Nothing irritates me more than typos. When it comes to others making them, I am quite forgiving; however, when it comes to my own work, typos drive me insane. Typos are frustrating because I am utterly blind to most of them. I simply do not see them in the text because I am reading what is in my head rather than what is on the page. This is especially true of longer pieces or projects on which I spend an enormous amount of time. After I finished what I believed at the time to be the final draft of The City of Earthly Desire, I was horrified at the amount of typos and errors early readers noticed - typos and errors which I did not see at all.
I have completed several revisions of the novel since then, carving away the typos and errors bit-by-bit. The current text of the novel is much cleaner than the first I placed on the market nearly two years ago, but as I am completing what I hope will be my final proofread of the novel I am noticing something rather troubling within the text. In my seemingly never-ending quest to root out typos, I am, in some instances, creating and planting more typos. This happens most frequently in the cut-and-paste parts of my corrections where I accidentally cut out an article or pronoun or paste an extra article or pronoun in the text without noticing. This results in sentences like:
"but he accepted it as part of of some cleansing process . . ."
"He left town for a few days, but he'll back"
These are not huge errors, but they do affect the flow of the prose and there are many errors like the ones above in the text. This bothers me immensely. If I ever get around to writing another novel, I'm going to seriously consider asking for help from a dozen beta-readers and hiring the services of a professional typist to put together the final draft. I truly believe it would be money well spent.
I have completed several revisions of the novel since then, carving away the typos and errors bit-by-bit. The current text of the novel is much cleaner than the first I placed on the market nearly two years ago, but as I am completing what I hope will be my final proofread of the novel I am noticing something rather troubling within the text. In my seemingly never-ending quest to root out typos, I am, in some instances, creating and planting more typos. This happens most frequently in the cut-and-paste parts of my corrections where I accidentally cut out an article or pronoun or paste an extra article or pronoun in the text without noticing. This results in sentences like:
"but he accepted it as part of of some cleansing process . . ."
"He left town for a few days, but he'll back"
These are not huge errors, but they do affect the flow of the prose and there are many errors like the ones above in the text. This bothers me immensely. If I ever get around to writing another novel, I'm going to seriously consider asking for help from a dozen beta-readers and hiring the services of a professional typist to put together the final draft. I truly believe it would be money well spent.
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