a long time.  Blogs?  It’s a daily page, and even though the old ones are there, they’re pretty much only read when someone hits it through a word search.  They’re also usually read by people in the same spirit newspapers or opinion columns were read.  90% is usually enough.

I’m not saying this as an excuse for sloppy writing.  Of course I do my best in whatever time I have to devote to the endeavor.  And so should you.

I’m saying it to remind everyone that the “perfect” is the enemy of the good – it is the ENEMY of HUMAN, period – and unattainable anyway.  If you feel disrespected because there’s a word missing from one of my blog posts (or three words missing.  Or two typos) you probably have other issues.  It is the equivalent of going off into a froth because your mom made you an omelet for breakfast and didn’t plate it perfectly, with a little bit of orange and a sprig of mint, just like your favorite chef at your favorite brunch place does…  Instead of being happy your mom rolled out of bed and made you an omelet at all, before she had coffee.

Most of the people who devote themselves to obsessive typo hunting in other people’s blogs are people who feel inadequate – perhaps because they don’t think they can blog, since they can’t be perfect – and the typo-hunt is a way of attempting to bring others down and elevate themselves.  “Well, I might not blog, but if I did, I’d catch that typo.”  To them I say, “Give it a try.  Find out how hard it is.  Get your self-esteem by doing it, not by pointing out flaws in the product.  Mote, meet Speck.”

Then there are the ones who simply feel entitled.  Nothing but the best will do for them, and how dare you put an inferior concoction in front of my exalted self? It reminds me of the Far Side Cartoon where the dog has mowed the yard all in a scramble of lines and the owner is saying “bad dog” instead of being amazed and grateful the dog mows at all.  To those people I say – like people with a fine palate who must eat only at the best restaurants, you sir or madam are too refined to read mere unpaid blogs.  You should confine yourself to writing that’s not published till after it’s checked by layers of proofreaders and fact checkers.  (SNORT.)

If we get to the point you think a lot of my posts are well nigh incomprehensible or typo riddled to the point of inanity, then I will have fallen below my definition of doing it well and find it not worth doing.

On the other hand, until/unless such a time arrives, or until/unless I decide that my compensation is simply not enough for the labor involved, I’ll go on doing it “as well as I can in the time I have.”  Hopefully that is enough for most of you.

119 thoughts on “The Enemy — a Blast From The Past post from 4-28-12”

  1. While I appreciate people giving me heads up about spelling errors in things I write (I am dyslexic after all), I get really sick of the people who seem to be offended by it like I had just exalted the virtues of Nazism or something. They’re typos. Chill the hell out folks.

    However, I do look forward to the day a GHH or SJW decides to make some comment about spelling with me. I’m going to scream ableism as loudly as I can.

    I’m kind of an asshole like that. :D

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    2. I often point out spelling or similar errors, because I figure stuff happens and know that if I’m polite about it, folks here will go “oy…. thanks.”

      Unless someone’s being a real massive jerk about being smart and perfect and such, it’s not a big deal.

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      1. I appreciate the heads up, so long as it’s polite.

        When someone’s a dick about it is when I have an issue. I tend to not be very polite back.

        After all, I’m a people person. :D

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  2. This reminds me of a comment I used to get when I was still teaching. I’d be on a plane or some other public setting where people chit-chat to while away the time. Sometimes this would happen when I was first introduced to someone. It went something like: “What kind of work do you do?” Knowing what was coming, I’d reply: “I teach English at the college level.”

    Fully nine times out of ten, the person would say: “Well then I better watch my English.” The other one case in ten, the person would want to discuss some point of grammar with me. UGH.

    The point is that there has always been a collection of people who reduced English to writing — never literature or persuasion — and they distilled writing down to grammar. What a horrible reduction … what a loss.

    My sense is that you’re critics hail from the same region. Correctness is all! If it’s not correct, *I* will correct it!

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    1. Did you mean to write “you’re critics”? If so, it was funny. :-D

      (If not, we’ll pretend you meant to. ;-) )

      On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 9:21 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:

      > Frankns commented: “This reminds me of a comment I used to get when I > was still teaching. I’d be on a plane or some other public setting where > people chit-chat to while away the time. Sometimes this would happen when I > was first introduced to someone. It went something like:” >

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        2. My mother taught in high school, but one trick she taught her student teachers was to say, when caught in an error, that you put it in on purpose, to see if they would catch it. It would make them laugh, but it would reinforce that you were in charge.

