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Pet peeves in novels, novellas, short stories, and other literature

alfaniner said:
Typos. I've even seen them in comic books. One I recently read had several of them. Odd because they aren't really typos -- they are generally hand-lettered. Or, they used to be. But I was reading an older one.
For a professional publication that has to go through an editor and a proofreader that is unacceptable.
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I'm kind of on the fence about typos.

I can see why they would annoy readers, but I've also spent a lot of time editing my own five novels (because I can't afford to have someone else do it) and one weird result is that I now edit everything I read, and what I've found is that every novel that I've read in the last decade has had at least one typo or grammatical error in it.

I'm still finding them in my own novels, and I'm not just talking about general authors either. I'm talking about big names like King, Baldacci, Larson, and Rawling.

It just goes to prove that even the best can still make mistakes.
 
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Carlotta said:
I just want to be able to distinguish between the words "car" and "cat" in novels. It sometimes makes a difference!
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Thank you, Carlotta.

This comment actually gave me an interesting idea.

My novels are all about a talking cat, but what if I changed that around to a talking car that could sniff out missing persons and sometimes serial killers.

Remember that old, old TV series My Mother the Car?

Hmmm... maybe I'll even live long enough to actually write a novel along those lines.

It might be fun.
 
AmyStrange said:
I'm kind of on the fence about typos.

I can see why they would annoy readers, but I've also spent a lot of time editing my own five novels (because I can't afford to have someone else do it) and one weird result is that I now edit everything I read, and what I've found is that every novel that I've read in the last decade has had at least one typo or grammatical error in it.

I'm still finding them in my own novels, and I'm not just talking about general authors either. I'm talking about big names like King, Baldacci, Larson, and Rawling.

It just goes to prove that even the best can still make mistakes.
Click to expand...

I remember doing keypunching for IBM cards (age!). The second step was to run them through the keypunch again, this time not punching the holes, but retyping with the Verify setting. If the input differed from what was on the card, the keyboard locked up and the operator had to pull the card to check the error (it was either on the original card or the verifying input.)

Long story longer, when I'd verify my own cards, if there was an original error I'd often input/verify it the same way, thus not locking the keyboard for a check, and the card would get sent to the computer in its error state, making the program bomb. At some point we were directed to have a person other than the original keypuncher verify a set of cards so the same error wouldn't be input twice.

So I can see how it would be easy to miss your own errors. (I still mistype my own address -- "BLVE" for BLVD", and mix up the words "show" and "who" almost every time.)
 
alfaniner said:
I remember doing keypunching for IBM cards (age!). The second step was to run them through the keypunch again, this time not punching the holes, but retyping with the Verify setting. If the input differed from what was on the card, the keyboard locked up and the operator had to pull the card to check the error (it was either on the original card or the verifying input.)

Long story longer, when I'd verify my own cards, if there was an original error I'd often input/verify it the same way, thus not locking the keyboard for a check, and the card would get sent to the computer in its error state, making the program bomb. At some point we were directed to have a person other than the original keypuncher verify a set of cards so the same error wouldn't be input twice.

So I can see how it would be easy to miss your own errors. (I still mistype my own address -- "BLVE" for BLVD", and mix up the words "show" and "who" almost every time.)
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As a 'data control clerk', I used to punch cards with a 'hand punch' which had a set of keys mounted above a tray. The card would move one column to the right every time you punched a set of keys. (The device was about the same size as the click clack credit card machines).

Something like this:

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3415/ICL-Hand-Key-Punch-Card-Machine/

I can't remember much about the code now, but remember that hash was all keys depressed at the same time, and a comma was three keys from the right-hand column and one from the next column to the left. (The keys pressed resembled a comma stylistically).

After manually punching the cards, we used to run them through a machine that could duplicate cards, but also had the function of printing the values on the top of the card.

That thing may have been called an 'interpreter' but it's too long ago I'm afraid...
 
Armitage72 said:
The title on the front cover of a book should not look like the stereotypical death metal band logo.

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1450&pictureid=13751[/qimg]
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Maybe if it's a book about a stereotypical death metal band.
 
SpitfireIX said:
I love Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer trilogy, but the primitive computer technology is frankly jarring. And let's not talk about using slide rules to calculate interplanetary trajectories in Heinlein's The Rolling Stones. :eek:
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I found Arthur C. Clarke 's Rama series quite jarring in that respect, the characters have personal computers but they only have the capacity for a few documents & they're limited to a couple of textbooks & iirc one discretionary book on them.
 
alfaniner said:
Typos. I've even seen them in comic books. One I recently read had several of them. Odd because they aren't really typos -- they are generally hand-lettered. Or, they used to be. But I was reading an older one.
For a professional publication that has to go through an editor and a proofreader that is unacceptable.
Click to expand...


I used the short story Bedrock from Annie Proulx's collection Heart Songs (not the one with Brokeback Mountain) in an anthology for Danish high school students. I came across this sentence, which didn't make sense: "Jags and geese followed one another, their iron, ringing cries stirring his feelings of an incomplete life."

I searched online and found a review of Heart Songs that quoted the passage verbatim, which made me think that nothing was wrong with it, but I had to find out what the hell these jags were for the glossary I was making. I ended up asking Annie Proulx, who said it was a typo. It should have been "Jags of geese," which made much more sense.

I am not sure, but my anthology (2002)] may be the only edition that gets it right. An edition of Heart Songs from 2007 (I have the Kindle version) still has "Jags and geese ...".

It's the kind of typo that's easy to miss because it's not about spelling.
 
Perhaps it should be "jaguars and geese"; I know hearing those things making noise together would stir feelings, or at least attract a lot of attention.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
I found Arthur C. Clarke 's Rama series quite jarring in that respect, the characters have personal computers but they only have the capacity for a few documents & they're limited to a couple of textbooks & iirc one discretionary book on them.
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I just read one of his short stories (written about 1960) where the spaceship computer breaks down and they have to use jerry-rigged abacus(es) to calculate their escape. I guess by that time his far-future stories allowed for computers solely doing that sort of thing as he didn't mention slide rules.
 
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alfaniner said:
I just read one of his short stories (written about 1960) where the spaceship computer breaks down and they have to use jerry-rigged abacus(es) to calculate their escape. I guess by that time his far-future stories allowed for computers solely doing that sort of thing as he didn't mention slide rules.
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"Alexa! How the **** do you use an abacus?!"

"Now playing songs by Abba."

The sad truth is that reality is always so much stupider than science fiction predicts it'll be.
 
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