Sunday 6 May 2012

How do you comfort the grammar police?

Give them a big hug and say "Their, there, they're."

I've been reading the hard copy of Echo and the typos are just flying off the page. I went through the e version, then printed it out and went through it again, although to save trees it was two pages per side, so it wasn't that big.

Everybody says you should get a professional editor to avoid these things but something like that would have been a massive outlay when i didn't expect it to get read by more than a handful of people.

A few people have expressed an interest in buying the actual book. It's slightly embarrasing when people are shelling out a couple of quid, but the paperback is £7.99 on Feedareed.com. If people want the book i'm going to have to go through it, make all the changes and upload it again. I can also re-upload to Kindle and list it for free for a week so that people who bought it can download a copy without all the mistakes (including one use of the wrong sort of their (there, they're). Not that i mind, but it's not as much fun as writing Echo2.

Having said that, Echo2 isn't much fun at the moment. I've just finished chapter 3 but there's a pressure for it to be as good as the original. Self imposed pressure, but still real. Echo was never meant to be read which allowed me to write whatever i wanted. I'd like to write E2 with the same freedom, but i don't think that's going to happen. I now understand the difficult-second-album syndrome that effects bands.

Does it matter if E2 is rubbish? Not in the grand scheme of things, no, but a remarkable number of people have said very kind things about Echo and i don't want to disappoint them with a disappointing follow up.

Anybody else have this problem?

4 comments:

  1. Dear Lord, yes! Beautifully put. I'm writing book 5 at the mo and second-guessing myself at every word which is totally ruining the flow of the story. I honestly don't think you'll have anything to worry about with Echo 2 - your characters are wonderful and the world you've created for them to inhabit is just so real and described in a kind of HD script...sorry, I'm prattling. Congrats on the gorgeous 'real' Echo by the way - it looks great.

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  2. I think the trick will be to adopt the naNoWriMo approach and go for quantity rather than quality, then sort it all out in the second draft.

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  3. The thing with echo is that it is effortlessly brilliant! Fantastic characters in a beautiful universe written with an innovative style that people loved! And that came purely from the mind of Peter Johnstone!!
    I also believe you have a certain luxury with echo2 in so much as you have a goal, and an audience waiting in anticipation to read the outcome of the many subplots throughout echo!!

    As for mistakes,, I read many books, and im yet to read one without these mistake. Dostkoevsky, Asimov, Hamilton they're all riddled with errors!!

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  4. All these loose ends i accidently created...so much pressure

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