I’m making some little changes to Dancing Barefoot for the next printing. I’ve done lots of readings from the book in the past few months, and I’ve noticed certain passages that benefit from the addition of a word or phrase, or the removal of stuff that I thought was good when I wrote it, or for whatever reason has never connected with an audience.
Here’s where you, dear reader (wow. I can’t believe I said that) come in: if you’ve read Dancing Barefoot, and you’ve spotted a typo, you can help me catch anything that I’ve missed. I think it’s pretty solid, but I know that the current printing has at least one.
Thnka yuo fro your’re help!1
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Bugzilla, eh?
Dude, that is a seriously inspired idea. I like it, a LOT.
Alright so we’re getting nitty griity on the layout — widows and orphans for goshsakes, how about
GUTTERS!
When typesetting a book that opens up and is bound together so it can’t open the whole way flat without breaking the spine *ahem,* you should make the page margins on the inside of the book a bit wider than the margins on the outside. This keeps the type on the inside from getting too tight into that dark crack formed in the crease of the binding and makes your page look nicer. Keep your type out of the gutter.
I know your mind is there often enough.
First of all,
I have been selling on Ebay for years. One of the great new features is the Second Offer. You can use it to send a chance to the second place bidder to buy the book for their best bid.
Second, When you issue the new version of DB, You should call it “Dancing Barefoot, the Next Generation” (I can’t believe that we went over 50 comments with no one making that one).
Mark Hamil is such a whiner. That punk RUINED STAR WARS!!!!
If Will Wheaton and Mark Hamil got in a fight I would put my money on Wil! And Will Wheaton is a better writer too. And he probably plays with his lightsaber better.
Ok, so it looks like we’re supposed to put typos in here. (I apologize, if I’ve misunderstood.) I just flipped through and randomly read one passage, and started another. Here’s what I found in them.
Pg. 25 – Last paragraph, 1st sentence…
“I stepped carefully around several other actors my way to the sign-in sheet.”
Should it be “…on my way”?
Pg. 39 – 5th paragraph, last sentence
“Youurreee wiiffeessss innnn bedddd…”
Missing an apostrophe… “wiffee’ssss” And that may have been just been an aesthetic decision, but I thought I would point it out anyway.
Pg. 39 – 7th paragraph
“…Stay-in bed…”
Stay-in-bed
I’ll keep looking and see what I can find. I’m pretty good at this stuff…maybe too good.
Woo!
Thanks, Nayir!
I caught pg 25 . . . but I didn’t know about the other ones.
Awesome! I’m really grateful.
You’re very welcome. I’ll have more later on, if there are more to be found. It’s kinda one of my fortes, among other things that are not to be mentioned here. 😉 Heh heh.
It’s not really a typo but rather the clarity of the illustrations. I like Ben’s work and think one little step might make them even better. My guess is that they were saved as grayscale photoshop files. If you convert them to bitmap (go to image, then mode). This will convert the artwork to lineart for nice crisp lines instead of the fuzzy edges around the lines. I hope this helps!
Now this is really being nit picky, and would be a hairy thing to do but it seems that you are using foot marks instead of smart quotes on your apostophes. I think it would be easier to just leave it as is than to find every place you used an apostrophe. But I thought it might be helpful to you to know this for JAG. ( On a mac, you hold down the option or option shift and then one of the two bracket keys depending if you are going for quotation marks or apostrophes.)
Wil, I really enjoy your website (it’s my first bookmark and one of the first things I do each day) and I love Dancing Barefoot. I can hardly wait for you to do a signing in the Bay Area. I’ve delivered some press kits to a couple bookstores here in Napa.
A girl can hope!
Elizabeth
Wil,
I didn’t really notice any errors first time around (too busy enjoying the book), so read it a second time.
I only found a couple of minor things.
P.19, paragraph 3 “. . . finding the strike zone,). . .” You probably don’t need the comma before the end bracket.
P.39 end of first paragraph. “. . . if she said things like “fucker.” . . .” Should the full-stop be outside of the ending quote mark here? I could be wrong.
P.102, second last paragraph. You mention in two days you’ll never want to board an airplane again. This confuses me, did I miss a bit? Because I’m not sure what this refers to.
One other thing. In some places you italicise the names of TV shows, and in other places you don’t. For consistency it probably should be one or the other.
Hope this helps.
I’m back with a few more I’ve found. Some of it is more editing stuff, I guess, then typos per se. I hope you don’t hate me.
Pg. 13, 3rd full paragraph
“kids table”
Should it be kids’ table? I’m not so sure on that, but since it’s a possession of some sort, I’m fairly sure there should be an apostrophe.
Pg. 17, Last paragraph, 2nd sentence
“…thanks me for helping with him.”
…helping him.
I also found the pg 19 one. I don’t believe you need comma’s within parentheses.
Pg. 62, Last paragraph, 1st sentence
“…spacesuit that is a little to tight…”
too tight…
Pg. 46 4th full paragraph, last sentence
“…began to move back toward…”
Ok, this is nitpicky, but it looks as if there are two spaces instead of one between “back” and “toward.” My eye always catches stuff like that…
Pg. 49 1st paragraph
“…she said, “did you get…”
said, “Did you get…”
Pg. 49, 7th paragraph (I think)
“What an asshole!” She said, “Oh,…”
That made me stop when I was reading it, because it’s normally read as “What an asshole!” she said. “Oh,…” It makes the reader pause because something doesn’t seem right. You know? I mean, basically, the reader wants there to be a period there, and will read it as such. So, when there isn’t, it makes someone stop. And you don’t want that to happen.
Pg. 53 6th paragraph
“Hi Wil, how are you?”
Hi Wil. How are you?
Pg. 56, 7th paragraph, last sentence.
Starbuck’s
No apostrophe.
Pg. 56 last paragraph
“…inner voices: Sarcastic asshole.”
Sarcastic-asshole – you know, to be consistent with how you worded the others, like Self-Preservation.
Pg. 58, 2nd paragraph, towards the middle (I got sick of counting sentences. 😉 )
“It’s not just mindlessly scrawling my name; It’s stopping…”
I think the second “It’s” should be “it’s” – after the semicolon.
Ok, that’s as far as I got last night before Final Fantasy X-2 beckoned me once again. Maybe I should rethink my current career choice, and become an editor instead…
One last thing I noticed – you like commas an awful lot, and you may just want to check them out a bit. The only reason I say this is because I have the same problem in my writings. I’m a comma whore, and I know that I don’t need nearly as many as I use. If you want me to find some examples of what I’m talking about, let me know.
WOW!
Good notes, Crystal! Thank you.
Nayir! You should be a copy editor.
I *am* a comma whore, but not as bad as I used to be.
I think I’m going to to a MAJOR rewrite for a future version of this book, and I’ll wipe out all those amateurish commas.
I’m also going to attach some sticky notes to my AP book, and my Elements of Style, too. 🙂