Day 1: You want to be a great writer. You have an amazing idea for a story!
Day 30: You believe you have it in you to be a remarkable writer.
Day 60: In point of fact, you write every day. Your keyboard is smoking.
Day 90: Before you know it, you have an entire novel completed and formatted.
Day 90 (Later that day): You go back to read what you have written. Your heart sinks. There are spelling and grammar errors that neither you nor Word caught.
Everywhere. Literally, everywhere.
Everywhere. Literally, everywhere.
Day 91: You make the mistake of letting a friend read it. She finds places where your verbs switch back and forth from past tense to present tense. She says it is confusing.
Day 101: You let another friend edit it because you really want to keep going and publish. She says it's really good! You read what she gave back to you.
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Day 102: Now it’s a total mess and all you can do is go back to the first draft—the one with all the errors in it—and try to find them. There are a lot of blue, squiggly lines.
A lot. Is that one word or two?
A lot. Is that one word or two?
Day 103: O.k. You’re just going to focus on the red, squiggly lines. They're the ones that really matter.
Day 103 (20 minutes later): You’re a writer, not a Grammar Guru!
Day 104: Command decision: If you don’t know the rule, no one else will catch the mistake. Just tackle the ones that you're sure about.
"Consider revising" sounds like more of a guideline than a rule.
"Consider revising" sounds like more of a guideline than a rule.
Day 120: You’ve spent weeks editing and reediting page after page and gotten no closer to publishing. You probably shouldn’t have told your friends you were writing a book.
Day 121: Getting your book published is probably not going to happen.
