Big revelation time.
About a decade ago I made a writing mistake. I know, I know, tremendously hard to
believe. Me, the great and wonderful ooze, made a mistake. But it happened and I had repressed
the horror of it until just yesterday when I finished reading Young Thongor by
Lin Carter. The mistake was this. In writing a piece for REHupa, the Robert E.
Howard apa, I misspelled Thongor as “ThongAr.” Although it passed unnoticed by
the vast majority of that august organization’s members, one member (at the
time) caught my mistake and gave me a sound thrashing via private email. I was
certainly glad it was private so that my shame was not broadcast to the world. I wish I still had that email. The upshot was that he had always considered
me a fine critic and thought I showed great promise, but that it was simply an embarrassment
to make such an egregious error. I had
the feeling he lost a lot of respect for me that day. Of course, he was right. It would have been
easy to check the spelling since I had half a dozen Thongor books on my
shelf. I figured I’d gotten lazy. I also
got a pretty good laugh out of it, though.
Cut to today. I’m editing a bunch of stuff for some friends
of mine and have stumbled upon a number of such mistakes, mistakes that could
have easily been corrected with another moment’s thought and some checking. I’ve
realized, though, that the vast majority of these errors are not really careless or lazy mistakes. They’re
unconscious mistakes. The writers are making them because their minds have not
been trained to think like editors. Editors are like the lawyers of the writing
world. And often they get about the same number of jokes told about them. What do you call 10,000 editors on the bottom
of the sea? A good start!
And now, I’ve become one of them, an “Editor.” Next thing you know, I’ll be running for
public office and declaring that Novels should be counted as people.
And every time I get a little frustrated at some of the
mistakes I’m finding in the editing work I’m doing, I just keep saying to
myself…ThongOr, ThongOr, ThongOr.
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