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          1. It almost never worked with our editors at work (when I was working where there were editors), but we’d try it once in a while anyway.

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  3. As someone who mostly sticks to posting random youtube videos and snapshots on their own blog and who regularly manages to misspell words when only typing out two or three sentences per post, I stand in awe of people like you who write daily essays.

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  5. I do find misspellings and misuse of words annoying. My writing demon drives me to always search for that perfect word or turn of phrase. I do try though to not let style overwhelm content. There are some folks over on Baen’s Bar who’s grammar is simply atrocious, but I greatly value their message, so the occasional wince is the price I willingly pay to read their posts.
    Do allow me on this one special day of the year to say: May the Fourth be with you! And an early happy Cinco de Mayo as well.

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      1. Well a big, parabéns a você and feliz aniversário to your mom from me and mine.
        Hope things settle down and improve to the point that you can see your way clear for a visit sometime soon.

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          1. Hmmm, if you’re(possibly) going to be in western Europe in September, and I’m (possibly) going to be in eastern Europe in September, do we need to warn Europe what’s coming? Or just show up and watch the ripples of shock and awe flow outward as news of our presence spreads? ;)

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            1. No, Europe doesn’t deserve a warning, but do warn the rest of us, so we can don’t miss the fireworks.

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            2. Good. Since both of you will be far, far away from the Shirtless Tsar’s demesne, when he goes mysteriously missing in September you will both have excellent, well documented alibis.

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          2. Certainly hope that all works out for you.
            Does Portugal borrow any part of Octoberfest from its northern neighbors? The Deutsch do start that celebration in September after all.

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        1. And yet absolutely inevitable. Seriously, there’s a whole internet law about it. ;)

          (So… I’m going to end this post before I end up invoking it myself.)

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      2. Bonus points! You found my intentional “gift.”
        Yeah, that’s the ticket. I intended to do that.

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  6. So…
    You’re providing free entertainment.
    And there are people indignant about imperfections in it.

    Misanthropy, FTW.

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  7. My grammar skills have deteriorated since I had to take chemo and my brain stutters (adding an extra the and other problems). So when I read grammar errors and misspelled words (more the write, right or the theres) I give a pass nowadays. I hope others give me a pass.

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    1. Old(er) age is doing a bad thing to my grammar knowledge. I expect my grandchildren, when I have any, will have no clue how to read anything I write, as the typos will prevent anyone from understanding me.

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    2. And I’m at least half blind more than half every year. I just don’t see the damn mistakes, sometimes at all, at other times I can perhaps spot some of the typos. And then next time a few more. And then next time… well, it is slow enough that proofreading my own stuff for several months of the year is kind of never ending project. Frustrating. Very.

      And of course there are also those mistakes which I don’t notice as mistakes, like mixing some British English in when I’m using mostly American English, or sometimes ending up with what is close to being a word for word translation from Finnish.

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      1. Proofreading! Gah! I owe you stuff like that. I plead not guilty by reason of stupid (And life happening, like taking far too long to realize I wasn’t getting enough sleep, causing me to feel horrible all the time). I’ll get back on that.

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  8. I strive for the perfect (re: typos & errors, anyway), and fail, alas. Though I will keep re-releasing until no more are known/found.

    I remember the shock I had, the first time I found a typo in a new Oxford University Press book, in the 90s. That’s what finally brought home to me the internet-sanctioned “good enough is good enough.” Heartbreaking…

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    1. One must remember that not only is the perfect the enemy of the good, the good is the enemy of the perfect. 0:)

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  9. One of the things I like about the blog is its casual nature. Occasional typos are just not that big of a deal. Plus, minor mistakes can sometimes have the serendipitous effect of inspiring (hopefully good-natured) teasing.

    I think two things should be kept in mind when it comes to formats like this:
    1. Stupid autocorrect.
    2. Typos of the world untie!

