I don't have profound thoughts often, so this might not be up to the standards of those who think profoundly for a living. But it occurred to me that, since language is a development of intelligence, making a typo--missing a comma, misspelling a word, using a homonym by accident, forgetting the "ed" at the end of a past tense verb, whatever--will always make the person doing the writing look stupid.
Professional writers are not those people who construct language perfectly, but those who've learned to live with the embarrassment of looking stupid on a regular basis.
I thought of this after my brother scanned galleys for the first of my Twins Mystery novels, TWO-FACED, an ebook which will be out in print soon. He found a HUGE Freudian slip of a typo. Not only that, but I made the error 3 times. The editor and 3 proofreaders missed them. I haven't been contacted about it by anyone who read the novel on Kindle or Nook, though it's been on sale for 2 years.
So now I'm admitting my stupidity and doing penance by offering a free copy of any book I have in print to the first 3 people who can describe the typo to me by May 15th.. If you've read the book, go skim through it to see if you can find the mistake. If you want to read the book before the deadline, it's available on Kindle or Nook.
Send your answer to missmaggietests@gmail.com .
Piece...I mean, peace,
Elena
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