Featured image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay
I have pointed out multiple times this story was not, is not and may never be completed. You are receiving it the way it spews from my mind through the fingers to the keyboard. What LibreOffice doesn’t auto correct will be there for all to see. I don’t even run the built in grammar checker before it ends up here. While some of you may be rather offended I served up such poorly edited trash I must point out two things:
- None of you paid money for this. You chose to visit and read. Thanks for reading by the way.
- You are actually spending money for the same level of trash when you purchase many of the ebooks on Amazon.
I suspect point 2 is the reason behind some of the numbers in this Publisher’s Weekly article. Low quality/no editing. There is a belief, however unjustified it is, that people who bother to load to a print service actually bother to edit just a bit. You will notice in that article that the increase in print sales is tapering off as more and more of you are uploading low quality/no editing works to POD instead of ebook only. The customer is getting wise.
My Orphan story posts on here are a shining example of why you all need multiple rounds of editing and the first round of editing has nothing to do with word usage or grammar or anything taught in an English class. The first round of editing is always looking for subtle broken things.
How many of you noticed that in the earlier parts of the story I was calling the girl wearing her trailer park finest Melanie and later Melony?
Forget all of the spelling, grammar and word usage errors. It’s these types of errors (really common in stories you leave sit for a long time) which have to be cleaned up first. Far too many of you try to find an editor on the cheap “for a light line edit.” You’re deluding yourself if you think one round of editing by a non-family member has your work “ready for sale.” A Grammar Nazi (the type of editor which typically does line editing) reads your work one sentence then one paragraph at a time. They are totally focused on searching for broken rules and broken sentences. The fact you changed the spelling of a character’s name several chapters in will not get found with their editing. It isn’t what you paid them for.
Sometimes you don’t even make this error, but it is in your document. A software or dictionary update can change the weighting of word choices. This is really common with various OpenSource dictionaries where each is built for a specific language, sort of. Many distros try to lump all forms of English into a dictionary package with -en in the name. This can give you interesting problems when the last maintainer to run a build had the country code for UK instead of USA active. Depending on which English language dictionary you are using grey and gray are both the correct spelling for the color. Even commercial packages aren’t immune to this issue if some other program you install came from a different country and sets an OS level environment variable your commercial word processor happens to also look at. Since you previously didn’t have that environment variable set, you didn’t notice the gotcha.
You have been reading some early parts for “Twenty of Two” listed here as “My Orphan.” Since I started pasting it into here it has become less of an orphan as I’ve added a few thousand words. While it may seem a long running story for an Internet tale, I’m not even out of the first of the 6 chapters I created a table of contents for when I first started. Yes, I normally don’t do that. I knew this was going to be a long one. I also knew, if I was going to attempt the interlocking trilogy, I needed a serious plan for the first book. It’s on pace to push 20K words for the first chapter alone. My gut tells me it just might weigh in close to 400K if I complete it.
Bonus question: How many noticed Billy and Billie?
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