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  10. I have to admit that I do find typos immensely aggravating myself. However, I have learned a lesson through long and painful experience that I think applies not just here but in many places: If it doesn’t *matter* — if it’s not my job, or someone hasn’t asked me, or everybody knows what is really meant and nobody’s going to walk away with wrong data — then I don’t bother correcting people. The increase in precision is usually not worth the acrimony incurred.

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  11. I’m a poor starving fledgling author so I haven’t donated to you.

    However, though a huge fan of Baen authors, I hadn’t gotten around to you yet. I have been greedily consuming your corpus since reading your blog. I’m one instance where you have succeeded.

    And, since I’m here, thanks for talking the business side. Writing 100k-word novels isn’t daunting, but this whole publishing process certainly is. You’ve helped a ton.

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    1. I’m glad I helped. When I wrote this first, that wasn’t, yet, part of it, but now that’s another reason to blog. I’m supporting people who are (even) more scared than I am.

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      1. Definitely a value added factor, for me. And appreciation extended for this and MGC!

        But I also dig the community.

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  12. Here here!

    Or is that hear hear? Or hear her?

    I view blog posts of all kinds as conversation moreso than writing, and certainly nothing like lit-raw-cherr …

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  13. TINS: There’s one English-language book about the 1979 Siege of Mecca, entitled “The Siege of Mecca.” Every time the author wrote about using armored vehicles (half-tracks) inside the approaches to the grand mosque, the spell-checker “corrected” treads to threads. Every single time. And no one caught it. So I’m trying not to giggle as it talks about the “bad guys” using rolled-up prayer rugs to jam the vehicles’ threads. After that 1) I got paranoid about other people not catching things and 2) I decided that sometimes it’s better just to wince (or giggle) and keep reading.

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    1. My grandmother (grandmother!) once read a newspaper article out loud to me when I was about 18 where the spell checker had replaced every instance of “pubic” with “public”. Grandma was in tears she was laughing so hard as she read about “public lice.”

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      1. There used to be an ad run in a local newspaper, locality to remain unmentioned, for a public shooting range. It included one of those cheesecake photos of a comely young woman with a rifle. Guess what spelling error they made? And it ran every week for weeks on end …

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    2. The people behind Dungeons and Dragons at one point changed the character class “mage” to “wizard”. In a subsequent book of magic items, they did a search-and-replace to that effect.

      This led to some magic items in the game protecting against a certain number of points of dawizard.

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          1. And then there are the occasional problems with the programs. I exported a text from Scrivener as a HTML file, and for some reason one part of one word was completely garbled. Every one of that word everywhere. At least it was garbled enough that it was very noticeable, looked like those strings of letters and signs which are used to mean swearing in comics – something like sft@w!!! – but made me wonder how often something like that can happen subtly enough that you won’t notice? One missing letter, one changed letter, one extra letter…?

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            1. And by the way, one big problem for me right now is the fact that my computer is way too old, I can’t update the programs into something which would be fully compatible with what Amazon uses. So I can’t get that kindle reader for mac to work on my desktop, which of course doesn’t matter with the books I have purchased since I can read them on the Cloud reader, the big problem is that since about Christmas I haven’t been able to get the kindle previewer to work properly either. Sometimes the old version I have starts running, but then the only way to turn it off seems to be by cutting the power to the computer since it seems to freeze the system – it runs, other programs run, but I can’t quit it or turn the computer off the normal way.

              Which means I’m not going to be putting anything up before I get a new computer. On the other hand I probably will not have anything ready before I manage that either. Sometime this summer.

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            2. I saw a number of ebooks (usually freebies) about a year ago coming out of Amazon that would have one word garbled like that throughout the entire manuscript. The fact that they were common for a short period of time made me think it was a problem with the Kindle conversion, and then wonder if the problem had been fixed, or if everyone just figured out that they needed to proofread before publishing and walking away.

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              2. Seriously? People can do that? I re-downloaded, and re-read Kiwi half a dozen times after conversion, and even let my kindle read it out loud just to make sure it was right before I let it go. I’m sure there’s still an error in it somewhere.

                Aside from the fact that the Kindle can’t pronounce Al-Natiri correctly.

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      2. Oh, dear…. I can see someone being such an “expert” that they don’t bother to check over their work. (I’m paranoid, so the first time I did that, I DID check, and then figured out that you put a space on both sides of the word, and then do a search for what you replaced to change the variations….

