The Dreaded Red Pen

A gentle brag with only 1 whine

Aug 01, 2025

When I turned [a certain age] last year, I insisted I could still roll down a hill (video exists). When I turned [a certain age plus 1] this year, I binned about 40 pairs of skis, scuba equipment, and other toys of my lost youth. That’s ok says I, I am having a blast writing about life and doing the projects I can on this 100-acre property in Vermont. I’ve got a building to build and all the other fun stuff. I have hit maturity. Look at me all growed up now. Whazoo!

Well except when ye olde publisher send the final proofs of novel #2 (STOLEN MOUNTAIN) with just over 2000 corrections. I crumbled with the maturity of a 13-year-old undiagnosed dyslexic looking at yet another assignment handed back by the teacher. Yet again the weight of red ink appears to outweigh the weight of my black ink. I know and understand how a professional team of publisher, author, editors, and etc can get here together. It happens with teams. We each share a little blame, adjust the pub-date then focus on the work-at-hand. Within a day, I find rhythm in the drudge. We got something out of order. We’ll make it right together. Yay for the home team.

The thing is that when I saw 2000+ corrections/errors in the final proof of the novel, I wasn’t a mature author of a certain age, but a frustrated child saying: BUT I TRIED.

I love to write.

I love great stories and great story telling.

But I don’t read the written word well and thank the gods nobody really sees my handwriting. I practice my signature and use a lovely fountain pen as a parlor trick, but if I stray beyond the common: “All the best” or “Enjoy the read”, the message may be a bit of a mess. The title page of a book is not a place get fancy.

Dyslexia is a challenge at times, but manageable. I had to learn to manage it. More on that in a sec. The disadvantage comes when you combine four factors:

Dyslexia
Left-handedness
Gleeking
No computers

Dyslexia: sure, my perception of things is slightly different that some others. Oddly, it is also a superpower. I can read well enough to comprehend in a lot of European languages. All y’all go ahead and argue over your spellings and words. They are all the same. Basta! I look at the world stating that all spelling is arbitrary and fixed within narrow temporal boundaries. What was wrong then is right now. What is right now will be wrong in a few years. When you stand back, squint, and see it through my eyes, you’ll see I am right. Ask John McWhorter (he may not actually agree with me, but we’d have a great ole chat about it all. In the end, I’d end up agreeing with him.)

Left-handedness: Not really a disadvantage in most things as long as you were raised after the generations of youths stopped being hit on the knuckles for being sinister (Latin for left-handed). Kids were then told that they were to be dexterous in all things (Latin for right-handed). Left-handedness matters with handwriting. I’m of the group of humans that write from left to right. That means that my left hand must curl around letters that I form. Or I must suspend left hand over newly formed letters. Or I just smear the letters. Both pencil and pen smear making bad writing with atrocious spelling difficult to understand.

Gleeking: I learned the verb gleek on the Green Line in Boston as a youth. I yawned and a woman witness the twin jets of clear, thin saliva that jetted from under my tongue. That, I was told, is a gleek. I had gleeked. I am a gleeker. It is like a gift from the gods to be human and spray like a cobra. This just goes to prove Hank Green right. Humans are fish. Snakes are fish. All of my life, I spray water from under my tongue when I yawn. That spray lands on my homework wrinkling my paper and further disturbing the fragility of my scribbled markings on the page. There is no recovery from that. Paper wrinkles, ink smears, pencil fades, teacher write with red pen on it all.

No Computer: I got my first computer in 1982 [as a person of a certain age can do because they were alive back then]. 1982 was the first year the IBM PC came to the market. By 1984, I got my first “A” grade. Why? I could see my writing. I had a spell checker. I could read my words. I could fix words without making them worse. Know what a left-handed dyslexic student who randomly sprays water from under the tongue can’t do on an assignment? Fix words. Even when I see a mistake, you can’t erase marks that have been dampened. You tear a hole in the paper, there is more smearing. With a computer, you hit whatever version of the print button exists then print the work again, nice and clean. No smudges, no water marks and maybe no errors (hah!)

Before computer, I would try and try and try and try and try. I would start over knowing I could do make it better only to make the same mistakes and yawn yet again. Sometimes I turned in my best effort, sometimes I simply lied and didn’t turn it in.

Not turning work in confused everyone. My parents would swear to my teacher that I sat at the dining table all evening writing. My mother would occasionally provide drafts pulled from the bin. What happened to my homework? I’d say over and over I didn’t finish it.

Which was worse, the lie or the inevitable results of so much red on a page that my original efforts in faded pencil or blotchy pen were incomprehensible. Boy, they tried to help me fix my papers. Some lovely lady in the same small town would pick through each word helping me spell all the stupid words better and more American. My father, a man of a different generation and properly educated, spelt everything correctly always. A nice “u” in honour and a pile of “y”s in bycycle. But for my that classroom I must spell color without a “u”, thank you. A “u” is wrong, always wrong. You get no credit for spelling that word: colour. But down the hall in another classroom, the spelling of that same word was : “coleur”. I learned that the spelling of words depends on the teacher, the classroom and the environment.

