A four letter word

the scariest one in the world....

There are a number of words that strike fear into the hearts of any writer. “Synopsis” makes our blood run cold. “Edits” can bring on bouts of PTSD in even the most seasoned of authors. But nothing is more chilling than a word that can make any writer break out in a sweat, heart racing into overdrive, stomach churning.

You know the one: Typo

Typographical errors. Mistakes of all stripes – fat-fingered slips, misspellings, grammatical blank spots in our memories from school. They expose our rudimentary skills and lack of command over the keyboard. They reveal the vocabulary words that have vexed us for decades. They remind us of homonyms that don’t show up in spell check because the word you hadn’t intended to use is still a word.

I can’t tell you how many times I have typed form instead of from. More than one character has been form the big city or form the country until it is caught by an eagle-eyed copy editor.

We rely heavily on digital tools now to check our spelling and even grammar, but it can be a trap where we don’t examine our own work closely enough thinking that the smarter microchip has already saved us from ourselves. Any decent Sci-Fi writer will tell you that the machines are not to be trusted.

But, ah, those saintly figures – the copyeditors. The women and men with the red pen and the Strunk and White guide open and dog-eared. Has anyone on Earth earned a paycheck more fully? Maybe someone on the bomb squad does work as important and crucial to survival, but it’s debatable.

They exist to make corrections, catch foolish and unintentional mistakes, and to save us from embarrassment in front of readers who might question why they paid the cover price for a novel written by someone who doesn’t know the difference between loose and lose.

As much as we don’t like to admit it, even copyeditors are not infallible. (Infallable? Infalible? Infallaball?) Far too many writers have had the gut punch of getting a final copy of their book only to find on page 234 that a character became lightheaded with a feeling of “extasy”. Strange how a single wrong letter can make us want to shrink down to the size of a grain of rice and fall through a subway grate never to be seen again. How the other 94,782 words that were correct don’t mean a damn thing anymore. There may be 5 stages of grief, but only 3 stages of Typo: Anger, despair, then back to anger.

Do you know why we call them Typos? Because too many writers made mistakes when trying to spell out Typographical.

The errors are usually subtle. Some may even go by unnoticed by quicker readers. Plurals become singulars, and vice versa. Him becomes Ham. Rarely does the cat walk across the keys and result in bfczgdsx making it into a finished manuscript. It doesn’t make the sting any less painful.

Typos haunt our dreams. Gone are the showing-up-naked-at-school nightmares, replaced by imagined NY Times reviews that cite the errata on page 84 that turned the main character’s best friend into a fiend for a moment.

Once upon a time you may have been able to blame a nearsighted typesetter, a sloppy typist from the steno pool tasked with transcribing your handwritten genius into a courier-font manuscript people could actually read. But now books go directly from your hard drive to the layout team. You may have read that line about “Ma enjoying a peace of pie” two dozen times and your brain made the fix for you. Somehow it got past the gauntlet, beyond the front lines, past the infantry and into enemy territory until it burrowed there in chapter 7 for all the world to see. Everyone except you, that is.

Maybe that’s the worst part. How easily someone else can pick out the typos on a first read. How glaring and obvious it is to them and not to you, the author. Even as I typed that sentence the first draft read “lick out the typos” and “Flaring and obvious”. Maybe they just put these keys too damn close together.

Did you know I once saw the word misspell in a book as mispell? I mean, come on.

But typos persist like a splinter under the skin. They are a fact of life. Also a fast of life. And a fact of lift.

What did they call them before the typewriter? Just dumbass mistakes, I guess. Foolish errors. Whoopsy-doodles?

I’m trying to think of how to go as a typo for Halloween this year because I can think of nothing scarier. Not sure how I’ll pull it off, but I’m sure something will come to me. Or maybe somethig wil cone to be. Who nows?