The Learning Curve

Everything that has lead up to the publishing of my first book has been an experience in tremendous growth, learning, and a lot of trial by error. Let me start this off right, and thank my Dear Friend, and fellow author, Jayne Townsley for all of her mentoring and the valuable hours she took away from her own projects to help me get this far. I love her so much. My life would have taken a completely different road without her. Even this blog wouldn't exist, so Thank You for being there for me for 30 years.

And with every new thing comes a bit of a learning curve, and I am still learning to climb the ropes. Even more valuable, is that I'm learning with every experience and I'm definitely growing. Let me give you a huge example: Yesterday I received a copy of my paperback, The Ghost of Forlorn Lane. My excitement of seeing my book in print for the first time lived as long as the time it took me to flip to the back page, looking for the acknowledgements. Before I could read it, I saw the last page of the last chapter- and there are I saw 2 type-O's just a few sentences apart! So I ran the manuscript through my editing program...and low and behold! 10 mistakes it hadn't caught before I hit publish!

A year ago...Oh I'd have screamed and pitched a fit. Yesterday, I laughed and chalked it up to a lesson learned. I'd had the opportunity to order a draft before the book came out. I declined to my own folly. Lesson learned! I wont be making that mistake again! Of course I hope that in the near future I will be able to afford such luxuries as paying for a professional editor,  but until that happens, I need to realize that it doesn't matter if my eyes are burnt out. One last read-through even when I think I'm ready is probably a really good idea. But it also doesn't do any good to pitch a fit, because I can't change the fact that the first 20 people who ordered my book have to live with my errors.

So today, even though I was supposed to be working on Book #3 in The J Club series, I will be editing Forlorn for the 99th time and I'm not going to grumble about it.