Authors Electric

I can always remember when I bought my first 'word-processor', a clunky Amstrad, because I was then  working on the final rewrites of Ghost Drum. The book had already been accepted for publication by Faber. These edits were something like the twelfth or thirteenth rewrite. Before I'd even sent it to my agent, I'd rewritten all of it from beginning to end, several times, and different parts of it, many times more. As my brother once said, "Writers don't write. They rewrite." The latest Ghost Drum cover Oddly, the opening paragraphs, often one of the most difficult to get right, were almost unchanged from the start. I'd 'written' them in my head during long walks and bus-rides, learning them by heart, before I ever began writing the book on paper. Through all the rest of the rewriting, they hardly changed. In a place far distant from where you are now, grows an oak-tree by a lake.  R ound the oak's trunks is a chain of golden links. Tethere...

'Telling Tales' by Susan Price I was on the track down of an elusive and prolific beast -- one that's common but camouflages itself so well that you can be staring right at it and not see it. I knew that no matter how dedicatedly I hunted it, no matter how many hours or days I spent on the trail, I would miss many of the pestiferous things. So I asked my friend, Karen Bush,   an ex of this blog, to help and she bagged quite a few of the critters, having an expert eye for them. Using Karen's spotter notes, I culled all she discovered – but in the process found a whole lot more of the pests. They breed, I think, as soon as you turn a page. Because I'm talking about typos, of course. I've been proof-reading my latest self-published book, Telling Tales.   There are several breeds of typo. They can be mistaken spellings. I know to be wary of any word containing 'ie' or, indeed, 'ei' because I seem incapable of learning which way round they go in any...

A case in point You have laboured for months, crafting your brilliant book ... and then toiled for further long days and nights, editing, tweaking, refining, proof reading and formatting it.           And now you are all ready to do the most satisfying bit ... pressing that publish button. But wait!           Are you really, really sure it's as good as it can be - hopefully the content is good, but is the appearance up to scratch?          Yes, of course you are sick to the back teeth by now with reading it through and checking and double-checking it on the previewer (you  did double check it, didn't you?)           And yes, of course it is very easy to make changes  after publishing - but be honest: how many of us actually bother to read through our own books again once w...

I hate typos. I really do. They irritate me beyond belief, distracting me from what I'm reading and making me itch to pick up a red pen or a highlighter. They seem to stand out from the text, thumbing their little fonty noses at me. Naturally, when I proofread my own stuff I go through it very, very carefully. It annoyed me no end when one publisher airily told me, "Don't you worry about correcting typos. We have a very good team who are very good at dealing with that side of things. They are really hot at picking up typos." Dear Reader, they were not. Despite the fact that I corrected all the typos anyway, they not only ignored them, but just for the hell of it added in some entirely new ones. The one that especially made me froth (apart from the change of surname of a Famous Person in the index) was the change from 'Excerpt from a Diary' to 'Exert from a Diary'. Obviously the 'team' the publisher used was a computer spellch...

When I first left university I worked briefly for an investment bank. The phrase 'fish out of water' doesn't cover just how unsuited I was to this job, to that whole world. But I did learn some useful skills. One thing that the bank took very seriously, oddly, was the written word. Documents and letters were always checked again and again. One day I was responsible for a letter to a client called Angus. The letter was, as always, checked by a number of senior people before it went out. But despite all that no-one noticed that the letter was addressed to 'Dear Anus.' The spell check didn't pick that up because 'anus' is a word. Of course, Freud did have a hand in this. The client was a horrible man and we all secretly wished to insult him. But, for me, the incident has stayed in my head mainly because it demonstrated how a number of well educated people can look at a document carefully, even a short document, and fail to notice a significant...

We all make them, don’t we? In that glorious rush to get words on paper fingers get muddled and our wisdom can emerge as gobbledegook. So we edit, edit, edit – honing our wonderful sentences until they say exactly what we want them to mean. Except sometimes they don’t. In our heads they are wonderful, because we see what we think we’ve written. But the reality can be wobbling tenses, repeated words words, missing punctuation so one sentence runs into another and the whole thing makes no sense at all and even speellings that hide in the sentence undergrowth and confuse here and hear. I know, you’ve read the thing six hundred times and are convinced that this time it’s perfect. And then along comes Nellie (probably aged about six, with a reading age of eight) and spots twelve mistakes in the first paragraph and it’s all you can do not to chew your own arm off with frustration because YOU ARE MEANT TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS STUFF! So – this is a plea – how do you spo...