Is "Entmoot" One Word or Two? A Day in the Life of an Editor
So at this very moment, I am creating production files for one of the (Too) Many, (Too) Many Books I'm working on this week and this Has. To. Be. the Very Worst Final Spell Check Job ever to date. Ever.
Read On . . . Fantasy Fiction is a book for teachers and librarians and anyone vaguely interested in suggestions on which fantasy books to read. The author included clever puns for headings, such as "Fan-to-Sea: The Best of Nautical Fantasy", "Flights of Fantasy: High-Flying Fantasy to Read on an Airplane", and some just plain too-cool-for-school headings, such as "Steaming Up the Looking Glass: When Romance Is Nice, but Sex Is Better" and my personal favorite, "It Was the Dark Lord in the Conservatory with the Candlestick: Fantasy for Mystery Readers."
But people, do you know how many made-up words are in this thing? So many, in fact, that MS Word infomed me that it was going to stop putting the red squiggly line under them because it was Overloaded.
And do you know who is responsible for the Final Spell-Check on all those words that have Overloaded the poor spell-checker? That's right: me. Just think about that, for every book out there, some Poor Schmuck of an editor has had to sit and click Ignore once, Ignore once, Ignore all, Ignore once for every weird last name, purposefully misspelled word, foreign term, or perfectly normal word that the spell checker doesn't have in it's Meager Vocabulary.
Read On . . . Fantasy Fiction is a book for teachers and librarians and anyone vaguely interested in suggestions on which fantasy books to read. The author included clever puns for headings, such as "Fan-to-Sea: The Best of Nautical Fantasy", "Flights of Fantasy: High-Flying Fantasy to Read on an Airplane", and some just plain too-cool-for-school headings, such as "Steaming Up the Looking Glass: When Romance Is Nice, but Sex Is Better" and my personal favorite, "It Was the Dark Lord in the Conservatory with the Candlestick: Fantasy for Mystery Readers."
But people, do you know how many made-up words are in this thing? So many, in fact, that MS Word infomed me that it was going to stop putting the red squiggly line under them because it was Overloaded.
And do you know who is responsible for the Final Spell-Check on all those words that have Overloaded the poor spell-checker? That's right: me. Just think about that, for every book out there, some Poor Schmuck of an editor has had to sit and click Ignore once, Ignore once, Ignore all, Ignore once for every weird last name, purposefully misspelled word, foreign term, or perfectly normal word that the spell checker doesn't have in it's Meager Vocabulary.
Or, in my case, every instance of Valkyrie, aether, Umscrumug, greffyn, and hradani.
*sigh*
Maybe I'll skip it. I mean, aside from "Quidditch" and the odd elvish word from Tolkien, who's really going to know if these words are misspelled or not?
posted by Sparky at 10:20 AM
6 Comments:
You forgot to answer the big question: what the h-e-double-toothpicks is an entmoot?
Also, do you have the standard dictionary, or is there some super-advanced version for folks with jobs like yours?
Innquireing minds want to no!
Ah, grasshopper, an Entmoot is a gathering of Ents. Rule #1: Know thy Tolkien.
Most U.S. editors use Web 11--or the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, in layman's terms. If the publisher wants us to use something different, like the OED, we can, but that's pretty much the norm.
I feel your pain, obviously.
And when I was editing a self-published fantasy novel late last year, I ran into the same thing--the damn spell-check function gave up on the squiggly lines, which would have been very helpful as I was making my way through the novel (the ability to right-click "Ignore All" at the first instances of the numerous oft-used, made-up words and names--and therefore the ability to see later, because of squiggly lines, if & when the author suddenly changed spellings--would have been nice). *sigh*
But I don't liiiiike Tolkien. Don't disown me. It's just that I've never cared for fantasy or sci-fi, so I'll take your word for it.
In unrelated news, I've started playing around with Flickr. I think you might have some sort of friend request in your Flickr inbox. (Don't we all need more inboxes like we need more holes our heads?)
I wouldn't assume that fantasy fans won't notice misspellings. As a matter of fact, I'd argue it's the opposite--they will CERTAINLY notice when you've spelled it "Cthulu" instead of "Cthulhu" but will totally let it slip by when there's a there/their mistake.
"'Cthulu'" instead of 'Cthulhu'"?
My head hurts.
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