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| It's Murphy's Law: What can go wrong, will go wrong. |
Bobbie Christmas is the owner of Zebra Communications and
very well-respected editor. I’ve met her several times because she frequently
lectures on “How to Edit.” Every writer
knows that it is next to impossible to edit your own work—it takes a trained
editor to find all those pesky typos and inadvertent grammatical errors.
(You can probably tell that my blog posts are not
professionally edited. No matter how many times I proofread, errors remain.)
Bobbie has a free monthly newsletter, The Writer’s Network News,
that every writer will find useful. It’s two or three pages a month chock-full
of editing tips and other information. Recently Bobbie wrote about the misuse and over use of the word “awesome.”
She also did a little blurb about a form of wordplay called “lipograms.” I
write for HubPages and I was
inspired by her comments to write two pieces: The Naughty
Grammarian: Literally Awesome Hyperbole and Word
Play: What is a Lipogram.
I emailed Bobbie to thank her for being an inspiration, and
she emailed back to tell me that she liked my work and was going to link to it
in her next newsletter. What a nice break for me. Lots of people would learn
about my work. All month, I eagerly awaited the newsletter. Finally, it arrived
in my in-box. I clicked on the links to my articles just for the pleasure of seeing
my pages pop-up. The links didn’t work.
I was beyond upset. I thought I had made an error. I hadn’t.
It took a while, but I discovered that there was a glitch with the HubPages
servers and some links wouldn’t work. Why does the bread always fall butter-side
down? Why did the servers fail just on the same day the newsletter came out?
Why were my links among the affected links? Murphy's Law.
(By the way, the links work now. So if you tried to use them
and got an error message, try again. The links above should work now. Also,
Bobbie was nice enough to say she would reprint them next month.)
You can learn more about Bobbie Christmas at www.zebraeditor.com
or www.zebracommunications.com.
You can also follow her blogs, Rx
from the Book Doctor and Write in Style.
I said a little prayer to Loki, the Norse god of mischief,
and asked him not to mess with my links so I’m sure all the links work.
P.S: I have done a whole series of The Naughty Grammarian
posts. Which of these issues do you need to brush up on?
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