In my garden of delights.

For the hundredth time I dragged myself through Travis, the story of my somewhat psychic hero, still finding errors. Very discouraging. There are still typos, despite the fact that my wife and I have been over this work with a magnifying glass. These are not just guerrilla punctuation hiding in the folds of a sentence, these are bonafida errors. Things like hose instead of house, hat instead of heat. I can’t believe my eyes just jump over such obvious mistakes. And it’s beyond me how they escaped the eagle eyes of my wife with an almost supernatural sense of right and wrong.

I developed a number of theories to explain the unexplainable. Aliens, YES aliens, insert these just to keep us off balance, sapping our moral, before they launch their "final conflict." This became clear to me during a SciFi movie on TV last night.

Another hypothesis centers around the inherent self-determination of any length of text to undergo spontaneous mutation. Hence house can easily become hose, and heat transmute into hat. Why then, you may well ask, does not house produce an equally likely fouse? A reasonable question that aims at the natural selection criteria, the survival of the fittest. Only those mutation that can fool the Spellcheck have any chance of success. Any maladaptive alteration would be instantly recognized and obliterated. Successful errors try to mimic righteous text.

A further theory would cast the phenomenon into a more organic context. Like weeds, these errors insinuate themselves into the lines, disguised as other beneficial words. I once had an acquaintance--a confirmed urbanite, who had just moved from a high-rise into a house, and who was experimenting with horticulture for the first time--point out with great pride a robust plant growing in her flowerbed. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was nurturing a thistle that would grow to seven feet and attack any passerby with barbed implements. Agreed, that was an overdrawn example, but successful weeds are able to mimic more desirable varieties. And so it is that house turns into hose (or even horse) and heat into hat. The eye jumps over the minor variation. Expectations fill in the gaps.

So I have to constantly tend my garden of words. Painstakingly riding shotgun among the rows, patrolling the pages, annihilating any aberration. Watch out for that predatory quotation mark, laying false claim to a line of text, they do not belong--at least not there. Be on the lookout for derivatives, such as spun off by, say, cat; bat, cab, car, eat, fat, hat, mat, rat, sat, tat, vat... and so on. Be on your guard for a shift of emphasis, such that would transmute slower into a shower; read into red, or sad into sled. And my personal nemesis, text that slips from the past into the present and back again. Believe me publishers don’t want to go back to the future past.

The permutations are mind boggling. Add to this phenomenon the ability of technology to propagate errors at an incredible speed. Say for example, during a long editing session you want to change a misspelled feat to feet, and unleash the change function to make the conversion, not realizing that inadvertently all eat’s are changed to eet’s. Later one wonders where the hell did cheet, beet, cleet, meet, and ... sleet came from.

Alas, what does it all add up to? Sadly it seems I have to go through once again and again ... working in my garden.