This is definitely not my favorite blog post. In this article I must admit a mistake. After having started an analysis of my previous published novel, “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.“, I’m still happy in general with the book I produced, but not happy with the quality of the product I unleashed upon the world. In my defense, writing a novel is a massive undertaking that people don’t truly appreciate, nor understand the level of work involved to make it happen. To be honest, to some extent, I have to include myself in that category. I had put in many hours to write this novel, but was only able to do it sporadically, in stints here and there, followed by long pauses do to other life demands. That’s not the best way to write a novel, by far.
I found myself having to get back on track each time I would reengage the project, which only caused things to move slower, and made the rewrite of the 1st draft much more work than it would have otherwise been. After outlining the novel initially, I decided I wanted to try some dictation software to see if I could write faster that way. I was surprised that I was in fact able to write at a much faster pace than when I typed in my ideas,.. and I’m not a slow typist. Thinking I would exponentially speed up my progress, I happily proceeded using the astounding software for many multiple chapters. The downside,.. sometimes the software would hear words that I didn’t say, or maybe didn’t pronounce clear enough for it to perfectly interpret. I was of the mindset, then, and probably still am, that it’s best to just get out your creativity on the first draft and just edit it later to a better state of coherency. That seems to be a relatively popular approach that many writers use, so I ran with it.
I believe the initial creative process is probably the most fun part of writing a novel for most people. The re-write is less thrilling, but an incredibly important part of creating a quality product that people will enjoy. When re-writing the first draft of “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.“, I found an incredible amount of errors, at least for my taste. The voice dictation software worked very well for the most part, accurately reflecting the words I’d spoken into it. But every now and then, it would populate words that would ruin the meaning of the sentence. This left me with a manuscript riddled with minute errors to fix. Words that a writer never would have intentionally written into sentences, but which needed to be fixed.
Another aspect of the 1st Draft rewrite was the normal consequence of starting and stopping the project so many times over the years, and yes,.. I did say years. When I did a blog post that memorialized that I’d started my novel project over 4 years ago, that really hit home. At that point I was very motivated to complete the project and was in the midst of the rewrite. I found plot lines that were mixed out of order or repeated, as I didn’t remember I’d covered something the last time I’d written. Character names were interchange occasionally and phrasing was sometimes awkward. There were a lot of things to clean up, but to be fair, that’s to be expected when your first draft efforts are mainly to get that story on paper.
So I worked on the rewrite, and I fixed a lot of errors, polishing things as I went. I was able to catch a lot of issues, but discovered an interesting thing in the process. I’m not sure if this is a characteristic of my my own brain or if others experience it as well, but I would sometimes find that I would read a sentence as intended, and not as it was. I’d think that a word was there as I’d expect it to be, but it wasn’t. I’d read again and found the error. This was a rare thing to find, but when you have even a small number of such occurrences, and multiply them by 80,000 + words, you’re going to have errors that remain.
I’d considered and priced the possibility of using a professional proofreader, and would have loved to opt for this as my third phase of the project to make sure everything was in good order, but the cost was too high. The lowest cost I could find for my humble novel project was one thousand dollars. I was under no illusion that my one novel, amongst thirty million other books on Amazon.com, would become a best seller and I’d be soon fending off multiple movie option deals. Given that, it seemed too much to remove this amount from my family reserves just for my book. So I set out to do the job myself, and I corrected a lot of issues.
After that process, I was anxious to make my dream a reality and publish my book,… and so I did. And this brings me to the mistake I made. I have to admit now, with a heavy heart, that I rushed the publication process a little too quickly. After having worked on “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” for so long, I just wanted it out there, but I should have waited. After a reader noted they found a “do” which should have been a “due”, I was mad at myself for having missed that. He said there weren’t as many errors as he’d seen in other independent books, but it was something mentioned in his otherwise positive review. He’d actually given the book a four star review, but I knew at that moment, the product,… my novel,… was not what it should have been for that reader. So I fixed that typo, thinking it was likely just one of the many issues that I just happened to miss fixing, but the thought that there could be more, dogged me for weeks.
So at one point, I grabbed a hard copy of my novel and began to reread it with a more critical eye to see if there were additional issues remaining. While there many pages without any issues, there were far too many where some remained. As I continued, I came across a “teeth” that should have been a “teach” and at that point, was starting to feel a bit demoralized. The dictation software had got me again, and when I’d reviewed it, I apparently saw what I expected, instead of the word that was actually on the page. I was too close to the project and the writing to proofread it effectively in one pass.
As it’s become clear now, I should have done one or two new passes over the book to ensure all typos and errors had been fixed. Either that, or hire a profession proofreader who would see any flaws given they were emotionally distant from the project. While I”m not exactly a perfectionist, I owe anyone who might read my novel in the future a better experience, and have thus decided to unpublish my novel for now. I’ve taken “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” off of all the markets it was available in for now. As there’s still some work to do, I’ll do my very best to make my novel the very best it can be and will republish it in the future.
Definitely NOT my favorite blog post.
Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: DONE, but now Unpublished [Additional proofreading project started.]
“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline: 1,777 words (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft: 19,440 (Went back to outlining 1st though, but delayed for additional proofreading of 1st novel.)