Ever get the impression

[cornerofmadness]

That there are no professional editors any more? Or at least they are sub par to fanfic editors? Lately I'm seeing more and more published novels coming out with errors that make you weep.

Just read a scene in Jennifer Lee Carrell's Interred with their Bones , one of the many Da Vinci Code inspired historical manuscript stories, this one about Shakespeare's lost plays. It's fairly good.

Then I get to the scene where she has the main character pulling out a card from an old-fashioned card catalogue and putting in a pink 'out' slip and two pages later she does the exact same thing. Now as a writer I can tell you how easy it is to accidentally rewrite an action but either me or my betas tend to catch it. I mean this isn't a typo slipping past here. How do you miss it?

Your Wrath Quotient: 68%

Everyone around you pretty much fears your wrath... which is probably what you want. But just remember, there's a very thin line between fear and hate!

How Much Wrath Do You Have?

Comments

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Lois McMaster Bujold is collecting Passage typos from her readers for the emendation in the eventual paperback version. And I couldn't believe it when CMX's translation of Emma misspelled "Eton" as "Eaton" in two separate volumes. This is not Victorian historical rocket science, people. Sigh. But I won't go soap their windows, however:

How Much Wrath Do You Have? (http://www.blogthings.com/howmuchwrathdoyouhavequiz/)

[thinks calm, unwrathful thoughts about editors]

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

you're awfully calm. You must have given your wrath to me.

Hmm wonders how one goes abuot submitting to that work

[mulzrule.livejournal.com]

Lazy editors. I just caught a minor error in a Stephen King novel of all people. One of my all time favorite books has a typo that goes something like,"He loved him" when it's supposed to be she loved him. I die laughing when I find these things.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

snort and I can see how a minor typo gets by but a whole repeated paragraph?

[mulzrule.livejournal.com]

Makes ya wonder if they still have their job.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i'm wondering if there even IS a job

[rahirah]

From what I've heard from people in publishing, the old-fashioned line editor is fast becoming a thing of the past. A lot of places rely on spell checkers now, because it's cheaper than paying an editor. Of course, it also SUCKS, but...

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i believe it, i do. It's very frustrating

[anguisel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've been noticing that alot as well. The book Redwall has a character that started out male and turned into a female halfway through. Then the main antagonist, Cluny the Scourge, only has one eye but whenever the author mentions his face, he'll put eyes. They're relying on spellcheckers way too much because those things rarely check grammar and would never catch those kinds of things.

How Much Wrath Do You Have? (http://www.blogthings.com/howmuchwrathdoyouhavequiz/)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

okay there is NO excuse for changing a character's sex. evil_little_dog read one series a while back where the disability changed from blindness to deafness.

This is why i keep detailed info pages on my characters so eye/hair color doesn't change and defniitely for scars, tatts etc.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

At the company I work for, I was shocked to hear we don't have any copy editors on staff. They're all contracted out. Which I guess is better than relying on spell check, but still.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

it's rather pathetic

[marlex.livejournal.com]

The worst typo I've seen was in the English translation of the Battle Royale novel. During a scene with two characters, the suddenly used a name of character that wasn't even in the scene to refer to one of them. It was just once. There were a couple of other grammatical typos as well, including a he/she one I think.

How Much Wrath Do You Have? (http://www.blogthings.com/howmuchwrathdoyouhavequiz/)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

it just annoys the crap out of me and fan novels like for STar Trek and Buffy are the worst offenders

[saphira112.livejournal.com]

How Much Wrath Do You Have? (http://www.blogthings.com/howmuchwrathdoyouhavequiz/)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

right behind me

[saphira112.livejournal.com]

*Grins*

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

I =KNOW= there are no editors anymore. Today we were shown a presentation of some of our company's new advertising, and right in the middle of a national television ad, there was the wrong "its." (They'd made the common mistake of using the possessive rather than the plural.) We're not a small company, mind you - this is pretty major. I was most displeased, when overall the campaign was pretty good.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

nods and that's rather minor I could see that getting by someone but whole repeated paragraphs where she obviously decided to change how she did things...

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

I think it's even more frustrating when, as a struggling writer, you work so hard to make your manuscript PERFECT... only to see unedited crap getting published.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

yes that's what really kills. And one that's going on about Shakespearan prose the mistake is just that much more laughable (also found your story under a pile of lice/flea/maggot paperwork. SORRY. I'm getting to it tonight)

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

I know you've been (just a LITTLE) busy... *g* Don't worry too much about it.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

just a tad. Hey, did you see the post about raising the nano word limit for the group

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

Not yet. I'll check things out this afternoon.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

no rush, pretty much its 100%, let's go full chapters at a time within reason (5000 words currently being reason)

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

Yee haw.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thought you might like that

[sillymagpie.livejournal.com]

I was in an editing seminar with some junior editors from HarperCollins West who said that editors who are expected to sell well are given only the edit necessary to get them out the door and into the hands of the reading public. That explained a lot to me.

Also, some publishers have writers pay for proofreading, so some writers will do it themselves, with mixed results. (I think those are vanity presses, though, or mostly.)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

yeah the pay for proofreading is vanity press. I remember back when my novel was excerpted in Writer's Digest in 99, when they were doing the writer workshops in their pages, the guy who did it sent me his fee pages (hopeful i would hire him) and it was outrageously expensive.

but i can believe that they're doing as little as they can to edit. It's showing and it's the reason i buy less and less and use the library more and more