Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You

I have been working furiously on a new novel, The Breaker, which I hope to publish later this year.  Writing is an interesting, solitary career choice.  You can bounce story ideas off of others, but most of the work is done inside your own head, in which you question your character actions and the way the tale will progress.  Since the book is located in a place I have vacationed twice, I am paying attention to the geography of the area even though I already changed the location of one location, in a move to add more detail to the chapter in which the event occurs.  It is interesting to write about things empathetically when you have never experienced them in your own life.

Mistakes

I was nearly done editing my latest novel when I noticed that I’d written Chapter 4 twice.  I’d read through the entire manuscript twice, but it took until the very end for me to notice such a gaffe.  So now instead of twenty-eight chapters plus an epilogue, I have thirty chapters.  Ha-ha.  That was a minor mistake, and easily corrected, but life is full of mistakes both large and small.  Sometimes you break the bank, and other times a mistake is quickly forgotten.  You move on and you’re past it in five minutes.  Mistakes can change over time and become something good—and other times it literally takes years to recover from a seemingly-innocent miscalculation.  It can be difficult to tell the difference upon first glance, because so much of life is lived in shades of gray.