I found a typo!

It’s the morning after the first night Dale has slept over at Vicki’s place. She’d asked him over for dinner to tell him how unforgivably unprofessional it was to sleep with him a few nights before in her surgery when the emotions overcame them both. She intended to apologise and tell him his rights, including reporting her conduct to the appropriate board and having her disbarred from practising as a psychiatrist if he wished.

Instead, they spend a magical evening together flirting, talking, eating and drinking. As consenting and single adults she unconsciously expects them to end up sleeping together again, but Dale – slightly timid after the sheltered life he’s led – is a perfect gentleman and doesn’t put a hand on her all night.

Now, the morning after, nature has taken its course, lust overcomes them and they end up making love with Vicki laying across her dining table.

Later, over breakfast, and with her wits about her again, Vicki knows she has to begin the discussion the visit was supposed to be about. Dale, amused at the idea of getting her into trouble and ending her career after the mutual satisfaction they’ve just enjoyed in each other, responds thus;

Dale’s mouth turned up in a sardonic smirk. “I definitely want to report you,” he said, “that was an unspeakably terrible thing you did to me in that dining room. But if you want to make it professional from now on I can charge you two fifty a pop.”

Vicki tried not to laugh as she looked back down at her plate. “I’m mean it. There are rules for a reason. I can’t possibly be objective now. We don’t know what it’s done to your treatment.”

Did you spot the typo? After reading Falling dozens (maybe hundreds) of times, many of the latter occasions with the express purpose of finding grammatical and spelling errors, we’re all human and things inevitably slip through. You occasionally see typos even in books from major publishers that have (presumably) been through the highest quality editorial processes.

I duly (and quickly) made the change to both the PDF file for the digital print/paperback file and the epub (ebook format) file and reuploaded them to Amazon.

It’s not even the first mistake that’s been found. Early on when I first published it a family member found a clanger in the first 10 or 20 pages.

As a self published author, it makes one shudder to think how many other typos are lurking no matter how careful one is, especially in such a long book (776 pages in print – playing with font and margin sizes to satisfy the Kindle Store restrictions about book length was quite a dance).

I read it. And read it. And read it again. I spellchecked it using three different word processor applications, one specifically designed for editing novels. I searched for every instance of common words I sometimes mix up when I type, like ‘from’ and ‘form’. For some reason I can’t ever type the word ‘management’ right on the first attempt. Almost every time I try to write ‘involve’ I usually type ‘invovle’. I had to make an exhaustive list of my foibles and failings and search for them all.

Being a completely one man publishing band, I didn’t have the scope (read; money) for professional editing services, so I have no idea how many other errors still exist. So if you bought an early paperback edition of Falling (I’m kidding, nobody has), please let me know.

Oh, and if you still didn’t spot it; instead of “I’m mean it”, Vicki of course should have said “I mean it…”