Taipos arr Peinful

Tu meik ay kople ef poynts, grammer ees ay berry eemportunt ting two preserb. Hau  yu rait seis a lat abaut wat yiu haft tu sei. Di werse yiu rait, di lays chanz yiu haf ouf meikin an eempact. 

Now tell me you didn’t throw up a little at the above train wreck of a paragraph. Although exaggerated, it does clearly share the point that grammar matters and that lack of grammar hurts retinas. As a writer, you have to be stuck up when it comes to grammar, at least that’s my take on it and I suspect I’m not alone in my grammar Nazi sentiments. 

Case in point, it’s not that your book can’t have any typos whatsoever, it’s just there’s a very small threshold a reader’s patience will endure. If you take the Peter and the Star Catcher’s series, the stories were quite enjoyable although I found myself cringing at the variety and abundance of typos. Having paid full price for a book, I expected more from the publishing house, the writers and the editors. 

For me, every time I’ve learned of a typo in my first book, I’ll admit it, I die a little because even if it tops 164,000 words, I’m disappointed in myself that I allowed something to take away from the experience. I don’t want ANYTHING to distract from my story because I have something to say. 

So here’s to proof reading, to being anal retentive and OCD oriented and never settling. 

Beautiful mistakes

Sometimes wonderful things happen in life as an accident. Chefs are all too aware of the magic that can happen by having one ingredient fall into a recipe. The attitude is always of curiosity to see if it works or not and quite often, it works in wonderfully unexpected ways.

While showing my poetry compilation to a friend, he asked me what a certain word meant because he remembered correctly that the spelling to that particular word was different. When I check, there it is... a typo.

The initial reaction was anger since I’d proofread the book and when I triple check, the word exists. You see, I wrote burry instead of bury. At first I was mad, until I did like a chef does... and checked the definition to see if this new ingredient ‘worked’.

The result was a definition that changed the meaning of the entire poem for me in the best possible way. My “mistake” made the poem something truly special and the way it happened, even more so.

It just goes to show, greatness sometimes comes about from mistakes.