Poor Mojo's Newswire

[Photo: Jeff Deck adds an apostrophe to the word mens at a clothing store in Wicker Park on Tuesday.] Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson have not wasted their lives. They fight a losing battle, an unyielding tide of misplaced apostrophes and poor spelling. But still, they fight. Why, you ask. Because, they say. Because, they must. For the last three months, they have circled the nation in search of awkward grammar construction. They have ferreted out bad subject-verb agreements, and they have faced stone-faced opposition everywhere. They have shone a light on typos in public places, and they have traveled by a GPS-guided '97 Nissan Sentra, sleeping on the couches of college friends and sticking around just long enough to do right by the English language. Then it's on the road again, off to a new town with new typos. Picture a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation—holding back a flood of mixed metaphors and spelling mistakes and extraneous punctuation so commonplace we rarely notice it anymore. But they are 28 and idealistic. Graduates of Dartmouth College, they are old friends with a schoolmarm's irritation at conspicuous errors, and despite their mild and somewhat nerdy exteriors, they have serious nerve. Deck lives outside Boston; Herson lives outside Washington. And together, they are TEAL—the Typo Eradication Advancement League—and they are between jobs.

HarperCollins is launching a site where authors can upload their work and have readers give it the thumbs up or down. I suppose a bit of momentum here might get them to take your book more seriously for the editorial big kids’ table. Eventually, you might even get to use the fork that doesn’t have a cork on the end. After that it’s just the crash helmet and you’re almost normal. Guardian blogger Jean Edelstein examines:

Officially, Authonomy is a “social network for writers and book-lovers alike”. Just as MySpace allowed bands to succeed without the prior approval and investment of record companies, so Authonomy will theoretically help separate the unpublished wheat from the chaff. The idea is that aspirant scribes can upload up to 10,000 words to the site and then have their masterworks judged by what HarperCollins refers to as “keen, talent-spotting readers” - other people, that is, who have registered on the network.

Thus, the democracy. No longer will the disgruntled writing masses be able to complain that their work has not been published because it has been vetoed by elite, snobbish publishing industry professionals. Now they will be kyboshing each other. (Or launching each other’s careers.) Of course, this isn’t remotely the first time a social network for writers has been launched - there are numerous sites on which thousands of people upload their work and have it critiqued by others. YouWriteOn.com (funded by the Arts Council) and thefrontlist.com have both been used as sources for new material by agents and publishers, although only to a limited extent.