I don’t have a blooper reel, per se, with regard to The Atlas of Reds and Blues. What I do have is a strong-willed spell check on my computer which made for some humorous moments as I employed Bengali, Hawaiian, Spanish and French vocabulary in to the body of the novel.
All of the sudden words like:
sandesh, a Bengali dessert, became sadness.
español, the language, became sepia.
kejuur guur, Bengali phrase for date molasses, became key guard.
namaste, sanskrit greeting, became names.
sucre, French word for sugar, became sacred.
juta, Bengali word for shoe, became jute.
Makiki, the name of a neighborhood on O’ahu, became maker.
And then the tug-of-war began as I would change it and sometimes the change would stick, and sometimes I forgot to to hit the save button enough times and I would be in what felt like an endless cycle of having to change the vocabulary again. There are seventy-five words on the phonetic spelling list, and all but three were scrutinized by the spell check.
Luckily almost all of this happened on my own watch, before I had to turn in final edits to Counterpoint Press.
