...a red pencil clenched in their teeth

John Ramsey Miller


Do not get me wrong. I love and appreciate my readers ....mostly. I recall when fans sent letters to the publisher who forwarded them to me. That's how long I've been around. Most were complementary, some not so much...  


Every published author has to deal with people who find mistakes in their book and have to get in touch immediately so they can do a "superiority" dance. Nonny-Nonny-Boo-Boo, I know more n' you do! We all hate their slimy little entrails. I have written people and told them not to ever read my books again and I've offered to pay them for the book they bought if they would agree not to ever buy another one. My wife gets crazy when I do things like that. 


I have told people that the mistakes were obviously typos put there by a typesetter who zoned out and the copy editor missed catching it. With what publishers pay copy editors and the nature of the setters reading and keying in the words of every kind of book there is, and I get it. So now so should you, anal compulsive reader dearest. 


Most readers are truly dears, but there's that one in five thousand who read novels the way surgeons read the New England Journal of medicine.  You get words wrong in that tome and people can die. I seem to get a few readers who read with their feet up and a red pencil clenched between their teeth. 


Here's the thing. I write stories in real time as I imagine them. If I put in mistakes, they are often invisible to me in consequent readings and edits. I see something, I read it the way I imagined it--if that makes sense. Sometimes my lens is clouded. If (the editorial) you are going to read for grammatical accuracy, don't read my books. Read law books. If you find a mistake in my books, keep it to yourself, because it isn't in my control. Write the typesetter or the copy editor and tell them they ruined my book for you. I can do nothing at this point but allow how friggin anal you are and repeat for the twentieth time, "Tell somebody who will be impressed that you read each word and found something that didn't belong, or found something missing, even after a dozen professionals missed it."  


If the editor(s) don't initially fix it, it will remain as broken as when I built it. 


I was not an English major, and I couldn't diagram a sentence if my life depended on it. I will dangle participles like I used to hang those foil strip icicles on Christmas trees, end a sentence with a preposition, misspele words, run a sentence from Eugene to Miami Beach,  double tap words, CAPS and lower cases lie where they fall, and more terrible, unforgivable things. It's just me.


Here's an example. (Spoiler Alert) If I remember the book correctly, in UPSIDE DOWN I have a character say something in German when he is about to kill another assassin (like he could accomplish that). The reader should think this guy is the German assassin in a clever disguise. This woman writes to tell me that she teaches German and loves knockschnizzels and she has to tell me that my German grammar is badly flawed and whoever does my research should be "drawn and quartered." Otherwise she loved the book. My reply went something very much like this:


Dear (Her name here),
My stepmother is German. I took German in college as my foreign language. I have several close friends who are German or who speak German at least conversationally. The phrase you are referring to was taken directly from a Babel Fish translation of the English I wrote in the little block. You see, the character got the German he spoke from babel Fish because he wasn't German at all, which I thought clear enough. He wanted to trick the real German assassin by tossing off a phrase he got from Bable Fish (since he did not speak German) and having the other guy answer in his native tongue. I don't know how you missed that since this is the only note I've received out of 200,000 copies out there.
Thanks for taking time to write.
John


She wrote me a lovely e-note response apologizing and saying that she had gone back and re-read the scene and was shocked she got it wrong. The fact is, I got it from Babble Fish because I planned to make it perfect later and never checked it or had anyone else do it. The copy editor actually noted it and asked if it was a correct translation, and it was never repaired by me or anyone else. And truth is, it could be taken that way, or hers. But the point is, I recovered and I came back and performed the superiority dance myself. I loved it. I should have felt, but I didn't feel at all guilty. I wish I could have done that with every one of those I've ever received. But sometimes you are standing there naked to the world ashamed to be associated with a word-fail most foul, and to some, unforgivable. 


Truthfully, it's nice to know someone with literary Asbergers is carefully policing the pages. Although, as goes with real cops, we'd all rather see them pulling someone else over.


The big problem with me self-publishing a book is that fact that it will be rife and rifled with mistakes large and small. If I lose a few anal compulsive readers, I doubt I'll much notice ...or care. But I am sure I will hear from most of them.