My Biggest Editing Problem
I recently received the edits back on my coming Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, Bears With Us.
The biggest errors in the book had to do with people's names--names of new characters created for this particular mystery.
In one case I had two different spellings.
In two other cases, I started out with one name for characters and changed it mid-stream. I was horrified that I made such dumb errors. Yes, I write down characters names along with their physical characteristics and back ground stories, but obviously I relied on my memory and my memory failed me.
What is even more frustrating is I read this complete manuscript to my critique group and none of them caught any of these mistakes either.
One name was Nora and I changed it to Vera. The problem with doing a Find and Replace is when I did that, every word that had vera in it like several and overall suddenly had nora in the the middle of the word. I had to find and fix each one. One thing I found out was that I overused the word several and used different words for a few.
Chance and Chase was another. I figured if I made all the names Chance there wouldn't be as many problems with the changes as there might be with chase, since what I wrote is a mystery. I was wrong, I used chance a lot and when I did the search and replace every chance that wasn't a name now began with a capital C. Once again, I went through the whole manuscript and made the changes one by one.
Let this be a warning to you, Find and Replace doesn't always work the way you want it to.
From now on, I'll check on my new characters' names every time I use them, so I don't do this again.
Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com
The biggest errors in the book had to do with people's names--names of new characters created for this particular mystery.
In one case I had two different spellings.
In two other cases, I started out with one name for characters and changed it mid-stream. I was horrified that I made such dumb errors. Yes, I write down characters names along with their physical characteristics and back ground stories, but obviously I relied on my memory and my memory failed me.
What is even more frustrating is I read this complete manuscript to my critique group and none of them caught any of these mistakes either.
One name was Nora and I changed it to Vera. The problem with doing a Find and Replace is when I did that, every word that had vera in it like several and overall suddenly had nora in the the middle of the word. I had to find and fix each one. One thing I found out was that I overused the word several and used different words for a few.
Chance and Chase was another. I figured if I made all the names Chance there wouldn't be as many problems with the changes as there might be with chase, since what I wrote is a mystery. I was wrong, I used chance a lot and when I did the search and replace every chance that wasn't a name now began with a capital C. Once again, I went through the whole manuscript and made the changes one by one.
Let this be a warning to you, Find and Replace doesn't always work the way you want it to.
From now on, I'll check on my new characters' names every time I use them, so I don't do this again.
Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com
Comments
Marilyn
I can't tell you how many times I have screwed up a manuscript worse than it was by doing find replace. :)
Yay for editors!