The business of writing

One thing I hate is how much time the business side of things takes up -- the looking up of guidelines, the preparing of a story, keeping track of it, all that sort of stuff. I suppose, if I'm honest, it's the preparation that's time consuming, and it's because I've always got to have a final read over it before I send it out to the wide unsuspecting world. And inevitably I find it needs tweaking. There's an awkward sentence here, a word that could be improved there, a weak verb coupled with an adverb there. Today, I've had the extra fun of getting something ready for the US market, which means thinking about all the spelling and punctuation.

I still remember an editor friend of mine who got an abusive letter from someone in the States because there were so many spelling mistakes on her website. Only they weren't spelling mistakes -- they were words that are spelt differently.

Now, for me, it should've been as easy as changing the PCs dictionary from Aus-English to US, which I did, but it still flagged the Americanisms as wrong. So I had to do a read through, and noticed that while I had changed "travellers" to "travelers" most of the time, I had missed one -- perhaps one I'd added after a global search and replace? Then I came across "armour" and "organise" -- all of which I thought I'd fixed. But I wonder about the words I might have missed, the ones I never suspect, like "ax" for "axe", the ones that just look completely wrong. Sometimes I got out my old trusty Webster's dictionary, a behemoth of a book if ever there was one. Then I started trawling, which hopefully picks up any I'm suspicious of, but not those I'm not, of course. Anyway, the sub's done, and I've posted another off to a competition, so I feel I've been successful, even if I haven't done any writing yet. Hopefully, tonight...