So Close, Yet So Far...

So my author's proof for Shades arrived in the mail from Createspace yesterday afternoon.

It felt like Christmas in February when I saw that package on my front porch. All other things on my daily to do list got pushed back as I hustled the box into the house and tore it open. And there it was...my book. 

The cover had come out even better than I expected (thank you Justyn Perry), and the formatting had worked as intended. To say I was delighted would be a woeful understatement. I was ecstatic.

But then trouble loomed in Paradise.

I sat down to read through my book, and started spotting errors. It seems that a couple of stories weren't edited as thoroughly as others, which I guess can be a hazard in an anthology.Don't get me wrong, there wasn't a whole lot of them. But what was interesting was how much those errors stood out once the manuscript was in book form as opposed to being on screen or printer paper. So...

It's back to work.

That's what proofs are for, after all. My job today is to break out the yellow marker and read through the entire book. Then once I find all the errors, I will fix the manuscript and upload it again. This book is going to have my name on it, and it isn't going to reach the market until I'm comfortable with the level of quality inside. It's almost there, but it's just not quite done yet.

Oh well, it's all part of the process. Soon, folks....

Soon.