Challenge: Unleash Your Inner Pedant

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I like to frame grammar as a matter of etiquette, and that I am not above taking shameless opportunities to give grammar lessons.

Novelists should be held to higher standards than Internet commenters.

In the literary community (read: mushrooming horde of writers), we tend to care a lot about proper use of language. We care about spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. One of the most frequent criticisms made (and not without justification) of self-published books is that they suffer from a glaring lack of editing and are accordingly riddled with typos and grammatical errors. It’s a fair criticism, but at the same time, a fun game many self-pub authors like to play is pointing out traditionally published books that didn’t get their fair share of proofreading.

You don’t need to express any loyalty to Team Trad-Pub or Team Self-Pub, and you don’t need to be a writer, to appreciate a book that’s free of errors. Scratch that: demand a book that’s free of errors. With that in mind, I have done my best to produce a book that is grammatically flawless and typographically immaculate. Therefore, the challenge to Unleash Your Inner Pedant is this: prove me wrong.

If you can find a typo (spelling, punctuation, missing or duplicated word, incorrect homophone) anywhere in Charlinder’s Walk, I will write a new scene just for you. This could be a scene to show a missing moment, answer a question, or give additional background information.

The challenge guidelines are thus:

1. You must find the error in a copy of the book which you have acquired since October 2011. I’ve handed out some free copies since then, and they’re valid, but a free copy I handed out pre-publication doesn’t count.

2. It must be a true error. If you want to argue with me over word choice, you will lose.

3. You may request one scene for each of as many errors you find, BUT, I will only write one scene per error. That means, you need to be the first one to find a given error in order to request a scene.

4. In the interest of transparency (so that I do not pretend an entry has not been made), please make your entries as comments on this page. Whether you are reading the paperback or the ebook, the chapter name should be sufficient for me to verify the error. If you do not want everyone to see your scene request, you may send an email to charlinderswalk (at) gmail (dot) com. (Rundown: to point out an error, leave a comment here. To request a scene, either include the question in your comment here or send email.)

5. A scene request may be: additional backstory on characters, to show an event that happened in the book from another character’s POV, to flesh out an event that happened in the book but wasn’t shown, to show an event that could have happened in the book but wasn’t made clear. Here is an example of an additional scene; in this case, an event that would be extremely difficult to narrate from Charlinder’s POV. I will not write a scene that is contrary to the spirit of the novel which I have written. I will not show anyone acting out-of-character.

6. But all that said: if you find a funny typo (as in, a misspelled word changes the meaning of the sentence), I will write you a sexy scene.

7. I will send the requested scenes to challenge entrants by email. You may share them at your discretion.

Have you read my interviews and guest posts about Charlinder’s Walk? Here is my interview at Everything and Nothing, my guest post with DeAnna Felthauser, and most recently, my interview at Literary Legs. If you’d like to know more about Charlinder before you jump into his book, here is lots of information.