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        1. Chuckle Chuckle. When I’m creating new entries for my Books Database, part of the process is creating “Sort Title Entries” where I have to remove the “an’s, a’s, & the’s” from the start of the title. Often I use the replace command to change “the ” to ” “. Imagine my horror when the replace “cut off” “the ” from the ends of some words in the titles. [Very Embarrassed Grin]

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      4. I once read a book where they had obviously gone to capitalize Mass. Alas for them, they all-cap’ed it. And no one noticed how the characters kept going to MASS at church.

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  15. I think that the last language argument I got in on the internet was with someone who insisted that the word “viable” when applied to biology meant “profitable” instead of “able to live.”

    Grammar just isn’t worth the fuss. I know what my fingers do and how hard it is to see the errors, even when I know very well what is grammatically correct. It’s easy enough to tell if the person on the other end of the intertubes has a strong grasp of language and just missed typos, finger macros, or made an editing error when they went back to change a sentence and managed to mangle it into a subject/verb disagreement. And if the person at the other end obviously just doesn’t know their grammar, there is even less point in mentioning it.

    And then there is the self interest in avoiding the “grammar and spelling flames always contain a grammar or spelling error” rule. Self interest is a powerful thing.

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  16. then there’s the little problem that substantive criticism requires substance, whereas grammar nits don’t even require a grammatical error, often.

    I remember a historian who claimed that the crusades were the start of Christan/Muslim violence. At one point got really snitty about my having got a year wrong. This from a woman who declared that the second capture of Jerusalem was provoked by the Christian capture. (Though when I pointed out that in her own words, she admitted that was only the second, not the first, she finally sulked off.)

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  17. I’m guessing that the economics of publishing (indie or print) are why we’ve gotten to the point where it is not uncommon to see really obvious errors or typos in print. What bugs me as a reader is when they are still in the electronic copy, long after initial release. I understand that it does take time and effort to fix even the electronic versions, but print publishers used to fix subsequent print runs, and that must have cost even more effort (shooting new plates, reflowing text, etc.) I’m a lot more forgiving of it from indie publishers than someone like Baen. It takes me out of the story, which is the real unforgivable sin.

    On blogs, I don’t worry about it too much. I do wonder why some people don’t use the spellchecker in Firefox to catch the most obvious things. I know it saves me every time I touch the keyboard :-)

    Where it REALLY bothers me is on the sites of major news organizations. If they can’t be bothered to even do a simple proofread, or run a spell checker, (or there is no oversight of the 19yo web intern) then how can I trust the reporting? (I know, you really can’t trust it anyway, but you can learn a lot by reading what IS published vs. what isn’t and by thinking about what isn’t said.)

    The thing about having to print it out to catch some of the errors is true for me too. My brain clearly “sees” text on screen differently than text on a page.

    Anyone else notice a tendency for internet pedantic-ness ( <–seriously a word) to be showing up in real life? Or is it only me? I see people who are a lot more willing to jump in on a minor point and correct me, when the overall message is adequately conveyed. It's almost as if they've been trained to trigger on the first error they see, and then disengage from the conversation and switch into correction mode. Very annoying.

    gotta run–

    zuk

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    1. “Where it REALLY bothers me is on the sites of major news organizations. ”

      Agree. I have noticed a substantive change for the worse in the copy of the WSJ over the last handful of years. Is it the tech, the clueless young interns, or is Murdoch just ruining everything he touches?

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      1. All of the major news outlets have had major financial troubles, and have laid off tons of staff. They are likely not doing nearly as much proofreading and editing as they used to.

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          1. Dunno how that word got in there, except maybe for reflex. I tend to add modifiers like that in case I hit one of my perpetual instances of knowing something that isn’t so.

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  18. The idea of nitpicking the typos (unless they’re fortuitously funny) of someone writing a casual blog in her nth non-native language strikes me as absurd. You add in that degree she’s got tucked away and it becomes decidely dangerous. You really want to start a grammar war with a multi-lingual, degreed writing professional? Oh, you do? Do you really want to start a war (any war) with Sarah?

    Silly child. Two words: fish fusion.

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  19. I just wanted to say, you all are most impressive (The Subtle Self Promoting Writer Self Promotes — Sort Of.), but the comments were closed.

