Neurosis 76: Perfect Errors

Writers spend so much time perfecting things that we eventually become immune to our errors. Today’s case in point – three minutes after sending out my first rough draft to my first beta reader, I noticed three separate errors. Three in three; not liking the ratio here.

Yeah. I had it down too. It took me two days to get the formatting correct going from a Word .DOCX document to a Kindle-formatted .MOBI document, but I had it down. Perfect. Every chapter read by my alpha reader and gone over by me more than once. No worries. Sent off. Jubilation supreme. Glow basking. All that jazz. Perfect, I say again, perfect.

Then I found the first error – the formatted crosses I spent part of the two days fixing didn’t work after the first instance. Then I noticed a chapter heading didn’t populate correctly, so it wasn’t in the TOC. Then I noticed a tiny issue that two people had the same name…and confusing the two would make for major issues towards the end of the book. Yeah, no worries.

Now as I read further on my own kindle, errors pop out everywhere. I can imagine the sentences talking to each other inside my computer as they plan their hiding spaces.

“Okay sentence explaining exorcism, you’re going to hide a small ‘not’ there in the middle of you so that everything Colin just wrote is invalidated. You, you over there holding the important information on Patti’s backstory, drop that comma so you’ll look like you’re saying the opposite of what he wrote. Ah, good work boys, let’s see him get taken seriously after this.”

And that’s just after three minutes of reading on my own.  God only knows what my readers will find.

The only thing perfect in my writing is the errors.

Achievement unlocked: Neurosis 76 exhibited. Writer’s badge updated.