Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The Hell of Proof Reading

If you’re anything like me, you find proof reading your own work next to impossible. You know what you mean, but your eye skips, you miss the obvious and, no matter how many times you read that damned manuscript you keep on finding mistakes you missed the last time. Of course one alternative is to hire a professional, but the average poor starving writer probably doesn’t have the means. So, how about one of you brilliant people – not me – who understands the arcane world of computer programming and algorithms (whatever they are), coming up with a way of proof reading a manuscript. I reckon it would need to include “Fowler’s English Usage”, “The Chicago Manual of Style”, “The Mentor Guide to Punctuation” just for starters. Some way of letting the checker know if a comma is in the wrong place - or needed at all – of distinguishing between typos like “the” instead of “them”, helping poor spellers to know the difference between “there” and “their, “weather” and “whether: all the things MS Word’s spell check is incapable of doing. And I won’t go into grammar checking, because Word is miserable at that. In fact, just telling us when we’ve made a glaring mistake we just didn’t see. I know this is probably impossible and there are a million reasons why it can’t be done. But wouldn’t it be nice? You could give it a name like “Nitpick” or “Bugproof”.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Maxim Gunn - New Arrivals

Two new adventures are now available in the Maxim Gunn series at Smashwords. You can find them, try them, or buy them by following this link: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Nicholas This is action adventure at its best.