Day: August 12, 2014

Way back in 2011, I blogged about the Dynamism of Writing, which takes many forms. I concentrated mostly on the ability of a project to take over the story from my conscious brain, but touched on another aspect as well, and that’s the “doneness” of a book. As I wrote back then, I think I could look at one of my books every day for a year and probably think there were 365 different ways to make it better (sometimes changing things back to what they were before I changed them!). Even our illustrious lady leader, K.S. Brooks, wrote about the wisdom of letting a book sit and looking at it with fresh eyes before publishing.

This whole issue was brought to my unhappy attention when I began to re-read one of my older books. First published 25 years ago, it’s one of my favorites and I do re-read it periodically just because I enjoy it so much. When the original publisher felt it had had its run, they let the rights revert back to me and I published it through iUniverse (the only game in town at the time), then years later cancelled my contract with them and republished it through CreateSpace. At both of these junctures, I went back through the book and made minute changes, caught a few typos and pronounced it good.

So imagine my surprise when I started reading it recently and found within the first few pages a glaring misspelling! Ack! Of course then the reading-for-fun immediately turned to proofreading, and I’ve found many things that I’ll change, a handful of typos but also—I swear—things that I don’t think I would ever do! Where do those come from? Did someone edit my book?  Who’s hacked into my Kindle and changed things? (Probably the same person who somehow gets into my DVD collection and adds new scenes to movies I’ve watched a dozen times before!)

Coincidentally in a recent discussion, another author friend asked the question, “Is a book ever really done?” Continue reading “Is a Book Ever Really Done?”