Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 166

More Fairy Tale Stuff

I think I got myself back on track yesterday. I didn't get the word count I wanted, but I figured out the scene I was working on and did a little backtracking to make a better transition. I now know the next few scenes to write, too. The early part of a book can either go quickly because it's all pent up or it can be a slow discovery process.

It looks like all the book versions are up on the major sites, and Amazon now has the paperback (which turned out really pretty!), e-book and audio versions linked on the same page.

In case you're interested, here's some info on the reader for the audio version (I don't know if they include this in the audio book, but I thought it was interesting):
Suzy Jackson is an actress and voice-over artist whose voice has been heard on numerous audiobooks, commercials, video games, and cartoons, including The Winx Club, Yu-gi-oh, Pokemon Chronicles, and Chaotic. Suzy has performed on stage with The Aquila Theater Company, New York Classical, CAP 21, and The Classical Studio. Film work includes To Be Perfectly Honest opposite John Turturro and Spike Lee’s She Hate Me. Suzy is also a teaching artist with Opening Act, a nonprofit organization that brings free theater programs to NYC’s most under-served public high schools.

And if you want more info or to see more work from Kirbi Fagan, the artist who did the cover, here's her web site.

And speaking of fairy tale stuff, there are two movies that I'm looking forward to.

First, the movie version of Into the Woods. I'm a little nervous about this because I love the stage show (and I have the DVD of the original production that was shown on PBS in the early 90s), but the trailer looks pretty good:


We'll just see how much of the singing does or doesn't make me cringe.

And then there's the live-action Disney version of Cinderella. It looks lovely, and it's directed by Kenneth Branagh.


Now I kind of want them to give this treatment to Sleeping Beauty. Just imagine a live-action version of snarky Prince Philip fighting a dragon …

I've barely seen any movies this year because there haven't been a lot that interested me all that much, but this stuff will lure me to the theater.

And now, it's cookie day, in which I bake my annual batch of Spritz cookies for the church cookie sale, in between writing bouts.

Back to Work

It's Book Day Plus One, and it seems to be going pretty well -- not necessarily burning up the bestseller lists but rising steadily, and people who've mentioned reading it seem to like it. My back is almost back to normal, and I suppose all this means I need to get back to work. I wrote most of a scene yesterday, only to realize the scene was all wrong. It was a nice enough scene (and I could see it playing out in the movie in my head), but I don't think it needs to be what's happening at this point. I'm not really sure what does need to be happening at this point. I will have to do some serious thinking.

So today's exciting plan is to walk to the Indian market to restock on tea (and possibly get some British chocolate), which might work as a meditative exercise for brainstorming. Then I need to figure out what to write and write it. I also have to clean the kitchen for tomorrow's cookie-baking extravaganza for the church cookie sale. All this means I'll probably be working at least some of the day on Saturday because I'm way behind.

I suppose I should decorate my Christmas tree at some point. The tree is up, but it's bare. I also need to get out the Nativity scene and clear off a spot on a table or counter for the Christmas cookie jar.

Or I could sit at my desk all day and check my Amazon rankings. Not that I'm obsessing, or anything.

But since it looks like it will rain soon, I'd better get up and head to get tea. Not that I'm in danger of having a tealess crisis. I just won't have my usual plain black loose tea. I think I may get some cinnamon sticks and lemons while I'm out, since those make for a good non-caffeinated hot beverage. Actually, I can go nuts in the spice section of this market. This store is on my list of the reasons I want to stay in this neighborhood when I buy a new house.

New Book Day!

It's new book day! It looks like A Fairy Tale is up at both Amazon and B&N. The Audible version started showing up yesterday, but I'm not finding it again now, so I don't know what's up with that (hmm, it looks like it's currently just available as part of an Audible membership, not to purchase separately). At any rate, share and enjoy! And tell a friend (or 100).

I think I was wrong to blame my sore back on my writing marathon. I was trying to stay sort of mobile yesterday and was working on my ongoing organization project, which I did a fair amount of on Monday, and the position that I got into to work on it immediately triggered the pain, so I think that may be the problem. I need to sit and reach up instead of standing and bending over. Some rest and the heating pad have made things somewhat better, and I have no excuse for not writing much today. I mean, other than the obsessive need to keep checking my Amazon ranking. It's actually been pretty steady for the past couple of days. No huge surge, no huge drop.

