Okay, so I just found out that I have, um, very little time to turn in any typos and edits to St. Martin's Press for the paperback. So if you have read my book and you saw anything that jumped out at you as wrong or weird, please drop me a line or leave a comment. You'll have my eternal gratitude, which is probably worth more than your stock portfolio at this point, right? Am I right?
I promise, I'll post something real soon, maybe later today. Lots to talk about regarding Schuyler, the love of my life, my little mermaid princess, my reason for living, as soon as I drive to her school and look for the new glasses that she lost. After a week and a half.
Ten days. Yeah.
32 comments:
Did you look behind the bed or between the mattress and the bed frame? I'm sure you did but as an avid in-bed reader I lost a lot of glasses and parts of a lot of glasses in those spaces when I was her age.
She lost them at school. I'm heading there right now to look.
All I have to say, Rob, is be happy it wasn't her new retainer. My son was in elementary school and lost his retainer somewhere around week 2. We thought it would be expensive to replace and we knew he lost it at lunch, so we spent hours digging through the garbage bags behind the school looking for that thing. Never found it, gave up, called the orthodontist and he said the first replacement was free but he charged after that.
We always call first now. (Not that your optometrist would do the same thing.) If you need a bright side to your situation, be happy she didn't drop them in the garbage can in the cafeteria.
Oh, I dug in the trash this morning. And in the smelly lost and found, which was almost as bad.
Look in the garbage; that's where they usually toss glasses and retainers and irreplaceable family heirlooms. It'll be under about a ton of banana peels and stinky, gooey Hazmat material. Have fun!
Our school keeps glasses in the school office. Try again in a few days or a week - sometimes it takes a while for them to get turned in.
My son lost his brand new (3 day old) glasses this summer - in a big open field at camp. Yeah. Never did find them.
Yeah, my daughter BROKE hers after a week.
Did not see any typos in your book. I'll hand it over to Josie, who is a master at these things, and keep you posted.
Do not give up hope...
The 91 year old woman I work for lost her glasses at K-mart. After six weeks of calling K-mart wondering if they had found them, and six weeks of them saying no, no nothing has turned up, we finally went to the K-mart service desk, asked to look in their lost and found, and lo and behold--- among 40-something other pairs THERE THEY WERE. Also, their were several cell phones and other potentially expensive items in the bin. Moral of the story... DO NOT take NO for an answer follow-up people!!!
I'm ashamed to say I have yet to finish the book...must...savor...book....I don't recall anything glaring, and I have an annoying habit of noting typos in all of my books, so I'll go back and see if I have any bottom-of-the-page-tiny-dog-ears, and a fingernail-produced "x", both of which generally note a typo. 10 days for glasses, huh? Reminds me of the time I ran Mason's glasses over...with our riding lawnmower...still not a funny story. At least glasses are cheap. HAHA! If she's anything like Mason, look in the most obscure place you can think of (behind the blinds, under the tv, beside the microwave, between her pillow and pillowcase, etc. He hides things in the craziest places sometimes! Good luck!
I feel your pain, brother. On our journey so far with Hannah (who's now 19), we've lost numerous lunch boxes, jackets, school ID's, library books, cell phone (found that one fortunately). . .the list goes on. The worst were the several times we've briefly lost HER!! Including this summer in Colorado when she got herself lost while hiking with a group in the Garden of the Gods!!
Of all the things I'VE lost.. . .I miss my mind the most!!!
Hope they turn up! Maybe she should keep a close eye out for another kid who suddenly has glasses just like hers!!
Did you try looking in the parking lot or any bushes etc. near the plaground? Lost broken glasses are almost the worst. Wait until she breaks her welded in retainer the night before you leave for vacation.
Ah, so probably not wedged beneath the mattress then. I never lost glasses at school, was always too blind to walk away from them after they fell off.
Hope you found them!
After the demise/loss of pair #7 in 2 years with our 8 year old, we instituted a rule. Next one completely broken or lost, the cost for the replacement was coming out of her piggy bank. And the mantra "if they are not on your face, they are in your case" is repeated often.
We are now on pair #8, and the kid is $60 lighter. Pair number 8, as a result, has lasted 3 times longer than the others.
I hope this is the only lost pair, Rob, but prepare for a lot of trips to the eye doctor.
I make a game of counting typos and found none.
When I was a kid I never lost my glasses - I just sat on them.
And the mantra "if they are not on your face, they are in your case" is repeated often.
That's the thing, though. She knows the same thing, and she's really good about it. The glasses AND the case are missing, which is why I think it shouldn't be hard to find them. Damn it.
we go through retainers here like water. the last one stayed aroud for less than a week. they and glasses are tough for kids to keep where they need to be! i hope you find them.
As a cranky-pants hater of typos in material which should have been proofed (blog posts, e-mails, etc. usually get a pass) I'm happy to say yours was a book which was devoid of typographical and grammatical mishaps. It used to be entertaining to find a book with an error; now, it's refreshing to read one devoid of glaring mistakes. Kudos!
(Although, I didn't see my name in the book. Was that a typo? )
Good luck finding those glasses. I remember the times, living in terror, between losing something of value and finding it later in the couch cushions.
Dirk, Sophia's dad.
We (I'm the parent of the 8 year old chronic glasses loser) find that the times when they go missing are generally around recess and bus time. The call of the wild seems to make even the most responsible kid lose their heads a little.
