Hallelujah! I have achieved Nirvana... I think.
Because I like numbers, here's the breakdown:
50 Chapters, 274 pages
Ironically, 274 total corrections therefore one per page or an average of 5.5 per chapter.
That's too high.
Phhhh. I'm going to have to reread it.
Necessary Changes:
Doubled verbs - two
Formatting -
Dashes that I doubled but Word didn't convert - three
Too much space inside a chapter break - two
Soft return creating a double tab on the next line - nineteen
Punctuation (mostly dashes, ellipses issues and adding/removing commas) -
twenty-nine
Capitalization (these are words that need to be capitalized in the setting of my book
and not real life) - eleven
General typos - sixteen
Spelling - seventeen
Lay vs. lie - seven
Cot vs. bed - thirteen
Changing words/sentences because they NEEDED changed (counting the missing five
ending sentences of chapter 48) - thirty-nine
Misc. - fifteen
Unnecessary Changes (words or sentences that didn't need fixed but sound better now):
Changed - seventy-four
Eliminated - seventeen
Punctuation - ten
I had six chapters that didn't need any changes at all! I was so happy to have those. There were more fixes in the front half of the book than the second half. When I didn't find the last portion of chapter 48, I was mortified.
I am SOOO glad I bought the book proof
There's too many errors to ignore the fact that I need to read it again. Sad, but true. But that's okay, I think. Like I said a few posts back, this book will last longer than me. I'm SO grateful I didn't just say "Oh, it's good. Let's hit 'accept'." This is embarrassing. It would have been more so with a published book.
I am not ordering another book proof, however. Because of the issues with the text being wrong on the front cover, I've already made those changes and uploaded a new cover. I ordered new proof book last week to be certain the book looked right with the fixed text and it does. It is WAAAYYY better. As far as the interior, I'm going to upload the cleaned up manuscript today and when they come back with the approval, I'll download a digital copy and print it off at home. I'm going to make sure all the indents are correct, the odd page numbers are on the right hand pages, that I don't have any orphans or widows and then reread it.
It'll be fine.
Yesterday, I had an awesome day writing. I got three chapters done, half of which was new material. The chapter I wrote from scratch yesterday took off in an unexpected direction so now I'm all fired up to write again! Yahoo! Note: that will mean more changes in the future and the farther I get away from this point, the farther I'll be from the draft that's already written. Isn't writing exciting! Wahoo!
I still need to upload stuff to CreateSpace and Smashwords so I better get to work. Check in with you tomorrow.
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