Fortunately, I don't have children's choir tonight. I'm not sure I could deal with bending over to try to hear what little people are telling me. Most of the time they're so loud, but when they want to tell me something directly, they suddenly get really quiet.

Back to the book … It's been a long journey, from a glimmer of an idea in 2007 or so, to actively brainstorming, researching and writing starting in 2009, to a long time on hold and finally bringing it back to the surface to work on in 2012, to submitting it to publishers in 2013, and now to finally deciding to have faith in it and publish it myself. I just hope I'm not the only one who likes this oddball book.

If I didn't have bad allergies, I'd be totally tempted to adopt a bulldog and name him Beauregard. But I don't think I'd do well with a dog in the house and I'm rather fond of breathing. Instead, I guess I now have an imaginary pet. I get to write about him, but I don't have to vacuum up hair or take him on walks, and I don't have to listen to him snoring.

So, happy new book day to me, and new series day. I'm going to celebrate by writing and taking Tylenol.

Audiobook Day

It's audiobook day! Supposedly, A Fairy Tale was going to be released by Audible today, but I'm not finding it on Amazon. However, the mp3 CDs for the entire Enchanted Inc. series are available today. I imagine that most people these days just do the digital download and this is mostly for libraries, but if you want to request that your library get the series on audio, that would be cool.

Meanwhile, I got a good start on the new book yesterday, with more than 5,000 words written. I need to figure out what happens next, though, because things didn't quite happen the way I planned. A character showed up earlier than I expected, and that's going to make things interesting.

Today I may have to see if I can manage to write while sitting at my desk, in spite of the lure of the Internet. I must have been sitting in a bad position yesterday for all that writing because my upper back is stiff and sore this morning. I'm making myself sit with good posture in my desk chair, and I have a feeling that slouching on the sofa all afternoon would be a very bad idea. The last book I wrote mostly sitting at my desk was Don't Hex with Texas. Otherwise, I've taken a laptop to various places in the house.

Tomorrow is the Big Day of the New Book, the launch of my first new series, when I find out if readers are willing to follow me to something new or if they just want to read that one thing and don't want me to move on to anything else. I'm rather nervous about this. I think that people who like things like Enchanted, Inc. will like this, but it is different.

What's similar?
The heroines are small-town Southern girls in New York. There's a mix of real-world and fantasy elements. There's not really much swearing and no sex. There's a hint of potential romance. There's some humor.

What's different?
There are multiple viewpoints, and it's written in third-person rather than first-person narrative. I like writing first-person, but there was no way to make that work with this book because there are parallel plot lines and because I wanted to play with the difference between the way someone is perceived and the way someone really is on the inside. The heroines aren't quite the "girl next door" types that Katie was. The romance is more in the "potential" than in the "building" category. There are characters you might want to see together, but they're nowhere near ready to actually get together. While there's humor, it's not outright comedy. Much of the humor comes more from the characters' perspectives than from funny things actually happening.

So, if it seems like you might like this sort of thing, give it a shot. Then leave a review at your online bookseller of choice, Goodreads or wherever else you talk about books. It would also be nice if people would mention it on Twitter, Facebook, tumblr or wherever else you talk to people. It's harder to promote self-published books because a lot of book sites won't deal with them. This one is kind of a grey area because I am a traditionally published author and the audiobook is through a publisher instead of self-published, but it's probably not beneficial to try to split hairs with someone over their policies. Trying to be A Special Snowflake isn't likely to help my cause.

And for those who have preordered who may end up with a download on your Kindle at midnight, I really hope you enjoy it. I love this book in all its weirdness, so I hope others like it, too.

New Book Week Begins

It's new book week! Tomorrow the audio edition comes out, and then Wednesday the print (e-book and paper) editions are available (it looks like you can now also pre-order the paperback from Amazon). I've updated my web site to include the new book info, including an excerpt.

I had a good holiday. There was a minor pie-related injury that seems to be healing well and the pies came out very well. I had a good visit with my family. I read a lot and got a start on decorating for Christmas.

In the rush to head over the river and through the woods for the holiday, I seem to have forgotten to do any kind of Thanksgiving post. I really do have a lot to be grateful for. This has been a good year. I've struggled a lot in the past, but this year I really broke through, and that's opened up a lot of other possibilities and has made it possible to start giving back. I have a family that makes me feel safe and secure. I have more friends than I really know what to do with (a problem for introverts -- spending time with everyone who wants to spend time with me is sometimes a bit more than I can take, but that's a good problem to have) and I have people in my life I know I can count on. I'm doing what I love and what I've always dreamed of doing. And next year should be even better (assuming the new books don't tank).