So, if not at the school, can you check with the bus folks?
I read your book (incredible! loved it!) *and* I'm a professional editor and I didn't find anything weird, misspelled, grammatically horrible, etc., etc.
In fact, if I recommend it to my book club, would you make a trip to Bloomington, Indiana, to make a special guest appearance?
The only thing I noticed "weird" about the book was that the f-word appears much less frequently that it did on Darn Tootin'. ;) But I'm such a longtime reader that I remember your blog entry about how you had to take the f-bomb out as you prepared the entries for inclusion in the book, so yeah... Do with that what you will.
Just finished the book... I publish a newspaper and proofread every day, so I'm reasonably good at spotting errors.
Jen
At 10 I dropped mine on the sidewalk while walking to school. Thankfully my best friend saw them and brought them to me. Never lost a pair that I never found. Came close on an airplane though at 18, they fell out of my hand when I fell asleep and while I can't remember where they were exactly they were in a bizarre place and because of that it took forever to find them. Of course I'm so blind that if I don't have them I'm in trouble. By the time my son was 3 he knew how to find my glasses,and where they usually ended up since his eyesight is fine and he always did. Funny considering this is a kid who can't find his shoes but he knew he wasn't getting fed until they were found, couldn't see well enough to make anything. I had tortoise shell metal frames and if they weren't where I left them I wasn't going to find them on my own unless it involved crawling around on the floor feeling for them. Heck, even now with black plastic frames I still have trouble finding them at times. If my son sees them anywhere but on my face or a table he hands them to me. Guess he doesn't want to have to search for them again.
I had my braces break on vacation at 13, had to find an orthodontist (thankfully I had a friend with braces so she had one) I had a band bust on my palate spreader( or splitter as I called it, that fucking thing hurt.)Had to have it removed and out back in place after vacation. Thankfully never had a retainer, but I had a positioner I had to sleep with and I often woke up to find that I had removed it during the night and chucked it across the room. If your kids ever wake up with a missing retainer chances are you'll find it across the room, I know a lot of people who would do that.
Taryn
I just finished the book and loved it. You have a real talent. Nothing glaringly wrong jumped out at me. Good luck with the glasses. It seems like these things always happen when you are trying to juggle 10 million other things.
I'm an inveterate proofreader too, and I have to say I don't recall noticing any. But then I devoured it in like, four hours...
I suppose there's an advantage to being blind as a bat -- glasses never got lost because they were always right where I was, frozen in fear that I would step on them...
Of course, the corollary of that is that if I did lose them, I was too blind to search for them...
I agree with everyone else that grammar/spelling wise, the book is awesome. There was one thing that did strike me as a little weird, though: on the first page of chapter 20, you talk about sometimes finding the BBoW left on a "freestyle" mode and then give examples of what you would find, including several variants on Schuyler's name. But then on you go on to tell us about her one day spelling/saying her name correctly, and how impressed and proud you were. I understand completely what you're saying there – that it's wonderful that the BBoW is helping her learn to spell and write, and that it's amazing that she could even pick up a concept like that on her own – but, at the same time, it seemed weird that you-the-narrator are surprised by something that seems to pretty much be a natural consequence of her playing with almost-correct spellings like "scuylher" ...which happened about a paragraph ago from the reader's point-of-view.
I hope you understand what I'm getting at, because little scenes like that between you and Schuyler are what make your book, and this only struck me as being "weird" because of how easily I could understand and emphasize with your emotions at every other turn.
I went online and bought 2 pairs of spare glasses. For 26 bucks a pair it was worth it to me, and the one pair I wear daily instead of the expensive ass ones from the eye doctor. That's one suggestion if y'all can't find them.
When I was around Schuyler's age I lost a pair of glasses, and we didn't find them for 2 years. At that point they cleaned out the lost and found box and they were sitting in their case, with my name on it, in the bottom of it. Boy was my Mom pissed.
Rob, I usually have a keen eye for typos and I don't recall seeing one. Hope that helps!
Could my story about a lost diamond bracelet trump any of these? I spanked myself over and over for that one! Maybe I will find it after all these years. Appologies to anyone who finds typos, gramatical faux paus in my writing---I wouldn't recognize it them if they came up and tapped me on the shoulder. Bless the editors in this bunch!
I do a lot of proofing and nothing jumped out that I can recall, but I'm willing to go back and read it again with a pickier eye if there's time. When do you have to have corrections in by?
Also, to counteract all the lost-item stories: my glasses led a charmed life (must have been because they were really, really ugly). When I was fourteen they once dropped out of my pocket at the beach in Big Sur. I went back and couldn't find them, but two hours later they'd been turned into the ranger station, the case full of wet sand. They'd dropped into the ocean and someone had found them. As a bonus? I'd found some loose change while scouring the beach for my glasses. Score!
So did you find the glasses? And how is your new book coming along? I miss regular posts from you...you were the first blog I ever read (back in darn-tootin' days)! Keep the posts coming, you inspired me to start my own bleeding-heart liberal blog.
Chapter 22; first character of chapter
should be ". I presume this is was
a conscious choice by an editor to
begin with an enlarged letter like all the other chapters. In my opinion, it's
still a typo.
Yeah, that's a style issue, not a typo. Nothing I can do about that.
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