A Context For These Errata

One evening, I was talking with Brass Bulldog. We were joking around, I don’t remember the exact conversation, but doing a goofy character voice, I said something to the effect of, “Recant for me the tale of the robot and the dog.” Something like that. And he said, “Recant?” Indeed, recant! A real ten dollar word, not the kind of word you get to know about without cracking open a book or two. Smartly, I explained to Brass that recant meant “to tell a story.” He said it did not mean that at all. After looking it up, I found out that, oh, big whoopsie-doopsie, indeed, “Recant” means just about the opposite of what I thought it did: Recant does not mean to tell a story, but rather, to take something back, to state that you have changed your stance on something.

Well, bugger. Immediately, I thought about how that’s definitely a word I’ve used in my stories, and it’s come across the editing desk for the Zooey Dot Pub magazine as well. I did a search while we were there on the call, and Brass and I had a giggle about some of the ways that “recant” accidentally still works in a scene, or the ways that “recant” accidentally makes a character say the complete opposite of what I was going for. “Recant” specifically, in To Thine Own Self Be Zoo, turns out to only show up in the novelization of Romeo & Juliet. Overall, this mistake isn’t something that would ruin that story, but it is something that I would wish to correct.

There are other mistakes here and there as well, that have, as I write this, stood free from correction. One typo comes to mind in Cheer’s Journey, just an incorrect word, where it’s obvious what the intended word was, but it does make the reader have to double back over the sentence to figure that out, and potentially really takes the reader out of the moment. Another item that would warrant correcting is that I fully believed with the pronoun one, as in, “One would like to eat ice cream if one were able,” it did not need an apostrophe to make it possess something, because it is a pronoun: to me, from his, hers, ours, yours, its, and theirs, ones followed: “Ones favorite flavor of ice cream is a matter of ones own valid personal opinion.” I could swear I even researched it pretty thoroughly before arriving at that. But, whatever misfire happened in my thinking there, it turns out that ones is incorrect too: the word does get an apostrophe, and the correct version would be, “One’s favorite flavor of ice cream is a matter of one’s own valid personal opinion.” This “ones” thing didn’t bother me as much as recant, I think because it’s a more technical detail, something that someone frequently engaged in reading is likely used to glossing over and assuming that it’s some difference in regional spelling or something like that. It’s also not an error that interrupts the narrator’s voice, if you imagine it being read out loud.

So, known errors have stood before. But it was—maybe fittingly—recant that made me decide they should be corrected in some fashion.

Besides these errors which have stood, there have also been errors that have been corrected silently after publication, or technical items that have been revamped. I have a vague memory of correcting one or two typos here or there, though as I write this now, I cannot remember what they would have been. Maybe all of them as minor as changing a straight upright apostrophe to a slanted apostrophe, but maybe a spelling correction or two has happened as well. There have also been technical aspects of the website that have been silently changed, for example, many stories at one time made use of style attributes in HTML to style text such as centering it or underlining something: in all instances, these have been replaced with standalone HTML elements such as center and u, as a personal preference. Usually with that, it is invisible to the reader that such a change has ever been made, except in rare cases where something is foregone because there is no standalone HTML element equivalent, such as losing the small caps from the headings in Romeo & Juliet.

So, some errors have stood, while other items have been changed. Why is that? Mainly, there is one reason. I have an aversion to muddling the record when it comes to things people may have had some emotional experience with. If I put out a story that used the word recant incorrectly 4 different times, maybe someone had already read that, has some memory of that word, and then goes back to check and it now says recite or recount. I don’t want them to feel gaslit over that. So far, all 12 issues of To Thine Own Self Be Zoo are released into the public domain—this is not made overly obvious, but there is a note in each issue’s PDF making it so. I think, with these being in the public domain, it’s unlikely to ever matter in a legal sense if there was a typo in a story released in June that was corrected in December, but in case it ever does become relevant, to law, to history, or to personal experiences, I want the record to be clear. I wish I had kept one from the start, but, short of doing a lot of careful digging through old files, the best I can do is to begin here, December 1st of 2023, at the completion of Volume I. Nothing too much will have been missed in the preceding time, and maybe there is some fun in leaving still that spice of primordial pre-record mystery to those who would care that much for utter completeness.

As a policy on errata, my intent is nearly only to correct technical errors on the spelling and punctuation level. My intent is not, for example, to go back in and rewrite the ending of a particular story that I realized afterwards could have been something else if the characters had done this instead of that. My intent is also not perfection: though this project does follow a style guide, it does not endeavor to do so robotically, and many commas may go or not go where another editor would prescribe, sentences may run on, characters and voicey narrators may use grammatical constructions that are not “good English,” and things of that nature. Even logical errors, “plot holes” or anachronisms, I think are usually more fun to let stand, and to let the reader imagine how the author is correct and how this seeming “plot hole” has come to actually be the case in the story, rather than pointing out how it is incorrect and assuming an impossible-to-reconcile meta flaw in the story—I do promise this is not just my opinion as an author, but also something that I do as a reader. I do not even intend to correct style choices that I would endeavor to make differently now, such as if an animal was called “it” instead of “they” even by a character who is deeply empathetic and mindful towards animals. Tidying up language around pronouns may be fair game in some circumstances, such as if a typo leads to misgendering a character unintentionally, but “it” used carelessly can be a mark of an earlier author who was not yet used to writing from a stance of zoophilia so openly. Primarily, the only goal here is to correct things that are objectively language-level errors that create a potential stumbling block to the reading experience, correcting “ones” to “one’s” and “recant” to “recount,” things of that nature.

And, to make the record, at least from here forward, there will be this page. Errors and corrections that are described here have been corrected where they appear in the stories. I will also include odds and ends of other kinds of changes—screenshots of old designs of the site and things of that sort.

Allow me to recant these errors.

signed,
Mrs Eggshell Ghosthearth
December 1st, 2023