#WritersCoffeeClub Apr 24 Share a silly mistake you've made while writing.
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@owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross another book did this and resulted in particitrousers...
@quixoticgeek @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross
Someoneneeds to pad theirsearch terms with appropriate whitespace (hi, @edwinb - who really understands whitespace). -
@owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross another book did this and resulted in particitrousers...
"It's the wrong trousers, Gromit!"
(That said, there now needs to be a protest-movement called Occutrousers. The name just says something definitive about careless use of technology. (See also: "cdesign proponentsists"))
@alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross
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PS to "silly mistakes": a common misconception is that copy editors will spot your silly mistakes. They might ... but then again, they might think the mistake was the authorial intention and let it pass. CEs vary wildly in their approach (never say competence) and your trad publisher's commissioning editor is busy managing workflow (editing gets done on the side, in their own time).
So don't rely on the editors cleaning up your messes.
I do know that by the time I hand over the manuscript to my copy editor, I have read it myself three times, with multiple months passing between the readings.
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@cstross
The good old "dawizard" from D&D comes to mind.
Hint for the unitiated: 4d6 dawizard. -
@owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross clbuttic mistake
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@owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross "buttbuttination of the ambbuttador"…
@blotosmetek @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross At one point I had a very Christian co-worker who regularly used to shorten Home Assistant to Home Ass. It wouldn't have been worth the trouble to point it out ...
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@owent a true "postcode file" on windows moment
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@davidtheeviloverlord @cstross I remember an early harry potter book where one of the characters said something apartmently.
The divine afflatus fell apart mentally.
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@quixoticgeek @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross
Someoneneeds to pad theirsearch terms with appropriate whitespace (hi, @edwinb - who really understands whitespace).@WellsiteGeo @quixoticgeek @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @edwinb No, they need to pad their search terms with non-word atoms (regular expressions are your friend!), i.e. \W+(search_word)\W+ (in perl-compatible regexp syntax).
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@editer @towo In the 2000s, Macmillan's corporate IT department installed a bad word filter *on their incoming email*. It finally got nuked after Tom Doherty (CEO of Tor) stormed their boardroom ranting furiously because the incoming email filter had repeatedly eaten the manuscript of a scheduled bestseller that Production were waiting on. (Turns out publishers get novels via email and novels frequently contain rude words: who could possibly have imagined *that* in a publisher's IT department?)
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@SmartmanApps @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross "one of these is *not* a banana. Can you find out which one?"
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@owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross Clear case of idiot editor. Because one obviously can be space sensitive and only replace " pants " with " trousers " and th[e]n this should be no problem.
@DJRNDM @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross well, that doesn't quite work, because "pants." — but you're not wrong.
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#WritersCoffeeClub Apr 24 Share a silly mistake you've made while writing.
Character name changes. If for some reason you change the name of a character you *really* need to double-check that it's changed *everywhere*. Hint: regular expressions and global *conditional* search/replace are your tools. Also how to manage word stemming with regexps. Then triple-check *everything*. Otherwise—guaranteed—you'll flip a character's name in one paragraph and the internet will never let you forget it!
@cstross Protip: always do big renamings via an intermediate nonsense string.
1) Globally rename the original string 'pants' to something that doesn't occur anywhere else, like 'xyzyx'.
2) Search for the new string and step through all occurrences to check for mistakes like 'particixyzyx' and fix them. This is now an easy task.
3) Rename all placeholders to the final string. -
@owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord @cstross Clear case of idiot editor. Because one obviously can be space sensitive and only replace " pants " with " trousers " and th[e]n this should be no problem.
@DJRNDM @owent @alicemcalicepants @nullcolaship @davidtheeviloverlord
Groan.
s/(\W+?)(pants)(\W+?)/\1trousers\3/ig
You could use \b — match a word boundary — instead of \W+? (smallest count of non-word characters preceding the next regexp group) but that'd miss run-on strings ending in pants (eg. InterCappedpants).
The pcre search modifiers s///ig are for case-insensitive and global.
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@cstross Protip: always do big renamings via an intermediate nonsense string.
1) Globally rename the original string 'pants' to something that doesn't occur anywhere else, like 'xyzyx'.
2) Search for the new string and step through all occurrences to check for mistakes like 'particixyzyx' and fix them. This is now an easy task.
3) Rename all placeholders to the final string.@richcarl Or you could use a regular expression. Hint: I once rewrote a UNIX man page for regular expressions as part of my day job back in the early 1990s. None of your search/replace tips are news to me.
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@richcarl Or you could use a regular expression. Hint: I once rewrote a UNIX man page for regular expressions as part of my day job back in the early 1990s. None of your search/replace tips are news to me.
@cstross Sure, regexps are great. If your editor supports them, and you know how to write them correctly, and the implementation doesn't have word boundary issues with utf-8. For any average writer stuck on an average text editor, I suggest the 3-step method.
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@cstross Sure, regexps are great. If your editor supports them, and you know how to write them correctly, and the implementation doesn't have word boundary issues with utf-8. For any average writer stuck on an average text editor, I suggest the 3-step method.
@richcarl I work in Scrivener, which includes pcre regexps. But you know even Microsoft Word has regexps these days? They're well-hidden and their implementation is typically Microsoftish (i.e. non-standard and missing a few features) but it's there in the search/replace dialog box. And the publishing industry runs on Word files—so much so that if you go the trad route you *have to* submit your manuscripts in docx format.
So every non-amateur author uses Word or LibreOffice at some stage.
