Many of you read my blog, "My Bad, Mistakes Were Made." (here is a link: https://judestringfellow.blogspot.com/2023/04/my-bad-mistakes-were-made.html ) wherein I lamented about the sad, sad fact that I had not only made mistakes in my book "Of Kilted Pleasure," but that there were 12 mistakes, and most of them were committed by ME!! I was the culprit. I was the problem. I didn't re-read the text another 100 times, as I had read it before I had submitted it, but about four or five of the mistakes were actually made by the publisher. STILL, and nevertheless, I made a bunch of stupid boo-boos that needed to be fixed. I am writing today to tell you just how I will fix those issues. This is not going to be a lot of fun.
When you send off a manuscript, you send it off without being saved as a PDF. Everyone knows this. I did this. I was 100% sure that everything was fine when it was not. After sending off the Word document, I then saved my document as a PDF so I wouldn't make the mistake of erasing something, and in doing so, I sealed my fate! I couldn't (and can't) open it up again to make the corrections. I fired the publisher after they published the book with the mistakes because, as I said, some of them were NOT my mistakes; they couldn't have been. There's no way I'm going to randomly put in a "w" here or there, and in one instance, there were two random "ww," and they were in italics! C'mon, sorry, I didn't do that. I think there was an issue, and they refused to correct it. That doesn't change the fact that I had (a) fired them and (b) couldn't get my Word document sent back to me. I couldn't.
The only way to make the corrections at this point was to pull the book from publication and literally retype it word for word. I can't copy it and paste it into another Word document, as the ONLY copy I have is, in fact, the PDF. I did actually save it 1000 times along the way, but I deleted all of those copies so I would only have the one PDF file. Then it hit me!! I did make another copy! I had, in fact, sent copies to friends to read, too, so I could essentially go back to those emails and find it and copy it onto a flash drive! All is not lost! I copied it on March 2, 2023, just days before sending it to Xlibris to be published. Between March 2, 2023, when I had copied it, and March 14, 2023, when I had sent it off to Xlbiris, I had made a few changes. Now, all I need to do is pull up the PDF, situate it side by side with the one I have copied to the flash drive, go through it PAGE BY FREAKING PAGE, and make the needed corrections. I can do this.
One thing I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE is that I can use my Find/Replace to make the changes I needed to with everything EXCEPT the random "w"s because they aren't on my flash drive since I didn't make those mistakes. There were three or four other things like that, mistakes the publisher made that would not be on my flash drive, but (and this is soooooo big) I found all the Cromwell issues and corrected them FIRST. I did that tonight. I went into the document, did a search for Cromwell, changed his name for the Duke of Cumberland, and/or used the words "Royal Army" when I said "Cromwell's Army"...you get the picture. I fixed the biggest literary plunder of my entire career. I feel really good about that.
I made tiny changes to three issues that I didn't have to change but thought it would make more sense if I did. The reader may never know, but I did it because I knew it was there on the page, screaming at me. Thankfully, no one else will ever hear that, just me. Tomorrow and the next day, I will go through the PDF and read it page by page, making the corrections and adding the additions to the flash drive saved copy; then it will be saved again, NOT IN PDF, so I can have it if I need it. I didn't tell you the other weird thing! I had changed computers between having sent it off and having it redone. My new WORD program won't open the old documents fully, and I was completely freaked out about that, but I'm good now. I'm good. Nothing that a bit of chocolate and a lot of coffee won't fix.
After I make all the necessary changes, I'll pull the book from being published and resubmit it on the same day, thus leaving a very small window to when the book is not available. Any books sold right now and up to that day are going to be collector's items, you know. Well, maybe not, but I have about 20 myself, so I'll be sure and use them for fire starters or something worthy. I did have a really sweet surprise today; a woman I know in Australia bought my book, and she said she read it in a few settings. She said it was well written, and though she saw a few mistakes, it didn't take anything away from her experience. She didn't know her Scottish history well enough to know that Oliver Cromwell had died many, many years before Culloden, so he couldn't have led that charge. That was good news. She pointed out to me that she would like to see a sequel to see how Ewan and Aria make out down the road -- no worries there. I'm working on it in my head. I have about two more books to write before I can write that one.
I really do need to be rich so I can just write. I need that in my life. Thank you for your patience with me. I appreciate it. I really do.
Photo Credit: ME
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