Re: Mom's Journal and proofreading for publication
Thank you for the pointers. The last post I found was Day 346 and it ends with:
"If we've come this far in a year, what are the coming days, weeks, and months going to bring? Maybe I should only worry about today and tomorrow. There is plenty enough to deal with for that without begging problems I don't even know about yet."
That could be an acceptable closing even if there is no "The End" but it's nice to have a defined "end".
For those offering to be proofreaders, I went through this story editing it as I would one of my stories for publication. It's a LONG story at more than 767,000 words. 60,000 words is considered "novel" length (even if some of the Harry Potter books were twice that or more). On that basis, Mom's Journal is a 12 book series. I put all the changes (spelling, punctuation, possessives, singular vs plural, missing words, doubled words, etc - the types of errors I or my proofreader had found in the draft of my first book) inside [] because I have a tool that can count character usage in a document. There were 2197 corrections in those 767,000 words or one correction for every 335 words. With tools like this, yes, I take publishing very seriously as my real name would be on the work for the world to see, even if it was priced at $0.99.
Think about your attentive reading speed - not the skimming you do to quickly get the meat of the next chapter but the speed when you actually look at every sentence and each word in that sentence - put on your 9th grade English teacher glasses and pick up your red pencil ;-) When you come up with your "words per minute", divide 60,000 by that number to see how long it would take you to proofread a typical novel and remember that Kathy's epic sagas can easily run several times that long.
There were a few sentences that I could not decipher, whether because of my outlook, something in regional usage (Southerners don't use the same words in the same ways as Notherners or Californians) or there were just enough characters/words missing for it to make no sense to me. Had Kathy been available, I would have PM'd the paragraph to ask what she intended. Expect to encounter something similar in any proofreading - you will need access to the author for clarification. If it's something that was written 9 years ago (some of the postings were in Sept 2009) the author might need to reread more than just that paragraph to put the text in question into its proper perspective.
If you think I'm trying to make proofreading sound like hard work, you're right ;-) Properly done, you'll be questioning your favorite author's handling of every word - but paying customers don't want to see "a" where there should be "an" or "it" where there should be "if" or "buy" where there should be "but". You want the readers to give the book a positive review. A small number of people give an honest review of every book they read but people seem more likely to complain than to praise unless a book really touches them. Been there; saw that; have copies of the reviews.
and yes we like your work that much!
