When I woke up yesterday morning, I was astonished to discover that it was Thursday, and the blog wasn’t written.\u00a0 Where did the week go?\u00a0 Down the editorial letter drain.<\/p>\n
From Friday of last week until eleven PM Wednesday night, I was working on Remains of Innocence–page by page and word by word.\u00a0 Typos are the bane of my existence.\u00a0 The is\/it, an\/and, if\/it, on\/one errors are so difficult to spot, and they sneak in everywhere.\u00a0 And characters’ names tend to morph over time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And then there are the invisible double words–“the the,” for example–that the mind simply breezes over without even noticing.<\/p>\n
I started Friday morning by taking a manuscript file written in the previous version of Pages and updating it to the new one.\u00a0 I was worried about it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They were there, all right, but in places I wasn’t used to.\u00a0 (By the way, I read an article about “Who’s ruining the English Language?” the other day.\u00a0 They said prepositions are fine to end sentences with.\u00a0 In this post I’m doing so with wild abandon.)<\/p>\n
So last night, about ten-thirty or so, with my heart in my throat, I tried the spell-checker.\u00a0 It crashed the first time, but after that it worked fine.\u00a0 (I reported the crash to Apple.\u00a0 I did not report the crash to Bill, and I was right not to.\u00a0 ((Whee–the freedom of putting those prepositions wherever!)))\u00a0 If I run a grammar check on this note, the program will go nuts over all those parentheses.\u00a0 I can hardly wait to see what she’ll (Grammarians I know are usually female!) will say.<\/p>\n
Then, when the spellcheck was finally completed, I ran a grammar check.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Despite my care, the GC (short for grammar checker) discovered several instances of double words.\u00a0 Most of her whining was over M.E. vs ME for medical examiner and U.S. vs US Marshals Service.\u00a0 My publisher’s copy-editor is going to have to straighten that one out.\u00a0 And whenever I used the word “convince,” the grammar checker suggested “persuade.”\u00a0 (I believe I changed one but not the others–I was not persuaded.)<\/p>\n
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:\u00a0 “She thinks that?” I said.\u00a0 “Really?”\u00a0 That doesn’t mean there should be a question mark after said!!!<\/p>\n
Oh, and something else.\u00a0 GC believes sentence fragments are a no-no.\u00a0 The problem is, people speak in sentence fragments.\u00a0 All the time.\u00a0 In conversation.\u00a0 So all the flags on sentence fragments were ignored.\u00a0 And I also ignored the flags about starting sentences with conjunctions.\u00a0 And why not?\u00a0 (Oops.\u00a0 Another sentence fragment.\u00a0 Make that three.)<\/p>\n
This morning, having dealt with grammatical rules for days on end, I’m having fun breaking them.\u00a0 Right and left.<\/p>\n
As of 11:03, the corrected manuscript landed in my editor’s e-mail box.<\/p>\n
Now we’ll see if she goes nuts.<\/p>\n
Obviously I have.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I woke up yesterday morning, I was astonished to discover that it was Thursday, and the blog wasn’t written.\u00a0 Where did the week go?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Typos are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[147,51,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joanna-brady","category-remains-of-innocence","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-7g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}