Yesterday I thought of a comment that Sarah Durand, a Senior Editor at Atria Books, made in April during an Edgars Symposium panel. (The topic was the state of the market, and--as I'm sure will come as no surprise--we learned that vampire fiction and big scale thrillers are selling well.) She said that she always knows by the end of the first page whether a book will interest her.
The importance of that first page came to mind when I realized—while watching the last mail truck of the day disappear down the highway—that I’d used a semicolon instead of a colon on a page that mattered. Despite the fact that friends and family kindly refer to me as anal, this particular sort of imperfection plagues me. Inevitably, I notice too late. Occasionally this occurs after a document has gone to print.
Do you ever find ten things wrong with what you’ve written just after you submit it to an agent, a small press, or for publication in a corporate brochure? An error in web text may initially embarrass, but since it can be fixed it is far less critical than, say, gigantic and graphically impressive text scrawled across the largest panel of a client’s trade show booth.
In fact, the first time I noticed this problem was when I took up calligraphy, and later did typeset layout for a commercial printer. A sort of shift occurs in my brain, and the words on a page become a work of art instead of plain text. The words look lovely, so a sort of creative pride allows my brain to miss slight imperfections. It must be similar to small flaws on a painter’s canvas. In light of the whole, these are easy to overlook.
Any bloopers you’re willing to confess? Surely I’m not alone....
— Lois
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11 comments:
That mail truck...I have a friend who calls that the "ohnosecond." If a nanosecond is the shortest measurable length of time, then the ohnosecond is a very short length of time that feels extremely long. It's the time when you realize that you sent that email complaining about your boss TO your boss by mistake. Or the moment you realize you've used a semicolon where there should have been a color.
I find those things all the time, though usually not JUST after submission. It is in the interminable wait between submission and response, when I go back to look at the piece in question and say "Oh, no, how could I have sent it off like that! It will be rejected for sure!"
Laura, I confess that the email ohnosecond occasionally occurs before I send that email to the boss. Yet I press the send button anyway....
I hate that kind of thing, but I just saw a NY Post front pagevheadline that read WTIH instead of with for quite a while. Sigh.
Clare, I agree it's a crying shame. What happened to editors? I've even seen front-page errors in the NY Times. For shame! Yet in some ways this comforts me. If we're all getting sloppy, my own very occasional (!) errors won't disturb quite so much?
Of course, now I see my "pagevheadline". Maybe I should give the newsies a break- they might be tapping on iPhones, too.
But I know what you mean. I'm hiding mine in a vast field of equally heinous weeds.
For many years, I made it a practice not to read anything I wrote or edited once it was printed. Too upsetting. :)
Absolutely - I have found things wrong after I have sent it. It's amazing how you can spend hours, even days on a piece, print it out (okay, I've caught many on the print-out, which is a phenomenon in itself), sent it, and then reviewing it after it's gone - uh-oh! How did I miss it? It's like some sort of amnesia! You are not alone, Lois!
A recent gaff in a newspaper occurred last week; my mom had paid for an "In Memoriam" for my brother; someone in the obits section (had to have been new), put my brother's death date as the same day of the newspaper (5/20/09) instead of 5/20/01. They gave him eight more years of life! I noticed the other In Memoriams had "09" as their ending date, too.
Elaine, I had thought of asking you whether editors - you being one, and all - were made of finer stuff. It helps to have another pair of eyes, but how many times can you get your writing group to reread your ms!
Wow, Kathy. That's quite an oversight on the paper's part. And I agree, I catch a lot in a printed version that I wouldn't on screen...plus I don't get sidetracked with on-the-fly revisions.
Lois- One of the most important things I had pounded into me as an editor is that the more eyes that look at a piece, the better. And if yours is the only pair of eyes, go through it at least twice and preferably more. Everyone picks up different problems. And every time you go through a piece, you pick up new things--that is, once one layer or type of problem is removed, others come to the forefront. The only ways in which professional editors differ from non-editors is that they're trained in proper grammar, punctuation, etc.; they're trained in the different styles (Chicago, AP, AMA, etc.) used by today's publishers; and they're detail-oriented, otherwise known as being anal or having OCD.
Elaine, I'm right there with you, anal and ocd i'm all too familiar with. Yeah, I'm amazed...at one point I went through the markups of five readers and although there was some overlap in what they found, about 60% was unique for each! And whenever I go through it I find a million ways to make it better. Ah well, each new agent gets a slightly new and improved version.
You are not alone as I have done the same thing a couple of times with my queries. The same with the rewrites to parts of my manuscripts: after the excerpts have been sent the bloopers seem to rise off the page saying "here we are!"
Most times it pays to go have a cup of tea and another look before sending the email off.
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