What’s the biggest blooper you have made in a story?

[EmilyMiller]

Accidental incest, when I mixed up the names of mother and daughter characters.

That gets a

 

[Limnophile]

Repeatedly… in a time machine… during a leap year…

Something to ponder: Would a story be allowed here, if it includes a woman who has lived 60 years but was born on February 29th? Since she has only had 15 birthdays?

I'm guessing 'no'.

 

[Voboy]

Something to ponder: Would a story be allowed here, if it includes a woman who has lived 60 years but was born on February 29th? Since she has only had 15 birthdays?

I'm guessing 'no'.

Yes. Of course it would. She has lived 60 years. So she is sixty years old.

 

[Britva415]

She patted her waste

and washed her hands.

 

[YDB95]

I left an editor's note in one story. That was probably the biggest.

Quite possibly a majority of my stories have a character referred to by the wrong name at least once (sometimes another character in the same story, sometimes not even that).

When it comes to factual errors, an early series of mine involves two ballet dancers, one female and one male. There's at least one mention of the latter having a problem with hiding his erection in his tight dancewear...I now know male dancers wear some sort of belt that prevents that.

 

[Thefireflies]

I called The Beatles The Beetles...twice, including in an author's note. I've said it before and I'll say it again but that mistake will bug me forever!

 

[EmilyMiller]

I called The Beatles The Beetles...twice, including in an author's note. I've said it before and I'll say it again but that mistake will bug me forever!

In the same vein I seem to be compelled to refer to “pealing off my panties”, I know it’s wrong, but I still do it all the time and spellcheck doesn’t catch it.

Em

 

[Stimtheone]

Most of the time, my bloopers might come either from me being too in the moment or google docs correcting me in wrong way. Sometimes I do get some stuff mixed up, but I have done it so often in the proofreading that I can't even remember most, all I can remember is a recent one.

Intention: "The boy found in this a great feel." Accidentally type "fel"
Google Docs: "The boy found this a great flex."

 

[EmilyMiller]

Most of the time, my bloopers might come either from me being too in the moment or google docs correcting me in wrong way. Sometimes I do get some stuff mixed up, but I have done it so often in the proofreading that I can't even remember most, all I can remember is a recent one.

Intention: "The boy found in this a great feel." Accidentally type "fel"
Google Docs: "The boy found this a great flex."

I write on my phone. I feel like throwing it out of a window half the time. Autocorrect is determined to make my writing even more nonsensical than it was to start with.

I would get if it only changed erroneously spelled words, but it changes correctly spelled words to something else. WTF!!! And I sometimes don’t notice until proof-reading.

Em

 

[Stimtheone]

I write on my phone. I feel like throwing it out of a window half the time. Autocorrect is determined to make my writing even more nonsensical than it was to start with.

This is why I never do text-intensive things on my phone. So much stuff can go wrong. Even with my trained fingers the keyboard is sometimes too eager. I have to check everything I write on my phone

 

[EmilyMiller]

This is why I never do text-intensive things on my phone. So much stuff can go wrong. Even with my trained fingers the keyboard is sometimes too eager. I have to check everything I write on my phone

I should too. I write ~ 10k word stories on it regularly. I once wrote a 20k word one .

Em

 

[yowser]

I write on my phone. I feel like throwing it out of a window half the time. Autocorrect is determined to make my writing even more nonsensical than it was to start with.

I would get if it only changed erroneously spelled words, but it changes correctly spelled words to something else. WTF!!! And I sometimes don’t notice until proof-reading.

Em

Any technological device with 'smart' as a prefix makes you dumber.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Any technological device with 'smart-' as a prefix makes you dumber.

There’s not much room at the bottom as it is, hun.

Em

 

[Duleigh]

I write on my phone. I feel like throwing it out of a window half the time. Autocorrect is determined to make my writing even more nonsensical than it was to start with.

I would get if it only changed erroneously spelled words, but it changes correctly spelled words to something else. WTF!!! And I sometimes don’t notice until proof-reading.

Em

I have a solution for you, it's not very technologically based but it may work - don't write large documents on your phone.

Try a laptop where you can easily program autocorrect to work for you not against you. I love being able to give characters longer names because I programmed autocorrect to replace kk or qq any other rarely used combination of letters to fill in that long and often used word. And if I have to use that combination of letters to appear in the text a ^z will fix the autocorrect.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I have a solution for you, it's not very technologically based but it may work - don't write large documents on your phone.

Try a laptop where you can easily program autocorrect to work for you not against you. I love being able to give characters longer names because I programmed autocorrect to replace kk or qq any other rarely used combination of letters to fill in that long and often used word. And if I have to use that combination of letters to appear in the text a ^z will fix the autocorrect.

I keep all my sex stuff separate from my home PC and I’m not going to use my work laptop, am I?

I might get a Chromebook or something if I get more serious about writing.

