OK?

Writing Wednesday

It took me a week, but eventually I opened the package that I knew to be my book In the Shade of the Mulberry Tree to review the edits. Letting a completely independent person read my writing is quite scary, particularly as she was to criticise and correct it.

Thankfully, it is not too bad. She has found spelling errors and typos. And she has made suggestions for re-phrasing, most of which make total sense. And she has pointed out inconsistencies, which require a lot more thinking about but need to be resolved. As it is a memoir of our time in Zambia I know exactly where I was and when, but I don't always write it down as clearly as it is in my mind!

So I bravely set to. One thing she noted was that I sometimes wrote 'ok', sometimes 'okay', and sometimes 'OK'. Apparently I should always do the latter.

'No problem!' I thought. 'Find and Replace!' Word has its merits.

Do you know how many words there are in my book with 'ok' in? Here they are:

• look, looks, looking (I do an awful lot of this)
• book (I read them)
• cook, cooker (half a chapter on the need for a cooker)
• guidebook, handbook (we travelled around)
• joke, jokes, joking (we laugh)
• woken, woke (I had two children under the age of 3...)
• broke, broken (I had two children under the age of 3...)
• brook (only one)
• took (travel with things)
• coke (diet or otherwise)
• smoke, smoky (unrelated to the coke above)
• shook (fear: have you got close to a crocodile?)
• hook, hooks, Hook (Bridge)
• bespoke (we needed furniture)

I might have been quicker reading the whole book again, particularly as I still have to go through it for all the other edits.

Still, I have gone through five chapters in detail ... only 34 to go. (Hasten to add: They are short chapters - this is not some epic tome that will exhaust you by looking at it!)

It loOKs as if my boOk will be OK - oh, darn that Find and Replace tool!