Etc Etc Amen

[Jonathan E.]

. . . 'hundreds of typos.' This can't help but imply a laziness and carelessness on my part, but the fact of the matter is that I must have been through that manuscript half a dozen times tightening up the prose and making all sorts of little changes, but for some reason my eyes have obviously become blind to certain kinds of typos, and even if I went through it again, now, with this knowledge, I'm fairly certain I'd still manage to miss 70% of them. Luckily my sister is now reading the book and is marking these mistakes, so future copies won't be quite so blighted.

It is very hard to edit and proofread your own material. It's not lazyness or carelessness. After awhile, your eyes and brain will just glaze over. Don't beat yourself up over it. Besides, some people are good at one thing and some at another. Proofing and editing are actually pretty specialized skills, although many people think they can do them.

If your sister is Word-literate, it might be worth her marking things up in the Word doc using the "Track Changes" function. Actually, anybody who's reading it from the screen could mark it up for you and send it back — if they were willing to perform the service and you were prepared for the onslaught. Sorry, but I personally did not think the manuscript was ready to be sent to a publisher in today's publishing business because of the typos.

[howard male]

Jonathan wrote -

Sorry, but I personally did not think the manuscript was ready to be sent to a publisher in today's publishing business because of the typos.

You could be right, Jonathan, but help is already on-hand as Chris kindly sent me a comprehensive list of what turned out to be only 45 that he had spotted - complete with page numbers - what a star!

Interestingly, while I was trying (and obviously mostly failing) to spot these kind of errors myself, I found myself more readily (no pun intended) spotting them in respectable published fiction. For example, Zadie Smith's latest, and a novel about Egon Schiele. The latter actually had a couple of real stinkers in the first 10 pages! So obviously these little buggers still manages to sneak under the radar, however many times a manuscript is studied by editors and proof readers.

[Jonathan E.]

Yes! Standards have fallen disgracefully. The guilty should be punished. When I was young . . .

When I was young, it was considered the traditional/industry standard to require six pairs of eyes to weed all the little buggers out. Nowadays, people think spellcheckers can do the job. And then they get lazy about doing it themselves. (No, Howard, that is not a comment about your manuscript. As I said, it's a difficult and specialized job — not for the average writer, especially of his or her own material.)

[howard male]

Jonathan wrote -

Nowadays, people think spellcheckers can do the job. And then they get lazy about doing it themselves

Spellcheckers are certainly no help with the silliest of my errors. I remember a couple of years back, I claimed on this forum that much of my bad spelling was down to a condition I essentially invented for myself: semi-dyslexia.

The kind of mistakes Chris locating in my manuscript are the best evidence I have for supporting my hypothesis as many of them are the same writing glitches I had as a child:

Using the word 'I' when a mean 'a' and vice versa, so that 'it was a simple palette' becomes 'it was I simple palette.'

Or using the letter 'f' when an 'r' is so obviously the letter required: 'perhaps it was dead of dying.'

I'd already managed to spot many of these typos but, obviously, some still got away. But they are clearly not normal spelling mistakes as there is no logic to them (as there would be to, say, spelling 'boat', 'bote.')

My most frequent error as a child was writing the mirror image of 'b's and 'd's at almost every opportunity, so that ''bird' would become 'dirb' for example. But, interestingly, I never do this on a word processor.

What's also intriguing (and of course intensely annoying) is that I am actually replicating glitches I had while writing by hand, on a computer. Why should I do that? You would think that because tapping keys is quite a different operation to writing with a pencil or crayon, that these mistakes would disappear, but oh no, they still pop up like mischievous ghosts, making me look more than stupid. I suppose it's because these mistakes have their origin in the brain rather than in the hand, and so they can't be overridden just because I'm now having to tap the right key, rather than write the right line-and-loop with my pen.

Reading this back, I wonder if it's of any interest to anyone but me, but I've written it now, so I might as well post it...

[Dominic]

I didn't spot any typos in Murakami's book about running, but was occasionally irritated but American spelling. I guess that just me being arsy.

[howard male]

That's my point, Dominic. You don't spot 'em, unless you're looking out for 'em! It's only been since I've been in the mindset for spotting them in my own work, that I've started to spot them in published books. My sister's had the same experience since she started to scan my book.

Funnily enough, at the weekend a friend of mine was asked by a Japanese friend of his, what author he would most compare me to. His answer was Murakami. I can't see it myself (I couldn't get into the one novel of his I sampled) but I think he mentioned Murakami mostly because it was a reference point he knew she would understand.

[howard male]

PS

Dominic wrote -

but was occasionally irritated but American spelling.

I suppose we should be grateful that The English language is still even called The English language. Surely one day it will suddenly just become The American language overnight and we won't be able to do a gawd damn thing about it.

[Rob Hall]

I suppose we should be grateful that The English language is still even called The English language. Surely one day it will suddenly just become The American language overnight and we won't be able to do a gawd damn thing about it.

'American English' is an acknowledged variant of the English language. It's not only spellings, but also pronunciation, some grammatical differences, different words existing in each and the same words having different meanings in each. Who was it said that we're two nations divided by a common language?

[howard male]

Rob wrote -

'American English' is an acknowledged variant of the English language.

Well, we're half way there already then aren't we.

[howard male]

I'd like to take this strand off on a bit of a crazy tangent, if that's OK.