In addition to a new book coming out this week, I'm going to start writing a new book today. This is my favorite part of the writing process as well as the part that most terrifies me (well, aside from the part where it comes out and people get to read it). It's a moment of infinite possibilities. And then words come out and it becomes a real thing. I have the opening three scenes kind of planned out, and then we'll see where it goes from there. I know who the villain is and I know what's going on. I hope everything else comes into focus once I get some scenes written. That's how it usually goes.

A Final Flurry of Activity

I made good progress on yesterday's epic to-do list. Today's is just as long, but I already have a good start, and a lot of the items are things I just have to set in motion, and then I can do other stuff in the meantime. Mostly, I'm baking. I have two pies to make for Thanksgiving. I have the dough for one crust made and chilling.

I've figured out that a lot of the clutter in my office now comes down to two things: stuff that I need to shred (that got pulled aside in recent purges) and books I need to get rid of. I made a good start on both yesterday, taking two bags of books to the library for the Friends of the Library book sale and getting a few years of old tax documents shredded. You only have to keep seven years, and I had twenty years. I still need to figure out what to do with the extra foreign editions. My neighborhood has a large Asian population, so I bet I could donate a set of the series in Japanese. Then I'll need to talk to some teacher friends to see if the German department in the high school would be interested in a set in German. I'm not sure what to do with the Dutch books, as they don't seem to teach Dutch in the local schools and we don't have much of a Dutch community here (if I had some Finnish or Swedish copies, that would be nice because those are the other two ethnic enclaves in my neighborhood).

I also have some stacks of boxes I was planning to take to the recycling center, but now that I'm planning to move, I probably ought to hang onto them. I should probably use them to pack up stuff I need to keep but don't really need to use in the next few months, and then I can stash those boxes out of the way.

After probably a final flurry of activity tomorrow, I'll be at my parents' house for the holiday, where my main tasks will be helping in the kitchen, communing with the horses in the pasture behind my parents' yard (they see me out there and come over for nose scratches) and playing with my brother's dogs.

And then, I have a book to write.

Short, Busy Week

Even when you're self-employed, a short work week gets busy. In my case, I'm wrapping up as much stuff as possible so I can return from the holiday and plunge into a book. Today's to-do list had twelve items on it. Some is stuff to prepare for the holiday, like an oil change for my car before I travel. Some is stuff to prepare for the time after the holiday, like some housework and trying to get back to my uncluttering/organizing project (I'm planning to take a couple of bags of books to donate for the library book sale today). Some is work stuff for various books in various stages of the publication process. And meanwhile, I've decided I'm really serious about selling this house and buying another, so I'm looking into some things like whether it would be a good idea to pay off this mortgage in full before I start applying for a new mortgage or whether I should just not bother with that and make a bigger down payment on the new house.

Anyway, it's a lot of stuff to think about and deal with, enough that crawling back in bed sounds like a good idea.

But I'm carrying on! One bit of work stuff already dealt with, one load of laundry in the washer.

I had a delightfully relaxing weekend, though. It rained off and on most of Saturday. I had a leisurely breakfast, then spent much of the day reading and listening to music. In the evening, I watched Winter's Tale on HBO OnDemand, and now I'm trying to decide if I want to read the book. A lot of the reviews of the movie mentioned that the book was considered unfilmable, which leads me to believe that a lot was left out or oversimplified. It ended up being the kind of thing you might have seen on the Hallmark channel if you threw in a Christmas tree or two. It was pretty, and it made good background noise for knitting. But I do like that kind of oddball magical realism and seeming time travel, so I may have to look into the book. Maybe that'll go on the January reading list.

Sunday was nice, and after singing for two church services, I did a little more relaxing but also did some work on the patio. The morning glory died in last week's freezes, so I pulled it up and untangled it from the trellis. I also tried to sweep up some of the leaves that were blown in by the Saturday storms.

Now to finish the laundry and do some kitchen cleaning before lunch, after which I'll head out for the errands. Or take a nap.

