Typo Gremlins

I'm convinced that typos creep into manuscripts every time you touch them, whether you're revising, adding page numbers, or even just carrying your laptop from the study to the kitchen. Typo gremlins are like the sock gremlins that live in the dryer, stealing one sock from every load of wash. They're like the car key gremlins pictured in a Far Side cartoon a friend once gave me. It showed the gremlins gleefully lifting car keys out of the pocket of a coat hanging by the door.

Like all of us, I've had my struggles with sock gremlins and car key gremlins, but lately the typo gremlins have been getting completely out of hand. With Lost in Lexicon, a copy editor went through the manuscript twice, and both I and my editor combed through galleys a few more times, finding errors on each read. After all that, the published first edition still had a couple of typos. Now I can't bear to read the second edition to see if more errors somehow snuck in.

In Tumblehome Learning, we all do everything. I'm chairperson and one of the authors. I solicit manuscripts; I read early drafts and give feedback to authors before turning them over to Ian, our pro editor; I'm art director; and I volunteered to copy edit one of our new books - Kelvin McCloud and the Seaside Storm, a weather-based mystery by Michael Erb. As with every kind of editing, this was an education, sending me frequently to the Chicago Manual of Style. Should times of day be written in words or numerals? How do you handle quotation marks around an an interruption, set off by dashes, in the midst of one person's speech? Which compound words are hyphenated, which join together as one word, and which stay separate? Where should one insist on the past perfect versus the simple past?

As I edited, I carefully fixed typos such as missing letters, extra spaces, en-dashes which should be em-dashes, etcetera. Then I read carefully through the whole manuscript once again, finding a few more errors. Then I passed the manuscript over to my son Damian and offered him a dollar a typo. Well, apparently the gremlins were rooting for him, because he found four typos, two misplaced commas, one badly handled set of dashes within conversation, and one dash that wasn't long enough. He also asked some questions that sent me back to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Damian was great. I'm impressed that he notices so much about commas. But despite his hawk-like eyes, I'm willing to bet that we'll find a few more typos before we're done. Hey, there are probably typos in this blog post. There usually are.

Ice Castle copy editing is finished

Today I received a copy-edited draft of The Ice Castle, an Adventure in Music, which is the sequel to Lost in Lexicon. Here's the blurb:

Their return to Lexicon is not all that Ivan and Daphne imagined. For one thing, Aunt Adelaide is deathly ill. For another, their musical younger cousin, Lila, has stumbled into their secret land.
Instead of rejoining old friends in the Land of Morning, Ivan and Daphne find themselves tracing Lila through a wintery landscape where what matters most is how well a person sings.

Sorted by musical talent and consigned to different lives, the cousins face cold, illness, and attempted murder. Slave, servant or fine lady, each has to escape a kind of imprisonment before they can find one another, foment a revolution and restore spring to the Land of Winter.

We have a beautiful draft cover with Ivan and Daphne in swirling blue and green cloaks and the Ice Castle in the distance, but I'm not allowed to show that yet.

To my delight, the copy editor used a light hand. I'm always happy to learn if a compound word is really one word, two words, or a hyphenated word. (The word "copy-editor," for example: I'm not really certain.) Copy editors pick up double periods or places where I've used a word twice in one sentence. Apparently we no longer put commas before "too," as in, "He insisted he was coming too." When I was in grade school, that had to be "He insisted he was coming, too." So I always learn a few things, like whether to put spaces between the dots in ellipses. But I'm happy to say the copy editor did not make many changes that affected meaning, so I won't have to fight back much. I will argue some wording.

Meantime, Joan Charles is converting sketches into fully realized drawings. She really brings out feeling, detail, and texture in her final drawings. I just sent Scarletta Press a sketch of the layout of one of the towns the cousins visit. We think we'll use an aerial view of that town as a frontispiece. The book is a fun, exciting one, and I'm thrilled to see it taking shape.