I got so excited when my second proof copy of "A Few Last Words" arrived in the mail that I over reacted and under examined. I gave the book a quick once-over and like the artist/painter I am, quickly saw a few small glitches in the text, but determined that like a painting, those glitches could be explained away as "process" glitches and that the reading public would either miss them entirely or would absorb them into the experience, and focus instead on the message of the writing. Zowee, was I wrong! And I mean, REALLY wrong.
This is where literary art differs from visual art. The visual art phenomenon (in most cases - especially now in the post modern era) tends to allow for all kinds of creative process forgiveness. Accidental drips on certain paintings can be seen as process drips. These drips might even be seen as intentional and planned. Sometimes that's correct. Sometimes drips and scratches and scribbles and loose brush strokes are used to camouflage a really mundane painting. It's eye candy.
We might talk more about that later. Suffice to say, here in literary land, incorrect spelling , incorrect capitalization, bad spacing, awful punctuation etc. etc., are not seen as eye candy. These things are seen as stupid mistakes and no amount of telling readers that it's the message that matters will fix the problem.
I had to learn that the hard way - and, it took more than one book to make me a believer. How dumb is that? Very. The reading public demands perfection when it comes to editorial presentation. And why not? Readers have been reading and writing for most of their lives, and by association, expect better than inept technical skill when it comes to a piece of writing they are paying for. Otherwise, the book is just a waste of time.
So here I am with this nifty but technically flawed proof copy on my desk. And what do I do? Well, I'm so excited that I order twenty of these flawed books from the print on demand publishing outfit and when they arrive, I distribute them to friends and relatives. The results, as you can guess, were quite embarrassing.
I won't go into detail here, except to say every one of those twenty friends and relatives changed their image of me as an intelligent if quirky creative type of person, to a totally inept goof-ball. My believability took a major hit.
The good news (I guess) is that I deleted the edition from Amazon.com and spent another month or so re-editing the book. I was too embarrassed to ask for help - another super dumb decision. The correct decision would have been for me to wheedle and arm twist someone with their hat on straight, to edit the book for me. See, the deal is, the first law of the literary jungle states clearly - authors should never edit their own work.
Regardless, I re-edited again and got pretty close to a clean copy out of the time spent. It was a good thing the book is only 157 pages long. It's now on the street for sale and has done better than the average 75 copies sold in the book marketing guru's statistics so I feel pretty good about that - although it has not broken the 500 mark. I'm sure there are some little technical glitches in the text, but life is short and I had a 400 page novel to finish. Plus, I admit to being slightly stubborn.
The good news is, that if you ever are called upon to create a eulogy for someone else, or decide to write your own ( a very good idea) "A Few Last Words - Your Guide To The Art Of Self Memorializing" is your ticket to success. Check it out at Amazon.com
Continued bloggy blogs about writing and publishing and art and sailing and more are on their way. Stay tuned and remember, comments and chat are welcome.
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