Still More of the Origins

I think I've figured out why I've been so sluggish for the past few days. I seem to be coming down with a cold. Yeah, just in time for Thanksgiving, but maybe I'll be over it by then. It looks like it will be a delightfully dreary weekend, so it will be perfect for huddling under a blanket on the sofa with a pot of tea and a book or my knitting. I might even let myself jump the gun on the holiday season and start mainlining all the TV Christmas movies. This year, I not only get Lifetime, ION and ABC Family, but I now have UP, Hallmark, the Hallmark Movie channel and the Lifetime Movie channel. By the end of December, I will possibly have overdosed on sappy TV holiday movies. Speaking of which, Lifetime made a Grumpy Cat Christmas movie. I am not making this up. It's for real, not a joke. Here's a link to the trailer, in case you want to verify it for yourself. I suspect that you get the gist of it and get all the good stuff (like the part where Grumpy Cat apparently sprays a department store with machine gun fire) in the trailer.

Now, back to giving some introductory info about the upcoming book (yikes, just a couple of weeks away!).

When it came to the story to tell using folklore about fairies, one story that comes up a lot is the Tam Lin tale, which is about a woman saving her lover from captivity in the fairy realm. There are also stories about men saving wives or saving random women who become their wives. But since I wanted any romantic relationship to be developed on the page rather than already established, I took it in another direction and made it be about sisters, perhaps inspired by the Christina Rossetti poem "The Goblin Market," in which a sister saves her sister from being in thrall to "goblins" (though the goblins in the poem sound a lot like the common folklore about fairies). So, that's the basis of the plot -- a younger sister is abducted into the fairy realm and her older sister sets out to rescue her.

Though there's more to it than that, and that's why the book took me so long to write. It took me a while to figure out why the sister was taken, what the backstory was and how it all fit together. I'd get midway through the book before I figured out what was actually going on, then I'd have to rework everything, and then I'd realize something else. I don't normally work that way, so it got frustrating at times. The second book was the same way. There seems to be something ephemeral about this world that makes it hard for me to capture.

The third main character (other than the two sisters) is the guy. Since the heroine is very much a take-no-prisoners type (but very polite about it), I needed a stronger guy, and since he's our outsider who doesn't have magical powers and isn't in the know about this stuff, that made it difficult for me to write my usual beta man without him looking like a wimp next to all the strong women in the story. So I made him a cop -- a police detective. That gives him a certain skill set and mindset, even though he is basically a nice boy-next-door kind of guy. In fact, that's a running joke about him with his police colleagues, that he's too nice to be a cop. He's in a kind of emotional limbo because he's also lost someone and hasn't given up on finding her again.

I had fun with creating the fairy world because I made it very dreamlike. I also imagined how fairies who don't quite get the concept of time might incorporate things they glimpse from the human world into their lives. Might they sort of keep up with the times? At least, they might not all still be stuck in a medieval guise.

I started the basic research for this story in the summer of 2009. That's when I was doing a lot of reading about fairy folklore, as well as reading a few memoirs by cops to get that mindset. I took a research trip to New York in late August and walked around a lot to find potential settings. I was working on writing it off and on for the rest of the year and into the next summer. I had a completed draft then but didn't like the conclusion. Then I was invited to speak at the annual conference of the Mythopoeic Society, and I got some ideas from the sessions I attended that told me I was on the wrong track with some things, but I knew it was going to take more work. At the same time, the steampunk idea was brewing and I thought it might be more marketable than this weird, vague book, so I put it aside and started researching the steampunk book, then wrote it. And then there was book 6 of the Enchanted, Inc. series, then a rewrite of the steampunk book, and then book 7, and then I finally got back to this book and got it to the point I was ready to shop it around.

As I feared, the publishers didn't know what to do with it, so I made the decision to self publish it. Oddly, it's going to come out before the book I put it aside to work on, but timelines in this business can drive you nuts.

The Fairy Tale Origin Story

One slight correction to the list of coming attractions: The audiobook for A Fairy Tale will actually be out one day before the text versions. We set the release date based on what they wanted, then they realized they always release on Tuesdays after we'd already set up the release date in all the systems and we couldn't change. So this may be the rare time that those who like audiobooks get a book first.

Meanwhile, the hardcover for Rebel Mechanics is already up for preorder at Amazon and B&N. There will be an e-book, but since it's so far out they don't have that up for preorder yet (I guess they don't have to worry about how many copies to print). I don't know how much pre-orders from consumers really matter (it's pre-orders from bookstores that are huge in letting a publisher know how well a book might do), but if you're planning to buy the hardcopy, pre-orders certainly wouldn't hurt in sending a signal to booksellers that there's demand for a book. If B&N sees that people are eager for it, they might be more willing to stock it in their physical stores.