    Fred

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  20. Thirty years as a technical writer (funny, it doesn’t *sound* like a BadThing(tm) when I read it), and periodically some upper-mid-level manager with time on its hands, (and apparently a frustrated would-be bean counter, to boot) would announce that the technical writers needed to be rated according to some wonderful new metric.

    Like characters/words/lines per hour of labor. Or document word count per error in the text. (I wonder what would happen to their little computer model if something managed to come through completely error-free? Say, calculating the bonus due when the weighting factor hit infinity.)

    Fortunately, we’d just smile and nod, and fail to bring up the issue in meetings for a while, and the manager would go back to sleep, and we’d go back to work.

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    1. And the term for this is “managing upwards”, that is, exercising skill and subterfuge to protect the actual productivity of an organization from the brilliant ideas of the line managers and above (especially above).

      I think it was invented by NCOs in the various militaries.

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      1. Various managers in our company talk about productivity metrics. Fortunately, no one has ever actually produced a metric measurement that they want us to document our productivity in coding. I’m okay in the development department, but I work with a couple of wizards, who can do more with 100 lines of code than I can do with 500, in many cases.

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        1. Of course, in programming you have to do a certain amount of thinking/planning before you start coding. How do you measure thinking/planning?

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          1. True story: I once was running a 5 person development team (small company, early in my career) and the President of the company came through and “caught” one of my best developers doing some of that thinking and planning. He asked the developer what he was doing and the developer replied, “Thinking about how I am going to approach this problem.”

            Heard by the entire room was the PHB’s (about 10 years before Dilbert) response: “Can’t you do that at home?”

            I come by my misanthropy honestly…..

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  21. So my email and social media was filled with people telling me that this was Star Wars Day. (May the Fourth … )

    Grrrrr, have I mentioned that I hate puns?

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    2. Well, here’s why you’re grumpy today – look how low you midichlorians are! You should clearly be taking supplements.

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  22. I have to say, I notice every typo, dropped word, and scrambled sentence (made with the eggs of the Word Bird. Or is the Bird the Word?). After all, my professional editing (among other things) is just my attempt to get paid for what I’d be doing in my head anyway. However, I have never and will never complain about them, or even point them out. First, this blog is free ice cream, and free is my favorite flavor. I ain’t complaining about free. Second, I’m not getting paid. I edit for money. Third, it doesn’t really matter. This is my Internet home for most purposes (yeah, I have my own site, but I basically crash on the couch at AtH all the time; at least I try to cook once a week for my keep!) and as long as I can follow what’s going on, that’s all that matters to me. No reason to annoy my friends and hostess.

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    2. “First, this blog is free ice cream, and free is my favorite flavor.”

      I used to work with a guy who claimed his two favorite brands of beer were, cheap and free.

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  23. Stepping in here and probably throwing my mouth in my foot….

    The folks I know who fixate on typos and such are either (a) editors who have a red pencil itch, or (b) people who have never had to write and have their work reviewed by others. The editors get a pass, because they are providing a valuable service (and scratching their own itches). But the second group of folks are like the fans in the bleachers, telling the refs they blew the call while never being willing to go out on the field and do it themselves. They bother me because they want to have the right to make the call without having put in the time. It’s exactly as you said, Sarah; they haven’t had to manage writing while doing fifty other things at the same time. They think learning some English in school and maybe a class or two in college (or more) means they know it all.

    From my stint as a technical writer, I know how incredibly hard it is to write, write well, and write in a way that creates comprehension in another. My hat is off to each and every one of you who writes, because it is hard work.

    May I take this opportunity to ask a question, though? One of the things that I had to do when I was a technical writer was also lead the group of editors we had in house. And we had to explain to a lot of the programmers (who thought their words should be etched in stone and never touched) about the different types of editing that could be done. Without fail, they all wanted the smallest amount of editing done–just grammar and typos, never high-level analysis of their work to learn how to improve as writers. My question is, how often are editors given the time to do high-level analysis in the publishing world at large?

