I’m getting ready to publish my next novel (read short story collection). I am looking through a printed proof (because for some reason, looking at it digitally makes me overlook errors like nothing else.), and have been ensuring that I’m only reading/doing mark up rather than trying to enter things as I find them. When I finish one of the short stories in the collection THEN I go back and enter it into the digital manuscript.
And I can’t help but be consumed by the proofing process…
Everything else has gone by the wayside these past few weeks. My webcomics… my other writing projects… yard work… dishes… cooking… laundry. All because I want this novel to be formatted well and be as free of errors as possible. ESPECIALLY because I really like the three stories in it.
I can’t be alone in this…
So now I have a double whammy on my writing. My inner editor fights me when I try to write new material by being too sticky about mechanics for me to just brain dump, and now my proofing shunts everything to one side…
I am trying to keep all my work on this old thing to September and October. I don’t know if I’ll make it but damn do I have some similar issues.
My boy turned on the toaster, where his daddy left the plastic container of coffee grinds. (Takes 3 seconds to escape and do this.) It caused me to reach overwhelmed after all the other antics he pulled today.
Only to the toaster. Plastic is melted down into it. I’ve used it maybe 10 times the whole time we’ve been married, so it’s an appliance I can do without.
Well here it is nearly two weeks later and the proofing process still isn’t complete. I’m about 75 pages from being done, but my evenings have been taken up with a lot of other things… cutting down on my time to go through the manuscript…
Still I hope to be done by this weekend!
Wish me luck!