I have been dragging all week, for some odd reason. I really had plans to start writing the new book this week, but I haven't had the brainpower (and I can't entirely blame the proofreading). Now I may just do a last burst of intense brainstorming and hold off until after Thanksgiving because stops and starts don't help matters. I can get my life sort of in order, do some resting and do enough thinking that I can't wait to write instead of feeling blank. And right now I feel very blank. The movie isn't yet playing in my head.

But with the first book coming out soon, maybe it will help if I talk about that one and start teasing it.

This was a very odd book for me. Normally, I'm pretty plot-centric as a writer. I may have ideas for one or two characters, but mostly I have a story concept and build the characters that are needed to play out that story. I do a lot of plotting ahead of time, and though there may be some adjusting along the way, the basic bones of the story are more or less the same.

This book started with a mental image. I'm not sure if it was in a dream or just something that popped into my head, but I had this very clear image of a very feminine woman walking a bulldog down a city street that looked a lot like the Upper West Side of New York, and then they vanished into a kind of mist. I knew there was a story in there, and I wanted to tell it, but this isn't my first attempt at teasing a story out of it. I originally had this odd concept of fairy tale characters being banished into our world, with the heroine an ER doctor who started seeing these cases of people who were considered crazy -- and yeah, a woman in modern New York who thinks she's Red Riding Hood would seem crazy -- but when there's an epidemic of them? And meanwhile there's a kind of fairy tale playing out with her, as she's a proverbial "princess in a tower" -- the daughter of a wealthy and prominent person who defied her family to go to med school and work in a public hospital when they just wanted her to find a good husband and be a society wife. And her love interest was the only other doctor who agreed with her about the odd goings on, with him being the proverbial poor boy made good who could win the heart of a princess. But the story never came to life for me. I workshopped the idea in an online class, and it just felt like a class assignment, never like a real story, so it never got written, and I even mostly forgot about it.

Funny, though, just writing that description brought it all back, and now I've got that "ooh, idea!" tingle, so maybe I'll have to put it on my list. I will also point out that I was doing all this brainstorming and development in 2007, so I was thinking about fairy tale characters banished to our world long before the TV series Once Upon a Time.

Anyway, that mental image never went away, even as I worked on other things. The rejections I was getting at the time for other work were always along the lines of "we were hoping for something more like Enchanted, Inc.," so I figured I needed to come up with something that maybe had the elements people liked about that series but in a different series -- the mix of magic and the real world, the Southerner in New York, a touch of romance, some humor. And that was when a lot of idea fragments started colliding.

I'd done a lot of research about folklore related to the fairies for an earlier stalled idea (that I may yet write) about a kind of Indiana Jones about folklore -- a professor who studied the folklore but secretly knew that these creatures really existed and helped deal with the negative or destructive ones. I started thinking that this might provide a way to do a "portal" fantasy, which I've always loved the idea of, since in a lot of the folklore, the fae have their own realm. That would also give me a magical premise distinct from the magic corporation from Enchanted, Inc.

Meanwhile, I'd had a particular character living in my head since I was in high school, in search of a plot but never being quite the right fit for anything. I had a dream in which I was this person, having all kinds of crazy adventures. She was entirely unflappable while being this odd mix of sweet and snarky, and she was rather petite and dainty looking, so people underestimated her. This character starred in a lot of my daydreams over the years, and every time I got a story idea, I auditioned her. When I was brainstorming this idea, I finally had a role for her to play. She was perfect. However, her name had to change. The name was part of the dream -- Alex Drake. But then the writers of the TV show Ashes to Ashes used it and I had to come up with something else. Now she's Sophie Drake, and I think that actually is a better fit for the person she ended up becoming once she was in this story. Part of the development of this character was me being a bit snarky about the Generic Urban Fantasy Book Cover with the chick in black leather and tattoos and deliberately writing a heroine who could never be portrayed that way on the cover. But I still wanted her to be tough and strong, so I made her a ballerina. I'd been dancing about a year at that time and was realizing that although ballerinas look pretty and frail, they have to be incredibly strong, and they can take a lot of pain (this article sums it up nicely). I did end up with a cover that kind of spoofs the Generic Urban Fantasy Cover because you could possibly remove my pretty ballerina (and apparently the model for the painting is an actual dancer) and insert a tattooed chick in black leather and get something closer to the generic. But I like mine better.

