You can tell because he highlighted all his words in red.
I recall a book I proofread where the Southe’n Bay-ul took an order for “a li’l ol’ shipment of aluminium” once.
Neil Gaiman also wrote an issue of Sandman where he got everything exactly right in a redneck bar for page after page–right up till someone asks for a packet of cigarettes.
But she did have someone read the manuscript aloud to her, to catch rhyming consecutive words.
Really? How do rednecks buy their cigarettes then? Individually? In pairs?..
Packs, not packets. Nobody calls them packets here.
Just putting it out there, but Cormac McCarthy? The dude doesn’t even bother with quotation marks.
Not bothering with quotation marks was part of the modernist movement in writing, and so dates back at least to the 1920s. It got very prominent in the 1960s, when another wave of writers picked it up, and may be cycling back again. It never went away in more underground/avant garde circles.
Editing modernist literature is a real problem. It was designed to subvert all the “rules” of writing, from punctuation on up. How do you edit Gertrude Stein? How do you edit the writers who would drop their manuscripts to the floor and pick up the pages in random order? Or cut-up technique? At various times over the last century, writers did everything imaginable with manuscripts to parallel what artists were doing with non-representational art. At some point you have to give up and hope that the end product is what the writer wanted - assuming that the writer had a specific end product in mind at all.
As I mentioned on these boards before, I believe, I have been a proofreader for so long that I proofed the first books of both Robert Jordan and the Gears, years before TOR Books was swallowed by St. Martin’s Press …
There was an artsy-fartsy book I did for Scribner several years ago which was a stream of consciousness “love letter” to his, real-life I presume, “muse” and maybe 5 “sentences” in total–in a book that was approx. 300 pp long. The author is or at least was semi-famous (I’ve blanked on his name) but this job was absolute torture–and I couldn’t conceive of anyone in his/her right mind who’d be willing to read the darn thing unless being paid to do so.
A couple times in jobs I’ve had, authors have mandated that there be no right-margin hyphens whatsoever …
I had an aunt who once told my mom out of the blue, “You know, Adam and Eve were American.” She was only one of my relatives who KNEW that Jesus spoke American English.
Yes, Laurel K. Hamilton had a scene where a character totals her car. A few pages later she is driving that car.
I believe Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has no editor. She has gotten the names of characters spelled differently in the same book and from book to book. I once mentioned this to her fan club president way back on AOL and was asked specifically was wrong in the book. I pointed about 7 different errors. Never heard back.
Fags are fags.
You need to work on your analogies. I’m sure it’s accurate, but it’s hardly illuminating.