editing

I edited the hell out of my book of short stories, so I was surprised to spot a misplaced modifier a couple of days ago. A few friends read some of the stories before they were published but they were just proud that their lovely friend Sandee had written pretty stories. Grammatical errors and structural defects weren’t on their radar. They read it and said, “Yay! Sandee wrote a book!”

I’ve been a writer and editor at different jobs. While I know it’s hard to spot grammatical and structural errors in your own work, I thought I was up to the task. The editor at Calliope made just a couple of changes to my short story for the sake of clarity, so I was confident in my editing ability.

I fixed the error for the hard copy version of the book. If I hadn’t used all of my book budget money for advertising, I would have purchased an editor, a big, hunky 25 year old who wouldn’t mind working in my apartment sitting on my lap. I’m looking into it for my other book.

🙂 😦

I finally figured out how to make smiley faces with a colon and close parenthesis symbol. After my frustrating search on the wordpress screen for buttons to click that would yield me the yellow orb of idiotic expression, with or without teeth, I looked for clues in the comments section — you guys really like those things in the comments section. I found nothing, after peering at length for any clue that might be hovering around the yellow heads. Scrolling, scrolling downward — I get more comments these days — I spotted it — a naked colon and close parenthesis symbol — what the?! Why, this must be it, I thought. But somehow it didn’t take in this person’s comment box — it didn’t flesh out. Putting my analytical mind to task, I concluded that sometimes having an ellipsis at the end of a sentence interrupts the full fleshing out of these amazing creatures. This poor person may not have known this. I practiced in my own box — as I always do — and — blam! — I got a head. I was so proud of myself because I even figured out if you use the colon and open parenthesis symbol, the reverse, you get a frowny face. But my excitement was muted when I saw that someone had festooned their box with a live animated head, with the ability to open and close their mouth in hideous, mocking laughter. I got over it however because today I figured out how to edit a comment on facebook!

I’m only on the blog and facebook and the twitter for four months. And while I have a twitter account I’m too overwhelmed to use it now. So it just sits there at present. I swore up and down Broadway that I would not succumb to any of it. But I realized that if I would be publishing a homemade book, that I had to do my own sorry-ass piss poor marketing — so the twittering, facebook and blogging it shall be!