The main protagonist of 'Etc Etc Amen' isn't a person it's a philosophy/theology which centres on the notion of entertaining the possibility that coincidences are cosmic nudges (or mini-miracles) from the Knowing, Unknowable Universe (The KUU). Coincidences are therefore seen by KUUists as the subtlest form of supernatural phenomena, ignored by most people, but highly valued by them.

Being the dumb optimist that I am, I've already started to think about the sequel to my unpublished high-concept would-be cult novel, and this is where you lot (can, if you want to) come in.

'Etc Etc Amen' mentions a KUU website were KUUist from around the world post their stories of bizarre, amusing, and even fairly banal coincidences, the best of which then get included as part of the appendix of the next edition of the KUU Hypothesis book. Extracts from this KUUist's bible are reproduced between chapters of narrative in 'Etc Etc Amen.'

As I have pretty much covered all of the philosophical/theological ideas of the KUU Hypothesis in 'Etc Etc Amen' I thought it might be fun to reproduce the true stories of coincidence posted by KUUists in the website, in book two (are you still with me?)

But this idea takes on a further interesting dimension if these stories are actually true stories (as in fact 95% of the coincidences mentioned in 'Etc Etc Amen' are, including one particularly amazing story which came to me via CG.) These stories don't even have to be that remarkable as long as you personally were amazed by the incident when it happened to you - the obvious example of this kind of story is when you bump into an old friend in a foreign city that neither of you have ever been to before.

Obviously any stories used can have the names changed to protect the paranoid, but it just seems to me that the true stories of coincidence are always stranger than the fictional ones. For example, this story from Tim Adam's feature on Amadou and Miriam in this month's OMM.

Tim Adams wrote -

It was this distinctive electric sound that gave a young music producer called Marc-Antoine Moreau pause when he first heard Amadou and Mariam in 1990. Moreau, the couple's long-term manager and producer, explains what sounds very much like the workings of fate. He was on a tour of west Africa in search of bands and one afternoon on a whim he took a train from Dakar to Abidjan. Having bought a few CDs at random in a record shop he was listening to Amadou and Mariam at a bus stop. A woman came up to him and said, 'That record is by my sister'. Yes, Moreau thought at first, in Africa we are all brothers and sisters. But no, she insisted, it was actually her sister. Moreau told her who he was and to pass on his regards, but though he kept the music in his head, he did not follow up the contact. In 1994 he heard that Amadou and Mariam were playing at a small gig in Paris. He went along and when he introduced himself after the show he was greeted, in a Stanley and Livingstone kind of moment, with the words: 'Ah, you are the guy from the bus stop.' 'Amadou is like that,' Moreau says, 'he is a magical kind of guy. Things happen to him.'

To a KUUist, Marc-Antoine Moreau missed recognising a cosmic nudge when it nearly knocked him off his feet in Dakar. So he had to wait another 4 years before he could re-enter the slipstream of his destiny to produce the band.

But KUU-incidences don't have to have any actual meaning. Their meaning can simply be the sense of wonder and surprise they initially generate in the person who has been cosmic nudged.

So, come on. Let's hear your favourite tales of coincidence. I promise I won't use any of them without the writer's permission!

Oh, and to go quickly back to the previous subject of suddenly noticing typos: there was even one in this small extract from the OMM ('introduced' was written as 'introdced')

[CantSleepClownsWillGetMe]

When my husband was in Intensive Care the staff told us to go home and get some rest. I got home about 4.30am, made a cup of tea and sat in the kitchen for a while. Then the phone rang. It was the hospital asking me to go back in as there had been a deterioration in John's condition.

I looked up at the clock and saw it was just after 5am, then I rushed back down to the hospital. My husband died at 5.38am.

When I got back home around noon, I glanced up at the clock again, but it had stopped, at 5.38am.

June

[Chris P]

But this idea takes on a further interesting dimension if these stories are actually true stories (as in fact 95% of the coincidences mentioned in 'Etc Etc Amen' are, including one particularly amazing story which came to me via CG.)

I liked the one about the English (?) world music journo who got down on his uppers for quite a while in Africa, having a hard time with some dodgy experiences and cleaned out of money, living fairly rough. Many months later to finally collect some money that was mailed out, he had to produce his passport or photo ID : when it was handed back to him he was frozen in shock - the picture had chnaged just like he felt he had: he was horrified to see that the episode had taken such a toll on him that he'd prematurely aged by maybe 25 years and a haggard old man was staring back at him from the photo.
It turned out that the man beside him in the parallel queue was also white and looked quite similar to him, but was indeed a much older man, and he'd been handed the wrong document back.

[Dayna]

I have bizarre coincedences all the time.
Can coincedences have a sense of humour?


The other day I was sitting on the floor looking through a bunch of music books & one of the books fell off of an upper shelf & nearly hit me in the head.

I do the same thing as Howard with spelling. I switch words around a lot. I wish we had a spell checker here, but I've gotten in a habit if I'm not sure of a pelling, I copy the word into an email box & spell check it there.

[Chris P]

The other day I was sitting on the floor looking through a bunch of music books & one of the books fell off of an upper shelf & nearly hit me in the head.

needs to fall open on the very tune you've been looking for or humming, or hit you on the head causing a realignment of your synapses so that when you next pick up the guitar: hey presto you are a virtuoso and can play all the tunes in the book 'just like that'
---> for the full KUU nudge

[Chris P]

Can coincidences have a sense of humour?

Exactly Dayna - one of Howard's conjectures