C.S. Lewis, still detective

[calimac]

Remember my review of two 1930s-style "cozy" mystery novels featuring C.S. Lewis as sleuth? Well, the author sent me the manuscript of his next book, requesting comments. Now it's been published, so here's the story.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

These sound interesting. (You might want to change complemented to complimented, given your usual care with detail.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Will anyone believe that I really do know which word is which? My fingers just type the wrong thing sometimes. I just caught myself writing "on" when I meant "and".

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Mine type the wrong word ALL the time. Wrong names especially. And when I reread it, brain helpfully sees what it ought to be, not what I typed.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

True of me too. Just a day or two ago I wanted to type a comment referring to Finnegans Wake. I typed the author's name as "James James." What's worse is that I tried to correct it—and did it a second time! The typing part of my brain carried out the orders it thought the language part had given, even when the language part knew they were wrong.

This is why I've said for years that no one can copy edit their own writing.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Apparently some can, but I am not on that list.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There is a tradition behind that sort of thing: Dorothy Sayers, for example, noted that she had placed Shrewsbury College on part of the grounds of one of Oxford's men's colleges.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The geographic clunkers to which I alluded were not about fictional locales, but real ones.