Our drive west to the ocean is quiet, the road hissing beneath our tires, the drizzle hiding the greater world around us. It is just us, the dashed stripe down the pavement, and the last vestiges of winter along the highway’s edge.
Washington is the Evergreen State, and it is always, ever, green; winter or summer, rain or sunshine, something is always green. In this season, it is the cedars, pines, firs, and spruce. They covered the hillsides and the slopes between us and the limits of the grey-misted world: tall, shaggy, dark green sentinels ranked in thick forest ranks, or short, stripling, pale green youngsters rising from the steaming refuse of clear-cut acreage. But not everything is green.
Whew. That was close.
Thus far, I’ve covered the most offensive types of errors I’ve seen in fiction on the web, and now I’ll get down to things that are merely bad or that are just annoying. But just because an error doesn’t stand up and slap you in the face, it doesn’t mean an editor will let you get away with it. She shouldn’t and she won’t.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 