The universal answer for spelling in a classroom is to sound it out. No dout that worx for sum. I do remember asking my parents how to spell “stoffice”. I was younger then, learning my times tables. The first answer was the reckless: “sound it out”. Then came the next great suggestion: “look it up”. “Stoffice” can not be found in a dictionary. When frustrated enough, I fussed a bit. My mother listened long enough to ask the follow up question. “Honey, what are you trying to write.”

“I need to know how to spell ‘stoffice’ because I am trying to describe going to the po stoffice.”

When I get 2000 comments in tiny letters in the comment-margin of a 300 page manuscript, I am not a person of a certain age who can roll down a hill still. I am a child who can’t spell “stoffice.” But given I am of a certain age, I know how to push through shit and get shit done. Everyone must know how to clean a toilet, and wash poop from stuff. I certainly can get through 2000 suggestions from a wonderful and helpful editor.

Happy to report there is a rhythm to the work. And that after making sure what we, as a team execute projects in a more logical order (write, edit, layout, white glove, publish), we’ll make it all sing and dance and bring joy. You’ll buy the book and we’ll do it again.

By the way, the release of STOLEN MOUNTAIN will be delayed a few weeks. Hey but the 1000 commas I missed will be in the right places. My odd affinity for hyphenating nouns to compound them will be tamed.

And I may win the argument on how my main character is addressed. Boy that was work for the editor. I admire her tenacity and focus. I could not have done that. Editor is right, technically correct in all measures. She’s clearly the kinda person who sees only A or A+ written in red pen on her papers. Thus, therefore the world needs a lot of her! So do I. I never really saw an A+ written in red ink until I was ready to graduate from university (At least I got one! Another “W.”)

Random Easter Eggs in STOLEN MOUNTAIN

(a note to this editor)

Place Names

You worked hard confirming that none of my place names nor road names or highway names don’t exist in contemporary Vermont. Vermont does not have a Route 1. There is no Trowbridge Vermont nor Snelland nor Haworth. That’s because: fiction. Well more than that. Maybe I tell true stories that masquerade as fiction. Maybe I don’t need my actual neighbors thinking I am a tattletale and a thief of good stories. Put fiction in a fictional place, keep lawyers off my back. I smiled at every comment in which you confirmed my research. Must have been annoying for you. And maybe you thought I was totally stupid for not knowing place names in the region where I was bread-and-buttered.

But while searching for Haworth Vermont, you didn’t find its source. Yeah, so I used the town names around Sherwood Forest in Northern England. Everything else around me is named for either an English town or based on an Algonquin word (except for Florida Mass which is a Spanish word for garden and two was named before Florida joined the U.S.)

U.S. Army

About the Chicago Manual’s efforts to abbreviate the United States without the little dots, that just doesn’t do for me. Sorry CMOS. But you can’t be a manual if you are flexible about stuff and list all the exceptions. If you look at old army belt buckles and saddles, “U.S.” is visible. The army loves stamping “U.S.” on stuff. Even gold buttons. And it is thus in the logo! And since we’re here… let’s first acknowledge that calling anything marked “U.S.” came from Uncle Sam seems obvious. And when talking about U.S. and army stuff, Uncle is can be just plain Uncle (with an initial capital). All the cool kids who have been stuffed into buses, planes, gymnasiums, and handed hundreds of pound of crap with U.S. stamped on it know who Uncle is.

While “US Army” looks damn stupid and totally wrong for obvious reasons (it is wrong). The “US Marine Corps” goes through life without the dots. Which for marines is acceptable. I raised Marine. He thought bootcamp was easy after life at home. He’s pretty good at saying “ooh-rah” and “Us Marine”. (oh, right, thank you for your service and happy birthday every November 10th!)

Sam vs Sarah

Dear Editor, you did pick up on my odd use of Major Sarah Ann Musgraves name. Publicly and professionally, everyone calls her “Sam” from her initials. The same initials my mother had. Nobody called my mother “Sam” but she wrote “SAM” on most things. My Sam prefers to be called “Sam.” Except that her friend, Brighid, calls Sam “Sarah” during more intimate moments. If you hear/read Sarah, there is likely a door or a pillow involved somewhere in the scene. Or maybe I am harkening back to the tender moments in their shared lives. Sam is Sarah during those private and quiet moments.

Editor is amazing. She never missed a “Sarah” and got them all fixed according Chicago Manual. All Sarah’s perfectly aligned and consistent as “Sam”. I couldn’t have done that in the marginalia of a PDF. I would have whined and fussed (because there is still a child in there). There were hundreds of such references. Editor caught them all, by hand, one at a time.

I am bragging that I can even do this shit (write novels and short stories) and that there are people joining me on this silly adventure.

My whine…

I do whine about Adobe and Acrobat. How the hell did any group of developers take a good reliable working product and turn it into such crap. It has become bloated and slow and difficult to work with (because I am impatient and intolerant of crap).