In case you’re at work, I subtly (hurr) censored the title.
Mistake 1: In Feb-March I was editing and fixing NSI for paperback using a program called InDesign. For those of you who don’t know, InDesign is essentially Photoshop but for designing books(the interior). I also made all my edits there because as you design a book, you create these paragraphs and pages that look beautiful on the page and if you ‘fix’ a word in one paragraph, it can fuck up all the paragraphs after that. Because I edited in InDesign to create the paperback, I also had to use that same file for the ebook. Well that doesn’t sound so bad right? Well, each chapter is a separate file in Indesign. So that when I found a mistake, I had to open each file to correct mistakes. And thats’ where my second mistake came in.
Mistake 2: I ran a program called ProwritingAid (which finds duplicate words and sentences and phrases) and, well, I thought I’d caught most of those(141 maybes at one point) but then it found I used a certain word 481 times. And rather than going through each file in InDesign to fix it, I decided to use the pdf to word. Also doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Well, it turns out that at some point(not even sure where) the files deleted paragraph returns. And not just one. 100s of paragraph returns. Which meant I had to read through the whole thing and fix places where paragraph returns were missing.
Mistake(?) 3: Not really a mistake but what’s kept this ‘fixing’ process three weeks longer than it should be. In a pivotal chapter late in the book, I found a scene that I just couldn’t live with. So for the last three weeks I’ve worked on re-writing it. One small scene(2000 words). But, being the perfectionist I am, and the significance of the scene, it needs to be as perfect as it can be.
Meanwhile, while I’m stressing over this, my 9 month old started walking so I’m chasing him every day. It’s fun, but exhausting. I find my writing interrupted every five seconds <8( I mean, it’s a good interrupting but still.
What does this all mean? Well, I didn’t want to write this update until I had a breakthrough in the scene and that happened on Saturday when I got all the feels I wanted. Hopefully those feels will transfer to you because I felt like they were really missing in the most important scene in the book. Anyway, once I’ve finished that rewrite, it won’t take long to fix the paragraph issue mentioned in mistake 1 and 2.
Hopefully, I’ve lowered some pitchforks, though I don’t blame you if you want to poke me a few times with them. <3 Aim away from my hands so I can still type just in case there’s someone that’s still willing to wait for NSI.