Fun fact! People don’t title their heads. They tilt them. But do I write that people title their heads? Yes, yes I do. 

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Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but people tilt their heads in my books a lot. When they’re confused. When they’re trying to understand something. When they’re threatening someone. It’s a very versatile gesture, in my opinion. But the words tilted and titled are very, very similar (there’s only one letter difference, after all), so it’s easy for me to mis-type it. Since I know this about myself, I try to make sure that every time I write tilted I double-check that I actually wrote the word I meant to. 

When I’m really smart, after a whole book is written and edited, I use control + F to see if any of those pesky head titles snuck in there. Though I was rereading a series I enjoy recently and caught a character who titled rather than tilted their head, so I know I’m not the only one who struggles with it! 

I also often type the word from as form by mistake, but visually they look quite different, so that’s easy to catch, whereas tilted and titled have a bunch of straight lines all in a row, making that mistake more difficult to notice. 

 Lightning versus lightening is yet another one I struggle with, though I suspect that one is because once upon a time I might have that the bright light streaking down from the sky was spelled the second way – but it’s not. That refers to making something lighter, like mixing a deep blue paint with white to lighten it into a pale blue.

Now you might be wondering: why is my lightning mistake relevant to this post? That’s because lightning will be coming up in The Genie Whisperer! Though not until book ten, so it’s still a ways away. But I promise, it’ll be a whole lot of fun when it arrives.