October 7, 2016

  I'm late with my post today for one main reason:  I wanted to get the corrections done!
  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.