Here's to Health

I’m happy to say I’m back in the saddle again after fighting the good fight with that flu virus.

And I tell you, it’s good to be back. While I was battling the sickness, I entertained myself with a detective novel that was a fast, exhilarating read. The only thing that bothered me about it was that it had little errors in it — not a ton of them, just enough to be aggravating.

In this blog I might have a misspelled word or misplaced comma here and there. It’s easy enough to miss your own mistakes. Look at those two “mis” words above. They both started out with the same “mis” but one has one “s” and the other has two. Luckily my computer had my back and fixed both of them as I typed.

This book had a problem with commas. They’d show up in the oddest places, where you’d never even think to put a comma. A kid in middle school writing a paper and just sprinkling commas in at random like he was putting pepper on scrambled eggs would not have put commas where these commas were. Here’s an, example. See what I mean?

Since the author is a best seller and it came from a good publisher, you'd think the editors would have caught these unworthy commas and sent them packing.

He made a mistake that had me scratching my head, mostly because I hadn’t washed my hair in a couple of days for fear my virus would turn into pneumonia. One place he said the police found a dead woman in one park, and about 200 pages later she had moved to another park across town. “Huh?” I said. I went back and looked it up, and sure enough, she'd moved to a totally different park.

It makes you lose a little bit of trust, you know? You want to believe his cockamamie story (WOW, my computer just fixed that word – who would have thought cockamamie was in it’s vocabulary?), but then he makes a big error and you realize that all the killing and conspiracy and corruption are just make believe.

Since it’s set in my town, I recognized a lot of the places in the book and I was totally convinced that these were real events, you know, but the names had been changed and facts rearranged to protect the guilty. Which wasn’t really necessary because he killed off all the bad guys or had them put on death row by the end of the book, and all the characters I liked ended up coming out fine, even the one who was shot in the head, and the one who shot her, who then got shot himself in the temple at point blank range but escaped with only a scratch.

It was a seriously complex story until the end when everything came to a screeching halt and got wrapped up as if the author was tired of writing and wanted to be done with it. I know how he feels. If I let any more time elapse, I’m liable to suffer a relapse.