Friday, June 29, 2007

Writing Bloopers

Urban Fantasy author Rachel Vincent has an interesting post today on writing bloopers. Her homophones are pretty amusing in particular. I haven't ever had such a blooper go out to anyone else other than my wife, fortunately, because she's an excellent editor and almost always sees my work before anyone else. That said, my wife has caught several really funny issues in the past:

Partway though writing THE GUARDIAN, I decided to change it from third person limited to first person. This was fine, but I manually had to go back and make a large number of changes in the three chapters that I had written at the time. One of the few that I missed resulted in: "I finished brushing his teeth, and spit out his toothpaste."

Also, sometimes when I'm editing I accidentally wind up splicing several sentences or sentence fragments together. Does this happen to anyone else? It usually happens when I get several good ideas in a row, and I'm rushing to get them all down before any leak away. At any rate, I wound up with one sentence in an early draft of THE GUARDIAN that read: "Which I what I had been studying for to pass."

2 comments:

Rachel V. Olivier said...

Oh that's funny, that sentence! Yes, I splice things funny, mean to change all of it and only change some of it. I blame the cat.

Colleen said...

Love the toothpaste thing! I changed from present to past tense and took numerous edits to get all the verbs right. I just found another one last night and I'm on my millionth edit!