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  24. Just after I started reading this blog, you mentioned one of your books, ‘Draw one in the dark’ I had just ordered it (used of course= you were new to me) In the comments someone said that it was alright except for the typos. I have about ten novels that I am review-edit- whatever at this time. Therefore, I automatically catch typos. When the book arrived, I read it with ‘typo’ in mind. I found two- one was a clear misspell where ‘a’ should have gone before ‘i’ and the other was a ‘then-than’ error. I find more typo’s in legacy print going back fifty years (Shell Scott fan- Richard S. Prather) for example. What’s important is that I enjoyed the book very much and am looking forward to reading the others in the series. And- will forgive any typos I find because story is more important than minor grammar points. In regard to fitting with this blog, does being called a witless fool by a Liberal count toward membership?

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    1. Oh, yes, they routinely call me stupid.
      While there aren’t typos in DOITD there are at least three dialects of English, and some people will think of those as typos. You see, that too was written while recovering from concussion…

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      1. As often as not typos and malaprops are the most amusing part of a post. I rarely fix mine, and on going back, I am even more amused by them than I was when I mis-typed them.

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    2. I still remember the critique that complained of over-use of passive voice in a story where I used it ONCE.

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  25. Pish. Water and ducks is what we say. “Like water off a duck” People who nitpick aren’t worth replying to, or paying any attention to. There are so many more important things in life. Like another shapeshifter book! Please?!?! I’ll take on the nitpickers for you if it would help. Though I warn you, people say I tend to go straight to nuclear options.

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  26. I am (mostly) a freeloader. I buy books and graphic novels that I read first on the net. I seldom tip for blogs, though I probably should. I don’t feel I need to have a hissy cat fit over spelling and grammar in something I get free.

    Tell me that Stalin was a reformer, and I’ll land on you with cleats. To get me commenting on misspelling you have to have done something truly amusing. The most recent incident being a Leftist Twit, One Each who (in defending it) called the New York Times a “new organization” instead of a “news organization”. I don’t recall the precise context, but in general he was criticizing the New Media as too young. It was risible, and I told him so.

    He didn’t reply, probably because it wasn’t worth doing.

    Please, Ms. Hoyt, write how you damn please, and let the chips fall where they may.

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  28. Unless your ‘copy’ is sent electronically, and typeset the same way, some intermediary or electronic glitch can mess up, too. It may well NOT be your fault.

    And I found your blog on the recommendation of Professor Puppy-Blender.

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  29. Well since I bought 4 of your books from baen e-books after finding your blog, I would say the publicity plan is working. There are a couple of your books I have yet to buy, just haven’t had the time to read lately. :)

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  30. Sarah, typos are boring. But I find your grammatical accent fascinating. Your ESL surpasses 99.99% of native speakers, but very occasionally we get to see that the milk-tongue scaffolding underneath it is quite different.
    Yoda-ing on purpose done lame is; and yet, there’s a strong clue here on how to subliminally exoticize a voice.

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    1. Actually mostly what you get is whatever the grammatical equivalent of dyslexia is. Sometimes my head goes to a place I can’t think of the way to say something. What comes out is not Latin syntax, it’s just weird. For instance yesterday on a link at Insty I found myself unable to use Brits because that is, as a matter of fact, a family name on mom’s side (well, peninsular wars. What can I say?) so I put in Britishers, which drove people nuts. :-P But to my head, at the time Brits was “cousins.” And in editing myself, yes, I find sentences completely backwards. It’s not so much the structure (look, I’m not thinking in Portuguese and at this point I’m more likely to import English structure into Portuguese and drive mom nuts in the weekly phone call) as the thoughts. Say I want to say “I ate an apple.” But the first thought that bobs up is apple and then dimly “something happened to it” and I’ll get “Apple was eaten by me” — which is more alien in Portuguese than English.

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  31. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing — POORLY. I.e., nobody starts out doing things well, so to start at all you must be willing to do it poorly. And then you’ll get better, maybe learn to do it well. And if not, the visibility of not doing it well may encourage someone else to come along and say either “try this” or “for goodness’, sake, let ME do it”.

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  32. ‘First because I suspect a lot of you would never have heard of me except through this blog. In that sense this blog is like an extended meet-the-author chat session which will, hopefully, lead to better sales for my paid work. Eventually.’

    You gained me as a reader and now my dad. I never would have heard of you except through one of your publishing nitty gritty posts that was linked to in an article I was reading. So, I’d say it’s working, however slowly. :)

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