RARA-AVIS: PIMP

Sandra Hess (shess@sirius.com)
Mon, 19 Apr 1999 11:50:23 -0700 I'm about to tuck into Iceberg Slim's PIMP for our May reading.
Coincidentally, I caught this past weekend's episode of NPR's This
American Life. The theme was Pimping in the 70s and tied in neatly with
our reading. You can listen to the true tale of a young man (I forget
the city locale) who grew up wanting to be a pimp, tried to become a
pimp and watched many of his friends become pimps at www.thislife.org
(check their archives, it should be up today or by Wednesday).

What's up with Holloway House? Haven't they got a proofreader they run
their galleys by? On the back cover of the PB edition I just purchased,
they misspelled Iceberg's first name. Lame. For those of you who write
professionally, just how does that work? Can you insist on a
proofreader? I just finished Anna Quindlen's BLACK AND BLUE and was
horrified by the lamest of typos ("he wined" instead of "he whined",
missing words in sentences, and the kind of silly errors one gets if you
rely entirely on spell checkers to catch errors). I think this is about
more than me being some kind of spelling or control freak. A misspelled
word creates a speedbump for the reader and interrupts the flow of the
story or information being shared. It works against a compelling story
and takes away from the hard work done by the author.

Typos in my emails? Well, you get what you pay for.

Sandra
Who is working on "letting it go."
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