Proofreading

If there are too many errors in a book it can be very off putting when reading through it and can ruin the flow of the story so proofreading is essential. If you are able to it’s great if you can hire a proof reader but if you’re self-publishing, with the other costs involved, that may be a luxury you can’t afford. You can ask friends and family to read through the manuscript and look for mistakes but if the story is good the chances are they will get wrapped up in reading it and miss all the errors. That leaves the last resort. You have to trawl through the book repeatedly yourself, which is not ideal as there is an art to proof reading but at least hopefully you may find the majority of errors.

I found proofreading was one of the things that took the longest time in the whole publishing process and I still doubted that all the mistakes were eliminated. Someone told me the best way to proofread is to read something backwards as now you will read each word properly without your brain guessing what the word in the sentence is and seeing what it wants to see. Even if you adopt this approach I find you do still need to read the book through in order to find grammatical errors and words that are spelt correctly but do not fit in the sentence such as the following examples:

‘She was starring at the moon.’ Which should of course be: ‘She was staring at the moon.’

I noticed when writing this in a word processing software it did underline the incorrect word, in this case ‘starring’, but in the following examples it did not underline any of the words and accepted both to be correct.

‘He couldn’t bare the pain anymore.’ Which should be: ‘He couldn’t bear the pain anymore.’

‘He jumped over the worn, wooden style.’ Which should be: ‘He jumped over the worn, wooden stile.’ 

It’s the mistakes above that can be particularly difficult to pick up without the word processor's help and because our brains are too clever and will accept even incorrectly spelled words that look similar as we read words as a whole as opposed to every letter in a word. A good demonstration of this is how a lot of people, myself included, can make sense of and read the following gibberish.

Alpapertny it is psoilsbe for mnay ppeloe to raed wdors wehvetar oerdr the lertets are in the wrdos povdired taht the fsirt and lsat ltteer are in the rhigt pclae. Tihs fcat meaks porornfedaig all the mroe dilfiucft and is the rosaen you hvae to raed turgohh the mapcsniurt so mnay tmeis.

Embarrassingly when proofreading I found I had often mistyped certain words more frequently than others in my haste to get my ideas down and hadn’t even noticed the mistakes when editing. It was only when I came to the proofreading that I discovered I had to be more vigilant for these words, a few examples of which can be seen below.

The correct Off or of
The correct it’s or its
The correct their, they’re or there
The correct your or you’re
The correct to or too

There were many other mistyped words I discovered and corrected and maybe more that went unnoticed, though I hope not, but the process certainly gave me a healthy respect for the work professional proof readers do.

The Magic Key - 1

The following copyright and legal information applies to this post and all subsequent posts related to this story with the category/label ‘The Magic Key’.

Copyright © Yvonne Arlott 2015

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events and places in this publication are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover.

Posted below is what I wrote in the time given at the writers group.

He stared at the ornate bronze key wondering what it opened. There had been no note with it in his uncle's will just the direction it was to be given to him. Why him though? His cousins should surely have been left the key along with the rest of his uncle’s estate but that hadn’t been the case. His mind raced back trying to remember something, anything in the conversations he’d had with his uncle that would provide some clue to its use. There had been nothing though, except maybe that one line his uncle was so fond of repeating. ‘Happiness is the key to everything.’ How could that possibly help him now though? It made no sense. Maybe his only sensible recourse was to search every possible item in the house and grounds until he could find the lock the key fitted. His cousins wouldn’t object he knew but it was a large house situated in 5 acres of land and there was no guarantee he would even find it.

‘Have you got any idea why he left it to me Jeff?’ He asked his cousin.

Jeff stared, the same puzzlement reflecting in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry I’ve no idea. It looks old though. It must open something old.’

‘You’re not being very helpful.’ Sheila interrupted.

