Impatience and writing don’t mix!

I’ve been more aware of my impatience writing this last novel. Losing three months due to illness, made me feel rushed to get back on schedule. It didn’t matter that the schedule was self-imposed. I’d hoped to streamline my concept-to-publishing timeline this time. But haste makes waste—or typos, at least.

Eventually, after much writing, editing, and reading, reading, reading, I pronounced An Illusion of Trust as ready, done, finished. I sent out ARCs. Christa Polkinhorn and I exchanged ARCs. When she pointed out a few typos in Illusion, I decided to reread it one more time.

POW! WHAP! Ewwww …

I found a few more typos and many sentences that needed tweaking. Cassie Hart, another ARC reader, pointed me to the typos she’d noticed—a couple of which neither I nor Christa had caught. My concern wasn’t that the typos existed because I suspect my remaining ARC readers will catch another lurker or two, but what bothered me was where those typos occurred.

Not a single one of the edits we found were in a sentence as originally written. I edit as I write, so much of my first draft remains unchanged by subsequent edits. I created every one of those typos during later editing. In fact, I made most of them in the final-polish stage.

So as I correct these typos and tweak these sentences, I’m conscious to slow down, read each word and punctuation mark, so I don’t introduce another problem. For my next novel, when I think it’s at ARC stage, I’ll wait a week and then read it through ONE MORE TIME. Even then, with familiarity clouding the editing brain, I won’t catch every Pow and Whap, but I might avoid the Ewwww.

I hope you do too.