You know what’s great when you have a new book out?

So many things!

Things like:

• Your brain saying Hey! A new book! You did it! Maybe you can even do it again!
• Your fingers taking some time off from struggling with the work-in-kinda-sorta-progress to stroke the gorgeous linen-emboss cover with spot UV.
• Your brain repeating the words linen-emboss cover with spot UV over and over like a mantra in a cunning attempt to avoid working on the WIKSP.
• Other people saying Hey! A new book! You did it! Look at that gorgeous cover! And all those words!
• You get the idea

You know what’s less great? Things like:

• People saying Hey! A new book! When’s the next one coming out? How come you haven’t written another junior fiction? Where is the sequel to A Single Stone? How come it takes you so long? What do you actually do all day? Are you even still doing that writing thing? (Yes, these are all things that have actually been said to me by actual people.)
• Other people saying Hey! A new book! I found a typo on page 3. And a grammatical error on page 27. And did you actually mean to repeat that phrase twice in the same paragraph?
• You get the idea.

I’m writing this not just to grumble but because hey, I have a new book out! and hey! I have some thoughts about ‘mistakes’ and rules and pedantry, oh my.

Six weeks before Always Never Always was officially published, I received a concerned message from someone involved in the book’s production. HELP!, they implored. Eyebrows had been raised by some recipients of early review copies. Teachers? Librarians? Bloggers or reviewers? I don’t know. I only know that the eyebrows were arched and they were pointed in my direction.

The cause of the consternation was this little couplet:

Cute, right? Rhythmic and balanced, rolls off the tongue pretty nicely?

Ah but grammar! Ah but egregious mismatch between singular and plural forms!

Surely it should be:

No worries, though. Concerned messenger knew I would have a good and ready answer to provide, that this is something that would have been discussed at length with my editor. Not being so much of a grammar person, they asked if I could provide my good and ready answer so they could deploy an ‘official line of defence’ as needed.

I would certainly have done so if not for one small thing: this was not something that had even once crossed my mind, nor that of my editor. Even more egregiously, now that it had been forced across my mind, I felt nothing but exasperation.

Look, I was raised by pedants. I became one from an early age. It is my very own superpower to be able to spot typographical and grammatical errors at 100 paces. This is a sometimes-useful skill, and an even-moretimes* completely pointless and/or counter-productive one. One of the works-in-progress of my adult life has been to set aside pointless pedantry and thoughtless rule-following, where language is specifically concerned, to see it as something contextual and communicative, something fluid and flexible which serves its users, rather than a box in which to confine ourselves.

Here’s what I wrote in reply, with some small redactions for the sake of propriety:

I fear I’m going to disappoint you in terms of defence as I literally had no idea what you were talking about at first. Yep, it’s probably technically grammatically dubious but the plural/singular mismatch in the contracted form is also super common and generally accepted in informal English. And this is poetry. Language play, bendy bendy words, compression. This is a heavy sigh from me, as it now occurs to me that many [gatekeepers/purchasers of children’s books] are sticklers for a very rigid version of correctness and easily tipped over silly edges. I had a teacher stop me during a talk once to point out a split infinitive, which is a fake-rule invented by some bloke based on a pointless analogy with Latin and has no logical place in English.[**]
The truth is that [we] never discussed it. It just never came up because it didn’t need to. I doubt I’m really helping but in keeping with the book itself, perhaps the perfect response is …

Words to live by. Words to gift to the small people in your life, and maybe some of the large. I truly believe that.

* Not technically a word. I do not apologise.

** This is vastly over-simplified but for those interested, the truth is out there and easily googled. For my part, I love Raymond Chandler’s response on this when challenged: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split”.