C.H. Valentino

... honey, please. You don't know me that W-E-L-L.

 

I can't spell.

 

Okay, I can spell. But I haz issues.

 

And that is, on a keyboard my spelling falls all to hell. Stick a pen in my hand and I'm fine.... except for when I get to the big ones with all the vowels all smished up next to eachother. (precipiation always nails me... I never get that one right the first time)

 

(PS. And I totally know the difference between "your" and "you're" but for some stinking reason my fingers don't consult my brain before they just screw it up.)

 

(PPS. When I was in grade school, my first grade teacher had the word "little" on our spelling test, but she had spelled it wrong. L-I-T-T-E-L. To this day I still spell little with an "el" before I punch the DELETE key and correct it. Every time.)  

 

It was pointed out to me in high school and then later in college this might have something to do with the fact that I am a self-taught typist. In college my professor (who was this really cool geeky computer guy that seemed to know a little bit about just about everything) made me do this typing test program that he had written that determines which hand you favor when you type.

 

68% of my typing is done with my left hand. (I'm left handed)

 

Two years ago, my job tested me for typing speed. I type 210 words a minute. (This comes from having to type as fast as people speak- as is the nature of my job- 5 days a week, eight hours a day)

 

And I forgot this until someone pointed it out to me eariler this week. The solution is very simple- I should spell check my blogs. But I don't because I type them straight into a HTML prompt and I don't like all the copy-cut-paste-reformating that must take place. That and I cut these blogs off in about 15 minutes between 911 calls.

 

Truth be told, I really only care about my spelling- or lack thereof- in the final drafts of my novels...

 

...or when Word puts that annoying little red squiggle underneath one of my brillantly crafted sentences....

 

...but beyond that, I generally leave it like it is... and here's why I'm really okay with that:

 

I looked at a lot of art in L.A. (emphasis of A LOT) And the one thing I always found myself doing was looking for the aritist in the paint/ink. And I almost always found it- on the right upper hand corner of a canvas or the lower middle edge of a sketch- were his finger prints. Sometimes they were small and smeared- other times, enough to clench a murder case... but they were there.

 

Fingerprints in the ink.

 

I'd never intentionally publish an error. Not in something like Of Hollow Men or Even In... or even a short story in a magazine. But, here, in my blogs I am as real and off-the-cuff creative as I can get. These are my little (littel) escape routes during the eight full hours that I have to "make a living". This is my connection to the readers and writers outside my 6 x 6 steel-trap office. This is my confessional.  

 

So, my fingerprints in the ink are just that... a touch of my humanity. I'm okay with that. And I hope that you are too.

 

CHV