Equally I sometimes write stories in slow periods at work, I don’t want to bring a dedicated sex laptop into work.
Em

 

[Duleigh]

I keep all my sex stuff separate from my home PC and I’m not going to use my work laptop, am I?

I might get a Chromebook or something if I get more serious about writing.

Equally I sometimes write stories in slow periods at work, I don’t want to bring a dedicated sex laptop into work.
Em

Hmmm - when I'm stuck in a position where I can't use my laptop I use a tablet, anything bigger than a cellphone, that I can go in later with a laptop or PC and a real keyboard and dress up. For me its a matter of screen real estate and input device. I also have a blue tooth keyboard and mouse that I can plug into my tablet which helps but looks really funny.

 

[Codoc24]

Not convinced this is really a blooper but: all my life I have called the loose skin around a dick, from balls to a circumcised head, "foreskin". I mentioned in one story that the guy was circumcised and later said something about his foreskin. A reader said that was wrong, a cut man doesn't have foreskin anymore. I am aware that the part that gets cut is foreskin but I thought the rest was just an extension of the foreskin. Tried doing a little research on the net but it wasn't exactly conclusive.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Not convinced this is really a blooper but: all my life I have called the loose skin around a dick, from balls to a circumcised head, "foreskin". I mentioned in one story that the guy was circumcised and later said something about his foreskin. A reader said that was wrong, a cut man doesn't have foreskin anymore. I am aware that the part that gets cut is foreskin but I thought the rest was just an extension of the foreskin. Tried doing a little research on the net but it wasn't exactly conclusive.

You can have frenulum-preserving circumcizions, but the foreskin is pretty much removed. That’s kinda the point.

Em

 

[Limnophile]

I write on my phone. I feel like throwing it out of a window half the time. Autocorrect is determined to make my writing even more nonsensical than it was to start with.

I would get if it only changed erroneously spelled words, but it changes correctly spelled words to something else. WTF!!! And I sometimes don’t notice until proof-reading.

Em

Autocorrect is my worst enema, and I need new pedophiles for my mountain bike.

 

[tenyari]

My biggest mistake was giving a specific date for the start of a story that was meant as 'taking place in the present day'.

The problem... 20 years later the story is half published and it just looks really weird.

That same story has my other big mistake: using a very very very specific style of slang that had a very short 'shelf life' as the way multiple characters would speak. It was around me all the time before I got my degrees, but even a few months later I'd never heard it again in my personal life and it just looked weird to read it back.
- I love using colloquialisms for characters in dialog, and/or having different characters speak or think in very different ways, but it's something to approach with care.

 

[RetroFan]

Not so much a blooper, but in December 2019 I published a story in which the narrator receives a phone call from a co-worker to advise that he is sick with the flu and can't come in today.

The narrator notes that his co-worker 'sounds like he had the flu in 1919 rather than 2019', and therefore is genuinely sick. Of course I had no idea what was in store a few weeks later as 2019 turned to 2020, and needless to say this line didn't age well and stands out in the story like it is in size 26 bold copperplate font.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

Mine was just recently, in Just Do As I Say. I have an edit submitted to fix it, but at the time of writing my stupid error is still there for people to point and laugh at.

What happened was - as I often do - I combined two actual events because my life is too boring and normal without doing that.

In this case, the first was my boyfriend going on his first European business trip since we started cohabiting. I went a bit crazy and decided that going to a bar by myself in a short dress and flirting with guys was the way to go (yes I am obviously still a teen at heart).

The second was an earlier Face Time session we had when he was on a domestic business trip and involved trying to provide JOI for him.

So I thought it might be interesting if my motivation for the JOI was to say sorry for the more recent ill-advised bar trip (nothing happened beyond flirting BTW - well a lot of flirting TBH ). I tend to work through stuff on my mind by writing about it.

So that’s the story I wrote. But I managed to reverse the Europe / US time difference in the process, which rather messed the whole thing up.

The worst thing is that I put the phrase “I’m a details person” in the text. Hubris, much?

What detail (or major item) did you screw up in a published work?

Em

I attached dialogue to the wrong person.

It really pissed me off as it was in an argument so was important.

 

[Stimtheone]

As I am proof-reading this last part, I almost missed one fuck-up that could have broken the moment. And that reminded me of this thread to show how we're all fallible.

Intention: "The girl noted down the transaction on her sheet"

Autocorrect: "The grill noted down the transaction on her sheet"

 

[Milene]

I wrote a whole story about Dana Delany and spelled her name wrong ( “Delaney”) through the whole thing. I have always intended to repost a corrected version, but never get around to it.

 

[AwkwardMD]

In one of my earliest stories, I had a character named Wheeler who showed up in two or three successive chapters. His name was spelled differently in each chapter. The same way within each chapter, but each chapter was different from the others.

I think I might have cried the first time I realized it.