Anal.

Heheh. Bet that got your attention...

So, I re-read my book on kindle yesterday. It's been a couple of weeks now since I put it up, and I knew everything would be fine with it, because hell, I'm a WRITER, darling, and my husband is also a really nifty writer (and also part of the global Grammar Police Force), and my close friends are ... well, you get the idea. I've also got a great little team of beta writers, and a brilliant author-friend of mine did a nuclear job of formatting the document for kindle. And did I mention my reviewers regularly terrify me with the amount of detail and attention they put into a report?

But my kindle was sitting there, unused, and anyway, I needed to read a few chapters just to get back into Finn's speech patterns. And there it was. Back in November, I *know* I typed '...room for fear...' as Finn and Lilith discovered a creative method for stress-release. I carry my own GPF card and polish my badge with pride, dagnabbit. How could I type anything else? I mean, nothing else would make sense, for a start. Yet there it was: '...fear for fear...'. I think I might have screamed. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? How many times have I read, re-read, re-re-read my own work? Did a rogue chimp burst in and add to my text whilst I was making a cup of tea?

Ah well, I can only apologise (and edit. Again. It makes sense now...), and marvel at how the eye and brain can make assumptions based on the surrounding text. I'm also pretty glad that I appear to be the first one to spot it, or at least raise it as an issue.

Is it worth being this anal about my book? The answer can only be 'yes' - I'm fortunate that this format allows me to tweak as necessary - although I need to resist the temptation to endlessly rewrite huge chunks, because the story needs to be finished; it is as it is, as far as I'm concerned - and people have paid to read something that should be as good as I can possibly make it.

But if you spot anything else, blame the chimp, would you?