Noble Pursuits: Re-edited!

Thirteen years ago, with my newborn son sleeping in his Moses basket beside me and my other children doing schoolwork, playing, or otherwise engaged in doing kid stuff.  I’d been working on my first book–Aggie’s Inheritance (Now Ready or Not)–and had a new idea.  I’d read something once.  I think it was a Rod and Staff book or booklet, and in it a widow said she had to really think and pray about whether or not she actually wanted to remarry because she knew it would change her relationship with the Lord.  She’d developed a very unique bond with the Lord and wondered  if marriage was worth that change.  I wondered what would happen if a single woman had a similar mindset.

And then I saw a woman coming onto a man so blatantly that I felt sorry for him.  I’d always seen it the other way around–men treating women like objects rather than people.  After that, I saw it again–and again.  It seemed that everywhere I turned, women had become the aggressor.  It still bothers me.

The two ideas merged and Grace and Nolan appeared on the scene. When it came time to publish my first book, I didn’t know if I wanted to go traditional with a publishing house, or independent in the print-on-demand route.  I decided to experiment with Noble Pursuits (Which I think was originally Graceful Measures).  I figured the subject matter (a woman choosing not to use her physics degree because she preferred to keep house for herself and, at one time, her father) meant it would have a limited market.  I followed all the advice I could find.

One piece of advice prevalent around the Internet at that time was to send the book to a dozen or so grammar-Nazis and ask them to proof it.  It made sense to me.  Send it out and even if eleven people miss something, the twelfth is sure to get it.  Yeah.  It failed.  Epically.  I think it actually made it worse.  And, I couldn’t see the errors before or after.  My brain sees what it thinks it wrote, not what my fingers actually typed it out. There’s a lot going on in my home.  At that time, I had ten people living here.  Sometimes, I actually typed what someone said rather than the next word in my thought.  And as wonderful as those proofers were, they didn’t catch it all.

And I didn’t know it.  UGH.  However, with the advent of my Kindle career, I saw what people said about the editing, and I went looking. *Gulp*  So, I passed it onto one of my favorite editors.  Christy took that book and went over every single word, helping me find missing words, missing or incorrect punctuation, head jumping–you name it.  But now… now it’s much better.  I’m sure I could do the story  better justice now, but it might not be the story it was supposed to be.  So, I’ll just be satisfied.