Novel Bloopers

DamaNegra · Sep 16, 2007

I just wrote:

"He found himself in a stoutly built room with no windows or walls."

Yeah, the room was so strong it was made of air!

So, what are your novel bloopers?

Devil Ledbetter · Sep 16, 2007

DamaNegra said:
I just wrote:

"He found himself in a stoutly built room with no windows or walls."

Yeah, the room was so strong it was made of air!

So, what are your novel bloopers?

I'm sure I have some, but that one had me :roll:

.

sunna · Sep 16, 2007

I had a scene in a forest in my last WIP; there were a lot of birch trees in it, and they were significant for a magical reason, so they got mentioned a lot. I wrote most of it in a very bad mood, though, owing to an argument with my sister.

Pretty predictable, actually. Every mention of a birch tree was bitch tree, a bitch bow, bitch bark, he leaned against a nearby bitch... it made for some interesting reading later.

kristie911 · Sep 16, 2007

I don't make mistakes.

Okay, maybe I make so many, I can't pick just one!

Robert L.B. · Sep 16, 2007

I wrote a couple pages during a time when I was debating the MC's name. I picked one and wrote it.

Few weeks later I forgot I had picked one and reopened the document to write a few more pages. The result was that my MC changed names halfway through the short story.

akiwiguy · Sep 16, 2007

I have of course started going down a path in erotic stuff where I suddenly think... "hang about, are they now facing me, upside down, right-side up? I seem to have worked my way into a bit of an anatomically impossible spot here!' LOL

Chumplet · Sep 16, 2007

My male MC scraped some leftover eggs into the dogs' bowels.

scully931 · Sep 16, 2007

I am sad because it took me a minute to realize what was wrong with that sentence. :Shrug:

Pila · Sep 16, 2007

Whoever made the layout of QWERTY keyboards were pretty rotten for placing the 'I' next to the 'U' and the 'C' key next to the 'X.'

On bad days, duck and sec turn into some pretty naughty words =)

I believe that I am the queen of freudian slips.

maxmordon · Sep 16, 2007

I had a colonel that magically became general and then colonel in just a few hours

Jersey Chick · Sep 16, 2007

I was in the middle of a love scene in an erotic romance I was writing and I realized that my characters couldn't possibly be doing what they were doing - unless they were freakishly flexible. And multitalented.

I'm sure there are a lot more, but that's the only one I can think of right now

maddythemad · Sep 16, 2007

Pila said:
Whoever made the layout of QWERTY keyboards were pretty rotten for placing the 'I' next to the 'U' and the 'C' key next to the 'X.'

On bad days, duck and sec turn into some pretty naughty words =)

I believe that I am the queen of freudian slips.

Don't forget D next to F.

AnneMarble · Sep 16, 2007

I don't remember the exact wording. The character was supposed to throw a soda can into a trash can in the kitchen, but it turned into something like "He walked into the kitchen and threw the kitchen into the trash can."
:Wha:

In my latest novel, I kept giving lines of dialogue to Queen Zakira in the scene just before she showed up in the story. It's a damn shame I had to take those lines out because they were good.

sneakers145 · Sep 16, 2007

I've done the name switch thing several times (Jenny became Amy then Jenny again). It's my characters' faults, really. If they would just tell me their names from the get-go, things like this wouldn't happen.

PeeDee · Sep 16, 2007

In episode 3 of my robot series (spoiler!), one of the Robots loses an arm, and it's a big deal. In episode four, he's waving it around willy-nilly. ONe of the many scenes I scrapped in episode four. Thank goodness I caught it.

I remember in a novel I started working on, several years ago, I killed someone, then came back to writing it after a few days, forgot all about that scene, and kept on writing him.

Every now and then, when I'm really tired, I'll write something absolutely mindless like he stood up and got to his feet. Because clearly, he stood up on his hands and then got his feet under him.

Honestly, writers.... Not too bright sometimes.

glassquill · Sep 16, 2007

I made my MC's biological mother much younger than she is. :tongue

Good thing I caught that in time.

wayndom · Sep 16, 2007

I was just doing a rewrite of my latest novel when I realized I had alternating chapters covering two different characters...and they were completely out of synch! I had a chapter taking place in the middle of the day, followed by a chapter taking place in the middle of the night, then back to the first character, who's still eating lunch!

Then I remembered that when I was writing the first draft, I switched scenes just to give myself a break, without concern for when the alternate scene was taking place, thinking I'd put them in order later. Thank gawd I didn't send it to an agent in that condition...

wayndom · Sep 16, 2007

glassquill said:
I made my MC's biological mother much younger than she is. Good thing I caught that in time.

