Free For Nothing

Gots another free story for you. Had one up yesterday for Sample Sunday and there's one up today at Dark Valentine Magazine. Called "Dry As Dust", it's a creepy one.

I'm also guest ranting… er, posting on Karen Syed's Life As A Publisher. The topic is bad literary fiction, but it goes for bad fiction of all sorts and styles, as well.

And another thing: I was doing my rainbow edits–where one highlights problem words and then goes through and rewrites to eliminate them where one can–and came across some places in which I left out an open quote or close quote. More important was the place in which I had left out a big chunk of text. Yes.

This was a book WHICH HAD BEEN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED. I took the manuscript I sent to Echelon from the one sent to me as published by a previous publisher. Looks like SOMEONE didn't look at her proofs very carefully before. Fortunately, I had backup files so old they're on little old floppy disks in txt format, so I was able to recover the lost bit.

When you get your proofs, read them. Carefully. It isn't that you don't trust your editor or typesetter. It's that the quality of the proof you turn in as ready to go is YOUR responsibility. Don't embarrass yourself the way I did.

WRITING PROMPT: If you have a finished story, read it again as if someone else had written it.

MA