*** 

Today, I finally
completed the revisions on my new book, Lovable Christmas Angel.
That’s the same 45,000-word book I had written in 18 days. When I say I
completed the revisions, I mean that I got back the edits from two editors that
I hired to check my work – one is a wonderful copy editor, and the other is the
perfect line editor. Between them both, I think we’ve found every error I made
and have strengthened the story tremendously. To tell the truth, they pointed
out blunders I would never have discovered because of the fact that I didn’t
even know that some of the stuff I had done was wrong… sigh!!

 

And let me tell you,
there were dumb screw-ups everywhere. I’m terrible at punctuation. Never know
where the commas should be??? Always mess up on the right places to put Em
dashes. And I tend to over explain myself in long narrative passages, and
oh yeah, fragmented sentences are another downfall. (I did get to keep some…fist pumping…yesss!!) 

 

This is the first time
that I’ve gone to this extreme of using two editors and I’m so glad that I decided it
needed to be done. In the past, I had a bad experience with one of my books
“Roll the Dice”. Right then, I’d made up my mind to never let that
happen again. I guess we all have to screw up in order to learn from our
mistakes. Plus, it’s nice to feel comfortable about the work that’s put out there with your name on it. And let’s face it—this self-publishing is a huge learning curve for
someone who previously had no idea how to do anything but open up e-mails. (Yep
– Moi!)

 

As you all know, there
is so much involved to do with publishing that it’s downright
scary. By the time you get the book written, most readers would expect that the
bulk of the work is finished. Not so! Not in today’s world for the Indie
author. It’s actually just the first step. To be assured that you won’t get bad reviews, the writing also has to be clean. And who better than good
editors to make sure that happens.

 

Next step – get the
darn thing published!! 🙂