That reminds me of a documentary I saw about artificial intelligence. A computer guy was explaining that in the early days, they thought it would be easy to teach a computer to learn from new info, but the computers kept making ridiculous mistakes. His big example: they learned that regardless of how much they told the computer about the way humans reproduce, the computer was never able to grasp why a father can't be younger than his son. Ultimately, they just entered the info: "A father cannot be younger than his son." I don't know if they included, "except in science-fiction."

glassquill · Sep 16, 2007

wayndom said:
That reminds me of a documentary I saw about artificial intelligence. A computer guy was explaining that in the early days, they thought it would be easy to teach a computer to learn from new info, but the computers kept making ridiculous mistakes. His big example: they learned that regardless of how much they told the computer about the way humans reproduce, the computer was never able to grasp why a father can't be younger than his son. Ultimately, they just entered the info: "A father cannot be younger than his son." I don't know if they included, "except in science-fiction."

I would think fathers are easier to explain than mothers.

When the age difference is about ten years, what you get is :Wha:

.

PeeDee · Sep 16, 2007

wayndom said:
That reminds me of a documentary I saw about artificial intelligence. A computer guy was explaining that in the early days, they thought it would be easy to teach a computer to learn from new info, but the computers kept making ridiculous mistakes. His big example: they learned that regardless of how much they told the computer about the way humans reproduce, the computer was never able to grasp why a father can't be younger than his son. Ultimately, they just entered the info: "A father cannot be younger than his son." I don't know if they included, "except in science-fiction."

How really fascinating. Now I want to know more. (The last thing I need is an "oooh, that's interesting" tangent, damn it. But still. Now I have one.)

AnneMarble · Sep 16, 2007

wayndom said:
That reminds me of a documentary I saw about artificial intelligence. A computer guy was explaining that in the early days, they thought it would be easy to teach a computer to learn from new info, but the computers kept making ridiculous mistakes. His big example: they learned that regardless of how much they told the computer about the way humans reproduce, the computer was never able to grasp why a father can't be younger than his son. Ultimately, they just entered the info: "A father cannot be younger than his son." I don't know if they included, "except in science-fiction."

A few years ago, I bought a family tree program in the bargain software section and started entering the family tree, based on my mothers' notes. I finally gave up in frustration when I ended up with one of my descendants giving birth to his own mother, or something whacky like that. And no matter what I did, he kept turning up in weird places. Sort of like that David Gerrold character in "The Man Who Folded Himself" who went back in time and met different versions of himself. Or maybe my ancestor was Virginia Woolf's Orlando!

Pila · Sep 16, 2007

maddythemad said:
Don't forget D next to F.

Hahaha, however could I forget that one?

I have arthritis (at 17 I'm basically already a 60 year old woman!) so I only type with my left hand and then the forefinger on my right hand, and while I type just as fast as anybody else (180 wpm on my good days) I'm always making a ton of crazy mistakes.

Will Lavender · Sep 16, 2007

Pila said:
Hahaha, however could I forget that one?

I have arthritis (at 17 I'm basically already a 60 year old woman!) so I only type with my left hand and then the forefinger on my right hand, and while I type just as fast as anybody else (180 wpm on my good days) I'm always making a ton of crazy mistakes.

You type 180 words per minute? With one and a half hands?! Holy jeez can this be right? I type about 110+ and I'm very fast. (Perhaps, though, those mistakes are happening because you're going too fast?)

This is a threadjack...but 180? That's spectacular.

Pila · Sep 16, 2007

Will Lavender said:
You type 180 words per minute? With one and a half hands?! Holy jeez can this be right? I type about 110+ and I'm very fast. (Perhaps, though, those mistakes are happening because you're going too fast?)

This is a threadjack...but 180? That's spectacular.

Yep. I can't do it constantly but if I have the sentence planned out in my head that's how quickly I can get it out. I took a keyboarding class three years ago in my freshmen year of highschool and the program we use measured our WPM and that's how I scored =) My CONSTANT wpm is 110-130ish.

The mistakes are mainly on the right side of the keyboard, becuase that's the side I only use one finger on and sometime it gets a bit misplaced

wayndom · Sep 16, 2007

maxmordon said:
I had a colonel that magically became general and then colonel in just a few hours

Sounds like he was put in charge of Iraq, then told the president things didn't look good...

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