Editing Lessons

Despite working dilligently on a writing project, I went through some extremely hard knocks. I’d like to share the lessons I took away from it, and maybe it might be of use to you, and maybe it won’t.

1. If you think you’ve got the final draft, you don’t. Have someone else look at it. Sometimes you need another set of eyes despite yours being the sharpest eyes you know. If you want me to have a look-see at your adventure module or character archetype, please ask, I’ll do it for free.
2. Make sure your PDF’s compile the way you think they will. Don’t trust them just because they worked the last ten times.
3. After all reviews of the final draft are done, go away for a bit, do something else unrelated, and then view it a final time. It’s amazing what you’ll notice when you plunged a toilet, mopped some floors, and folded some laundry.

So what is the source of this lesson? I thought I had a completed final draft of a supplement for Pits & Perils. I submitted it, and instantly, no clue why, I saw I made a grammatical mistake. So I edited it, recompiled the PDF, and submitted, but I didn’t check to see the PDF was correct. So it was just one paragraph of text that I had accidentally selected.

So I recompiled it and submitted a final attempt. I’m so upset with myself. I am the most detail oriented, anal retentive person I’ve ever known, and I blew it at something I care very much about.

I spend most of my life checking and double checking, the things I do. I have a job working at a major pharmacy where I check and double check and triple check my work. 99% of the time it’s completely unnecessary. But the 1% of the time I need it, usually is the time when I didn’t recheck my work. And so it looks like I don’t check my work. There’s never a record of your successes, just your failures. It’s aggravating to live life with so little confidence that you have to make sure every I is dotted, every T is crossed, and then recheck it repeatedly.

The failures proves my anal retentive procedures are necessary, even though they are usually only necessary when I failed to do them! So I’m at my best when I’m at my worst, if you take my meaning. When I trust myself the least is when I do the best I can do and that is opposite of how most people operate. I recently took a test at work to advance to the next level of the job. I went in ready to fail at it, and I scored 100%. I’m quite certain if I were confident I would have failed it. Not because confidence equals failure, but because if I were confident it meant I didn’t check my work.

I hope any of the above items are helpful to you in your writing and gaming endeavors.