So, that was the starting point. To Be Continued ...

Editing and Proofreading

I had a question from a reader about the editing/proofing process. A lot of how this works depends on the publisher, the editor, the book, and how much time there is before publication. I'm sure there are rush jobs with big-name authors where they know the book will sell well anyway and they're losing money with each day it's not in print that have minimal editing -- just run that sucker through spell check and go. A smaller press with an editor who only does a few books a year may do a very detailed check every step of the way. I've had books where I didn't see anything from the editor from the time I turned in the manuscript to the time the book was in print, and I've had a book go through four rounds of edits with the editor, then copyedits, then proofing of the typeset pages.

A general standard seems to be that the editor does at least a line edit -- sometimes tightening pacing or revising a scene but not necessarily changing the story while also adjusting wording, as needed. The author gets to see these notes and is the one to actually make the edits based on the suggestions. The manuscript then goes to a copyeditor, who checks for grammar, spelling, punctuation, continuity, house style (if there's more than one right way to do things, which right way does this publisher use?) and general flow (repeated words, clarity, etc.). The copyeditor also puts in the code for any type treatment like chapter beginnings, italics and special characters. The author gets to review these edits and accept them or argue with them. Sometimes the author may find another way to make the suggested correction. At this stage, the author can still make other changes that might come up. This is really the last phase where actual "writing" can happen. These changes are then incorporated, and the book is typeset. At that point, the book is proofread by a professional while the author also gets a copy to review. Here's where they check to make sure the copyedits were inserted properly without messing something else up (and if the edits were done by hand on hard copy, sometimes mistakes creep in because of handwriting issues). The proofreader also looks for awkward line breaks, bad hyphenation on line breaks, too many hyphenated line breaks in a row, "widow" or "orphan" lines (awkward paragraph breaks between pages), and this is one last check for stuff like grammar and spelling. Sometimes there are things that only come up once the book is typeset -- like there might be a small, common, "invisible" word used twice in a paragraph, which usually wouldn't be noticed except when the words line up perfectly two lines in a row in the typeset version. The author may or may not see what the proofreader does at this point, and the author is strongly discouraged from changing anything that's not an actual error (no rewriting). Then there may be one more check to make sure these edits don't mess up something else.

I find that seeing edits is very educational for me because it gives me something to look for in editing myself. One thing to look for is repeated words. I don't think it's necessarily a crime to use some words more than once in a paragraph or on a page, especially if they're smaller, common words and if writing around the use of that word would actually be more awkward and obvious than repeatedly using the word. One I've run into is "out" and "outside." There's not really another good way to talk about where the things happening on the other side of the wall are happening. You look out the window or go out the door to see what's happening outside when you hear noise coming from outside. Still, it's worth pausing to think about in case there is a way to reword it.

Then there are your personal pet phrases or words. Sometimes they're unique to the particular book because of the situation, relationships or voice of your narrator and sometimes they're your own favorites. Look for words that seem to come up a lot, then do a search for them and see if you can find other ways to express those thoughts. There may be things that need to repeat -- a character's catchphrase, for instance -- but you still don't want to overdo it to the point that it gets annoying. I keep a list of words I tend to overuse so that I'm more conscious of them in the future and know to search for them.

Make sure the word you're using means what you think it means -- if you're at all unsure and are using a word that you've seen used elsewhere and have figured it out in context, look it up. Also look for typos that make words -- I seem to have a bad habit of typing "thing" when I mean "think," and vice versa, and spellcheck will never catch that.

I still think that reading a manuscript out loud is one of the best ways to catch a lot of these things -- you'll find awkward phrasing, and it will be more obvious that you've repeated words when you actually hear them out loud. That's also given me some of the reasons I've argued with an editor because the way they change it doesn't fit the way it should sound when read aloud and it doesn't fit the character's voice.

And you have to get used to the idea that no matter how precise you think you are, no matter how careful you are in editing your own work, someone will find an error. Even after multiple levels of other people have gone over it, a new person looking at it will still find errors. And after all this editing and proofreading, there will probably still be an error or two in the finished book (that some reader will kindly e-mail the author about). This is a business where perfectionism helps, but it will also drive you insane.