Checking
I spent yesterday going through the text of The Collective Us. I had received the draft back from the printers. I put myself into editing mode, this being the second-to-last chance I would have to make any changes before printing and I didn’t want to miss anything. Any alterations made after this will have to be paid for. It is surprising how much we miss, reading our own copy. I had read and re-read the manuscript multiple times, as well as getting it professionally edited. This time, with my work laid out in a different format and words placed in different places on the pages, I managed to find another half dozen things that needed changing. Not only that, I realised that each time I had used a single quotation mark, the pair didn’t match. They had seemed fine on my computer, but not in the font they were now sitting in. I had missed this error through much of the reading and only picked it up when the marks encased a single word, as the two quotation marks were now closer together. I had used these 25 times throughout my text. I don’t have much of an eye for detail, but I am sure many readers do, and it would have been jarring for some, had this error not been picked up. Suddenly I thought about the speech marks, that needed two of these. Fortunately, all but one, were okay. I was so thankful that I had finally noticed these mistakes. It would have been costly, had I not picked them up till the final read, or worse, if the book had gone to print like that.
I was really aware yesterday, of all my former selves around me. I credit them with enabling me to find these quotation mark errors. It is like they are all behind me, routing for my success.
When Amanda was designing my cover, she asked if I had a logo or anything I would like added to the spine. I said yes, as the feather was something I thought I would use going forward with any further books. She placed one on the spine but I immediately knew it did not belong. The feather pertained to Chief White Cloud as he was the driver behind Who Is Me? but it did not belong on The Collective Us. This book is about all of my former lives, and one lifetime should not to be singled out, after all, we are all one, the collective us.