Monday, March 17, 2014

Sheep Teeth

What an odd title for a post, right? I mean, what could I possibly have to say about sheep teeth. Well, in fact, nothing. I have nothing to say about sheep teeth, except this.

A friend of mine, Missy, is editing through Seeking Eleanor. Yeah, yeah, that same old first book I wrote. No, I won't give up on her. You can't make me! I love her, love her. And she deserves the limelight she will one day get. *insert anguished cry here* Now, where were we ...

Despite all the edits (over a million) and rewrites (at least seven) there are still typos. Mostly because, I am human and I make mistakes. God, that was hard to admit. Actually, a bit painful. The simple fact is, when I sit on my human butt and read with my human eyes, I don't see all my human mistakes. Even worse, I didn't even stand a chance at catching the ones in the draft Missy is reading and this is because, just between us, I didn't even read through it after I finished rewriting.

Yes, that means I actually handed her a semi-rough draft. I know, I am a terrible person.

So, she's actually catching things I might have caught on my own. I use the word 'might' because it's touch and go with what I actually see when I read. The truth of the matter is, there are certain things I will never catch because I know what it is supposed to say and my brain fills in the correct word and punctuation and crap. The only way for me to catch everything is to print it off and read it aloud. Because I have a huge respect for trees and an appalling disgust with the price of ink, I won't be printing out my manuscript, which is currently four hundred and thirty pages. Yeah, that's a lot of pages.

And I was supposed to be cutting stuff. Oh, that makes me laugh.

Back to the point, one of the edits Missy came across and corrected was 'sheep teeth'. There's this part at the end of the book where good meets evil and evil has sheep teeth. I actually laughed myself silly over this mistake. I mean, there's the bad guy standing in front of you, skin paper white, eyes yellow and bloody, lips cracked and bleeding, and behind them sheep teeth.

Not really the imagery I was going for. 

Sure, sheep teeth are totally terrifying when you get in there and really look at them. And maybe they would have added a certain uniqueness to my baddie, but they aren't exactly the image I was hoping to conjure in the minds of my future readers. Still, it gave me a good laugh. It also makes me wonder about how my fingers are trying to sabotage me. Sometimes the simple act of typing amazes me. I think one thing and my fingers put it down on virtual paper. Well, not all the time. Sometimes they put in a similar word. Like sheep instead of sharp. This might not surprise you, but it happens a fair amount. Which only confirms my suspicions that my hands hate me. 

Haha. Sheep teeth. 

Grateful for my sense of humour. 

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