A horror story for writers, inspired by posts from Doranna Durgin and Elizabeth Moon on Julie Czerneda’s newsgroup.
***
Emma went to get a cup of coffee while the revised draft of her story was printing. One more read-through, just for typos, and it should be ready to send. She grabbed the pages out of the tray, and headed out to the patio. She’d learned the hard way not to do a read-through at her desk… she’d start changing things and fixing typos and never make it all the way through. Let alone get any sense at all of how it flowed.
She put down her cup, sat at the table, and lightly tapped the pages against it to neaten the stack. She took a sip of coffee as she began to read. An outraged squawk, along with a good portion of coffee, escaped her lips when she came to the first sentence she hadn’t written.
“Ya done good,” was what she had written — a minor colloquialism, perfectly suited to the rough-hewn character saying it.
It now read, “You have done well.”
Emma read on, and found sentence after sentence that had mysteriously changed from what she had written to something… stilted. Flat. Colorless.
What…?
Suddenly, she realized that all of the changes were those suggested by the MS Word grammar checker in its last pass. But she’d told it to ignore…?
Emma hurried back to her computer and rewrote the first changed sentence, putting it back to the way she’d originally written it. The green grammar checker line appeared under it. She opened the grammar dialog, and it suggested “You have done well.” She clicked the “ignore” button. Instead of going on to the next section, a line of text appeared in the suggestion section of the dialog box: “This is incorrect grammar. You should change it.”
She clicked “ignore” again, and the line in the dialog box changed to, “Why are you being so difficult? This is WRONG! Change it!”
She clicked “ignore,” with rather more force than necessary, and the dialog box now read, “I will save you from yourself!”
And the line in the manuscript changed…