Epic Writing Fails

We've all had those moments where we make mistakes in our writing. Writers, in particular, are prone to this, because the more you write, the more opportunities you provide to make errors. And we won't even mention texting with not-so-smart phones and their deranged auto-correct. (I'm so glad my flip phone doesn't have auto-correct.)

Here are a few examples of epic fails in writing.

1. "She determinedly kept swimming, determined to reach the other side."
2. While reading a story excerpt I removed from my manuscript long ago, I found this beauty. "A cold realisation shot through Xander as he realised the man was almost to the dragon..." It makes me realize how often I overuse that word.
3.  "...and instead it ends up looking garish and overdone instead." A lovely piece of repetition written late at night.
4. That new record you achieved in your writing, which is nothing to be proud of. Pro Writing Aid suggests that if a sentence is over 30 words in length, it may be too long. Then it announces you have (dramatic drum roll) a 58-word sentence. I'm going to hide in shame now...
5. "This was followed by several voices muttering replies, followed by a yell of..." This was followed by me wondering why I didn't notice this great sentence earlier.
6. When one character walks in and sets the door on the counter, and another is too nervous to sit down on the cough.
7. "Zephyr proudly ran off with his prize compared firmly in his jaws." Two extraneous adverbs and a totally wrong word. How I didn't notice this the first eight hundred times I read the first draft, I don't know...
8. "They had met when the girl was only eleven, the dragon still too young to fly. They had met when she, wandering through the mountains..." I could just cry.
9. "Jacob looked at the side of the garment and saw a small tear and small blood stains, no doubt from Zephyr's claws." Small overuse of 'small' there.
10. When you hit CAPS lOCK ACCIDENTALLY, BUT DON'T NOTICE IT UNTIL YOU LOOK UP A SENTENCE OR TWO LATER. nOT AT All frustrating...
11. "He ought a way he could gain this power, and brooded over it in secret." It took me a while to figure out what I meant to type.
12. When your spelling is so radically different from what you should have wrote, you right-click for suggestions and it literally compares your spelling to manure. Yes, OpenOffice, 'manure' was what I intended to say. Not.
13. When your character doesn't have a leash, so he ties up the animal with a pair of pants instead. And then it occurs to you that since the story takes place in a setting resembling Europe, 'pants' really doesn't work here. And then the less serious part of your brain conjures up an absurd image of frilly lavender underpants swaying in the breeze, and the laughing fit lasts several minutes.
14. When you stare uncomprehendingly at a really obvious error, wondering why the red wavy line is there.
15. Why write "set traps for" when "swt raps dfor" looks so much better on the page?
16. When your typo of 'Crystal' looks like 'Crytska'. Huh?
17. "Cadell named his nis new kingdom..."