When I woke up yesterday morning, I was astonished to discover that it was Thursday, and the blog wasn’t written.  Where did the week go?  Down the editorial letter drain.

From Friday of last week until eleven PM Wednesday night, I was working on Remains of Innocence–page by page and word by word.  Typos are the bane of my existence.  The is/it, an/and, if/it, on/one errors are so difficult to spot, and they sneak in everywhere.  And characters’ names tend to morph over time.  I noticed last night that Joanna’s secretary, who has always been Kristen, was suddenly Kirsten, while someone named Stephens veered into Stevens towards the end of the book.  And then there are the invisible double words–“the the,” for example–that the mind simply breezes over without even noticing.

I started Friday morning by taking a manuscript file written in the previous version of Pages and updating it to the new one.  I was worried about it.  My challenging experience with a corrupted version of the new spell-check feature had left me gun-shy. The new program had hidden the dictionary function–Bill was able to find it–and the word count function as well.  They were there, all right, but in places I wasn’t used to.  (By the way, I read an article about “Who’s ruining the English Language?” the other day.  They said prepositions are fine to end sentences with.  In this post I’m doing so with wild abandon.)

So last night, about ten-thirty or so, with my heart in my throat, I tried the spell-checker.  It crashed the first time, but after that it worked fine.  (I reported the crash to Apple.  I did not report the crash to Bill, and I was right not to.  ((Whee–the freedom of putting those prepositions wherever!)))  If I run a grammar check on this note, the program will go nuts over all those parentheses.  I can hardly wait to see what she’ll (Grammarians I know are usually female!) will say.

Then, when the spellcheck was finally completed, I ran a grammar check.  I am happy to say that the new Pages program no longer sends out a sexist alarm every time the word husband or wife is used.  Despite my care, the GC (short for grammar checker) discovered several instances of double words.  Most of her whining was over M.E. vs ME for medical examiner and U.S. vs US Marshals Service.  My publisher’s copy-editor is going to have to straighten that one out.  And whenever I used the word “convince,” the grammar checker suggested “persuade.”  (I believe I changed one but not the others–I was not persuaded.)

GC is convinced (not persuaded) that, whenever there is a quotation with a question within a sentence, that the whole thing should have a question mark at the end, as in:  “She thinks that?” I said.  “Really?”  That doesn’t mean there should be a question mark after said!!!

Oh, and something else.  GC believes sentence fragments are a no-no.  The problem is, people speak in sentence fragments.  All the time.  In conversation.  So all the flags on sentence fragments were ignored.  And I also ignored the flags about starting sentences with conjunctions.  And why not?  (Oops.  Another sentence fragment.  Make that three.)

This morning, having dealt with grammatical rules for days on end, I’m having fun breaking them.  Right and left.

As of 11:03, the corrected manuscript landed in my editor’s e-mail box.

Now we’ll see if she goes nuts.

Obviously I have.