10 Minute Madness Experiment

I decided to attend a writers club as I thought it would be great to talk to other authors but an unexpected and interesting thing that came from it turned out to be a 10 minute task they set everyone in the group. They gave us the topic ‘The Magic Key’ and we had to write a story or as much of a story as we could about it in 10 minutes and then read our efforts at the end. I’d never done anything like that before and I found it extremely challenging and at first I thought I’d never think of anything to write in such a short time but I ended up surprising myself. Although it was written in a rush and was unedited I still found I wanted to know what would happen next.

So at the risk of putting myself under enormous pressure I thought it would be an interesting experiment if I were to post what I had written here and then, if I can manage it regularly, set myself 10 minutes (20 if I really can’t cope with the pressure) to write a bit more of the story.

I don’t usually like people to read a first draft of anything I write and this could turn out worse than a first draft with the time limitations. So please bear in mind what I post here will be unedited, rushed, written under pressure and will probably do any writing skills I may have no justice at all. I have no idea how long the story will be, what the storyline is or if I’ll even be able to make a storyline that makes sense. I don’t even know what genre it will be yet. Added to those problems once I’ve posted something I can’t change it which could well add to my storyline dilemmas.  Even just thinking of character names is awful under the time constraint and I end up just using the first name that comes into my head. My only consolation is that unlike normal where I spend hours thinking of a title I at least have something to call it already provided for this story, ‘The Magic Key’.

I’m really interested and somewhat nervous to find out how this experiment goes.

My Writing Story So far

After having spent ages writing and re-writing my book I then spent hours and hours trying to find any typos and errors and also asked other people to check through it. It felt like a never ending task as no matter how many mistakes I found I could read through it another time and find twice as many still remaining. I don’t know how many times I went through the book but I started to find fewer mistakes each time to the point where I could only find one or two.

With the book ready I then had to learn how to publish it, a task that at first felt insurmountable. I had read that you can self-publish eBooks on Amazon Kindle and decided that was probably a good place to start but it turned out to be more challenging than I had imagined to do it properly. Signing up to publish with them involved filling in various forms and then once that was sorted I spent a good while reading through all the invaluable help guides they provide. After further researching on the Internet and some trial and error I discovered how to convert and upload my book so that it appeared for sale on Amazon Kindle, which was a very exciting and nerve-racking moment.

Now that I had the eBook for sale I could concentrate my efforts on getting a paperback of the book printed. First of all I had to buy ISBN numbers and then register the book with the database which involved more form filling. I couldn’t just use the word file I had converted and uploaded to Amazon though as I learnt it had to be properly laid out in a pdf before I could send it to a printing company. The more I researched the more I discovered how much was involved in typesetting, from using appropriate fonts to eliminating widows and orphans. In hindsight it would have been a reasonably easy task but not having any previous knowledge of the subject I spent a long time typesetting only to have to restart the process from scratch after discovering I had made some fundamental error. Eventually I succeeded in producing a pdf in the correct format that I could send to the printers and shortly received the proofs to check through. It was very exciting the first time I saw the pages of my book printed, even though they were loose and not bound in the cover. Three weeks later boxes and boxes of the finished printed book arrived.

Since then I have sold both eBooks on Amazon and paperback books and have received positive feedback and reviews already which has been very encouraging. I’m still only at the beginning of my journey though and have lots more to do.

Welcome To My New Blog

I love writing and have always started writing stories since as far back as I can remember but never got round to finishing any of them as my confidence would always fail me. My family would find and read my attempts and would be so desperate to know how they ended they would pester me to finish them but I never did. Well finally after a lot of pestering I finished writing a book a few years back and, after mustering up courage, asked family to read it. They thought it was really good and suggested I try to get it published but I had too much self-doubt and so ended up putting it in a drawer and promptly forgetting about it for years.

It was only circumstances in life and relentless encouragement from my parents that eventually prompted me to read through it again and, after making significant changes and receiving positive feedback from other people I asked to read it, I decided to self-publish. So began a journey far more complicated and interesting than I had first thought.

Having only just begun this journey I decided now was probably a good time to start a blog and maybe my experiences can help others.