Friday, July 20, 2012

It never ends

Yesterday I read through the final, copy-edited and copy-edited-checked "final" version of Hang Fire, looking for typos and the like, and discovered this sentence:


They hated the woman’s second husband and, mindful of his weak heart, persuaded the grandmother who lived with the family to use lard in the molasses cookies their stepfather loved instead of margarine.

The stepfather loved molasses cookies instead of margarine? "There's an antecedent problem with that last phrase," I wrote the boss editor at Five Star. "Please make it read this way:"

They hated the woman's second husband and, mindful of his weak heart, persuaded the grandmother who lived with the family to use lard instead of margarine in the molasses cookies their stepfather loved.

Obvious clunker. Simple fix.

Probably more of those little prose bombs are hiding in that manuscript, ready to pop up and frag me.

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