I'm glad I'm a writer in the days of computers

I’m doing the proof edit of my book, this is my last chance to fix typos or correct errors.

Naively, I thought there wouldn’t be very many because I’d already had my draft copies (written in Pages and converted to Word) reviewed by me, two tech editors, my acquisitions editor, my development editor, my copy editor, and me again.

HOLY SHIT! was I ever wrong.

You see, whenever the copy editor made a change to one of my headlines, that resulted in crazy stuff happening in the Word conversion. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t seeing it in my copy of the .doc files, but when it would get to the production department, they’d be left with headlines that read such things as:

What What What

and my personal favorite, two sections in a row titled:

Choosing

Now, I’m all for choosing and asking questions, but that’s not what my book was trying to say.

So now I’m working on a chapter with a long table of commands. These commands are case-sensitive. But however my document was imported, some of those commands went from lowercase to title case. In other words: create link became Createlink and so on. This was probably some auto-capitalizing feature in whatever program they were using to convert my .doc files into the production-ready files. But it’s still upsetting.

I Can’t Even Imagine Proofreading a Document Submitted in Longhand!

And there was a time when all books were written in longhand and some poor (probably underpaid) person was expected to convert the writer’s (almost certainly) illegible writing into print blocks. I feel very sorry for that person.

Then they moved to typewriters, and the author probably received a galley printing of their work that they were expected to read through and correct. I can imagine, extrapolating from the number of errors I find today—using computers—that approximately every tenth word was written correctly in the galleys. I, like many writers I know, hate to edit and proofread. (Thus I come rant about it here…) But I am thanking my lucky stars that I was born in the era of the computer. That seems like it’s made it at least slightly easier.

I Promise to Never Whine About a Typo Again

Okay, I’ll continue to whine about lame errors online, but I won’t whine about errors in print books. I reserve judgement on ebooks until my book comes out in ebook form and I have to start cringing because of all the errors there… ☺ But hopefully, I’m catching most of the errors in this book. I’m sure there is at least one really horribly egregious one that I haven’t caught and will go all the way through to the second or third edition. But I hope not.