A Correcting Day

In Monday’s blog I admitted to being a slacker because I had fallen a bit short of my 5,000 word writing goal for Sunday, and that I hoped to make up for it that day. I guess I did because I knocked out a little over 7,700 words in my new Big Lake book by the end of the day on Monday. Then I wrote my blog, which was somewhere around 500 words.

All of that writing means that a lot of correcting needs to be done, too, and yesterday was spent making corrections. The first thing I did was make the corrections that Roberta, my third proofreader, suggested for several chapters I had sent her a few days earlier.

With that out of the way, I then made corrections to another six chapters that Terry had edited and proofed, and when I was done with them I sent them off to Judy, my second proofreader.

But that didn’t mean my work was over for the day because I had several more chapters I had been working on while the previous ones had been going through the proofing stages. I started reading through those and making obvious changes that I could see. I should get that wrapped up today and print them out for Terry to do her thing.

You might think that with four sets of eyes proofreading each book they would be error-free by the time they got published. If you did, you would be thinking wrong. All of my proofreaders are very good but things still slip past. Not a lot, but in every book there are at least two or three things that sharp-eyed readers find and tell me about.

One reader who pointed out a mistake in my last book asked if that offended me. Not at all. I want my books to be as perfect as possible, and when I find out about a mistake I go in and correct it. As I told her, it’s kind of like having a piece of spinach between your teeth or something hanging out of your nose. Would you want to be told or would you want to walk around like that all day?

After reading Sunday’s blog, in which I posted pictures of several meals Terry has made lately, a longtime reader told me he had gained four pounds just looking at them and asked me to please not do that again. Sorry, but check out the spaghetti with homemade sauce and meatballs she made for dinner last night! Look all you want, then get on the treadmill and walk it off.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – You know it’s going to be a bad day when your imaginary friend files a restraining order against you.