On Bourbon, Book Editing, and the Inevitability of Typos
I live in Louisville, Kentucky, in the very heart of bourbon country.
We have a street widely known as Whiskey Row. There are an abundance of bourbon distilleries in the city limits (including Old Forester and Angel’s Envy). There are several more in the surrounding area.
It’s safe to say, I know a little bit about bourbon.
And yet, it took me 30 years to realize it’s Jim Beam and not Jim Bean.
I was sitting at a red light, absently admiring a well-designed advertisement for the famous distillery when the realization smacked me like a corner of a cabinet door you know is there and forgot about.
Beam. With an ‘M’.
I don’t know why my brain decided to replace the ‘M’ with an ‘N’ for 30 years. But it did. I also don’t know why I suddenly noticed my mistake while sitting at a red light.
The brain has this magical ability to change what it sees to fit within prior expectations.
This is especially true for text. On the one hand, it’s a little humiliating, and on the other hand, it’s kind of extraordinary. For a writer, it’s absolutely terrifying.
I’m currently neck deep in book edits. The fear of typos is strong.
Writing a book takes hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of hours; each moment loaded with potential for typos. Once the book is written, writers engage in copious amounts of editing. More hours, more terror, and hopefully fewer typos than when you first began.
My Jim Beam Revelation was a bittersweet reminder of a double-edged, inevitable truth about writing.
Typos will happen and I can’t catch them all.
Even with the help of a professional editor (and line editors and copy editors and format editors and proofreaders). Even if I spend another thousand hours reading and re-reading. Hopefully, the typos will be small, infinitesimal, and unnoticed by all but the most attentive readers. But they will happen.
After my book is released (sometime next year) I plan to buy myself a nice bottle of Jim Beam to keep in my office. When the inevitable finally happens, and I find that one typo I should’ve seen before, I’ll crack that bottle open and pour myself a drink.
Thanks for reading to the very end. You get a gold star! Subscribe for free to receive new posts weekly, and to support my work.