Sorry for the short post today, but I’m proofreading Tourist Trap.
I can’t help but wonder how they managed to put so many errors into a manuscript that was clean when I sent it in. So far I’m halfway through, and found about four places where I sent in erroneous text. The other 40 or so errors were apparently put in by their software.
Most common are my subheadings–point of view character’s name, centered and in italics at the head of the section. Some are left-justified rather than centered. More often, they are centered but not italicized. Others are correct, both centered and in italics. How they managed to change some but not all I don’t know.
There there are the ellipses, …, which the software apparently changed to . . . . And the apostrophes at the start of words like ’til for until, which have all been changed to left single quotes.
Well, I hopt to finish this over the weekend, and get back to regular posts. Meanwhile, I’ll try to find time to post older materials.
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As a writer who sometimes pays the bills through sub-editing, I can vouch for the fact that proofreading is a poisoned chalice. No matter how meticulous you are, there will be some little gremlin that sneaks through, particularly when you’re writing about it. I had a friend who used to introduce an error deliberately, just to have got the inevitable mistake out of the way…
The problem was that they put in the errors. They weren’t in the text I sent. (Not that a few didn’t sneak through, but out of 50 so far I only found about 5 that were in the text I sent.)