(I need to stop making bad jokes. I blame my uncle. The rest of the family were talking about big issues or something at the big family thingie tonight and we were away form them all in a corner, quite mysteriously, and he told me many, many bad jokes.)

From an editor’s point of view, you have a very good sense of words. It’s your care and attention that trips you up. It’s lovely to work with, even when you’re frightfully worried. You’re balancing how something will be read and what you know needs saying and how the two interact all the time. I love this, though it must be uncomfortable from your end. You do a good job, maybe because of all these concerns.

BTW, I’m in Melbourne for family things. Same phone number as last time if you’re in Oz.

Kirby – I’m selfishly glad to hear that I’m not the only writer who can’t always get simple sentences straight. I think I’m often trying to arrange the simple against the fancy and get them in the proportions I want — which sometimes just results in contortions. My brain doesn’t fill in stuff so much — not on a large scale — but it cheats and makes sense of things that really don’t make sense.

I’ve never noticed any missed words when you post here. For some reason blog comments are a particularly crappy area for me. I feel like I forget what words mean and use them sloppily and strangely. It’s kind of somewhere between writing and talking and in my case a lot of the vagueness of talking gets in. (Then I look at YouTube comments and realise I’m calibrating my linguistic instruments by some pretty fuddy-duddy standards.)

Bullshit. I mean that in the nicest way possible *g*, but as far as your prose goes, words are your bitch. It may take you ten times to get them all lined up right (same problem here, ditto the screwing up the most simple of sentences repeatedly until I wonder how I ever managed to write, you know, whole BOOKS!), but hey, that’s why brilliant people are known for losing their keys and eyeglasses a dozen times a year. All the focus of those great brains goes somewhere else besides the minutiae. Maybe for you, the focus goes into the artistry of the prose, and not so much on the mechanics?

Me, I’m dyslexic. I can leave out not just single words, but entire sections of a sentence I’m typing, and when I go back to edit it, the gaps will be invisible to me. Often, I simply don’t see them, no matter how many times I painstakingly go over the sentence. I’ll think the missing section is there, but in reality my brain is seamlessly filling in what I fail to see. That sucks a lot, but I have ways of coping. I still have issues with blog posts, emails, etc, but luckily I have good friends who “speak Kirby” and make allowances. My editors (and I was a pro editor myself for years) always say my text is very clean when it’s sent in, and that there’s not a lot for them to correct. Shyeah. That’s because I’ve gone over it 20 times and had the computer read it back to me aloud first. Aurally, I miss nothing, but my visual… that’s another matter.