I was writing today’s comic in my mind this morning when something completely different popped into my head, and I went to go look up the word “post-apocalyptic” in the dictionary just to check (because when you’re an editor you tend to check even things you’d swear by) and to my horror, M-W Collegiate, my default dictionary, has the word as “postapocalyptic.”
The immediately changed my comic yet again, and that should give you a peek into how some of my comics end up coming to life: pantsing.
It just doesn’t look right to my brain. It reads like… pos-tap-ocalyptic. What? Argh! I still don’t know if I’ll eventually accept it. Amazon’s categories hyphenate it. Authors hyphenate it. And yes, it’s usually because the term comes before “fiction” or “novel,” but still, the hyphen has been my standard, and I think using postapocalyptic will just make people think it’s an error, which is an interesting dilemma, isn’t it?
It’s one that editors sometimes have to consider with fiction. Will the masses read it and think it’s a typo? How much will it matter? Should you just go with what people are familiar with or go with what a resource dictates? I tend to lean toward going with what will result in fewer people perceiving it as an error. This, of course, is something that’s determined on a case-by-case basis.
Have an awesome rest of your week!
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