My editor, Norma Jeanne Strobel, and I are engaged in one of the most frustrating, and necessary tasks known to a writer--proofreading. The middle of next month, or maybe even sooner, we will be e-publishing our first adventure/dectective book in a new series.
The title of the book is Carolina Nights. I will run this book through two critique groups, and get together with my editor for careful proofing. I read it from the computer and she follows on a hard copy. However, no matter how carefully we think we have proofed it, it is amazing that after all our attention to detail, our readers will still pick up errors.
Everyone knows that in good writing, the most important thought of a sentence is too go last. At one time, maybe a year ago, I realized I needed to move a prepositional clause from the end to the beginning of the sentence. Apparently I changed it so that it would now start with the prepositional clause; however I forgot to take the clause off the back end. We now had a sentence that started and finished with the same three words. Not to worry. We caught it and got that one fixed.
Another time, a mystery revolved around the word “through”. It sat there, between two sentences and seemed to have relationship to neither. Once there was probably a complete sentence surrounding that word, but now, like the gates of a city standing in the middle of a flat desert with no sign of a city, it becomes an intriguing mystery. What was it attached to?
But the really sad part is that no matter how many writers peruse the manuscript, or how careful we are in our proofing, after we publish, a devoted reader will still be able to find an error--or two--or three in the book -- and will not hesitate to bring it to our attention!
In our last book, it was dining and dinning room.
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