Some say that my novels are notable for their characterizations; some say that they are stories notable for their digressions, their characters' authentic or inauthentic dialogue; some say they're notable for their overuse of sem-colons.

Almost no one says that my stories are notable for their misspellings -- although they are.

Some of the errors are made by copy editors. Most are made by me, and though they should be corrected, often they aren't.

This is not going to be a rant on the state of line-editing in publishing these days, although someone ought to write a rant on that. It's going to be a small meditation on writers with learning disabilities, and I am one. I can spell. In fact, I spell very well. But, in the short life of this blog alone, I've misspelled the names of some of the people about whom I've written, without knowing that I had, and made errors of grammar and usage and not because I dash these things off in ten minutes because I don't.

I think them through, and write them down to the best of m ability and still they often include mistakes because I don't see those mistakes. I don't know what this inability is called (perhaps sloppiness?) but it's real and it's interfered with writing all my life, been mistaken for ignorance and carelessness. It's been the despair of editors who have noticed that characters in my books sometimes are pregnant for twelve instead of nine months or remain seventeen years old for longer than a year.

It's as if there's a glitch in the spatial function or a failure for links to connect in my brain that happens despite my best care to do things properly. For example, I'm not going to correct the missing "y" in the word that is meant to be "my" in the paragraph above, to illustrate how much care I can use and still make mistakes. If I write the word "the" (and "the" is a word often used by authors) more than half the time, I will spell it "teh" on the first try. I suppose this is a variation on dyslexia, but I'm not sure which kind.

Two of my children also have this sort of free-form tendency to make mistakes in writing, although they are both good thinkers and creative people -- one of them probably far more intelligent and creative than I. And I wonder how many writers are .. not writers because they have learning disabilities that have names (but are still shameful) or as yet have no names.

When I was a child, although I could win the spelling bee verbally, my papers came back criss-crossed with red marks pointing out errors, not so much in grammar as in typing -- a disconnect between the hand and the head. I read those papers over and over again and I never saw those mistakes.

The (teh) point of all this is that, despite the problems that I sometimes have setting down what I believe or what I know, there are people who are paid to have my back. For my children, there are only teachers who still believe that a child with a vast vocabulary who consistently can't spell name of the state in which he lives or she lives is stupid.

Despite all the clabber about how Einstein and other innovators suffered gaps in traditional ways of learning, no one really believes it. When it comes to learning disabilities, even educators, the precious few excepted, haven't got a clue.