Corrected...

There's a certain numbness that comes to me when I've finished a full scale edit like this. And I mean one this precise. I didn't just correct typos and misspellings and set the proper tenses of words throughout the story, but also cut and reworked sentences and moments to be clearer. Page by page, going backwards to keep myself from getting caught up in the reading of it.

That's not easy to do. Most of the pages started with half of a sentence in half of a paragraph. Then you jump to the page immediately prior and it's a completely different sentence and thought and time in the story. It's a bit jolting. But that's what I needed. Next comes inputting the changes into the text of the hardcover copy of the story.

I know I still missed some. I went back into chapter 4 to check on something and found, without even trying to, a sentence beginning with a lower-case letter instead of upper-case. And that led me to run through the entire alphabet, using the "find" tool looking for any others. I'd input ". a" and see what it came up with, which was usually nothing. I did find one instance where I'd put a space after an ellipses, which I don't do, so corrected that, too. But nothing else popped up.

Of course, that still led me to rethinking a word I was using for a couple of women gossiping in their kitchen. The word for that in Derry is craic -- so changed that...which led to me splitting another sentence in two, since it made better sense that way.

Swear to God, I could work on this another 10 years and find issues that need to be addressed or bits that needed to be adjusted for clarity. But I can't keep doing that. I promised Brendan his books will come out, next year, and so they shall. I think I once mentioned a schedule of January, July and December. I'm going to keep to that...

...if the fates will let me.

Meaning next is New World for Old in Houston. I have editors wanting to read it, already.