[EllenShaw]

I like to think that my stories are well crafted (heck, I spend enough time on some of them) but it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I read through them before posting, I always notice something wrong when I read them again a few weeks or months later when it’s too late to edit them.

That might sound a little egotistical but I write my stories for my own pleasure and I enjoy reading them as much as anyone does. Also, as my regular readers know, I’m a bit obsessed with chronological and consistency, so I often reread old stories when I’m working on new ones to make sure there are no discrepancies between them.

The errors I notice are stupid little things. A wrong word here, a wrong tense there, the same descriptive word or phrase used twice in consecutive sentences. To give an example I’ve just been rereading “New Blood”, which I originally posted 8 months ago, and I noticed that, near the end, Rylie is “…stating slightly self-consciously down at her sweaty tits” when she’s being introduced to me. She’s not “stating” of course, she’s “staring”.

Nits for sure and most people probably won’t notice them - but, being a bit of a perfectionist, it annoys me  . We all tend to read what we think should be there rather than what is there - which is why I miss them before posting. When you’ve read something 20 times, particularly something you wrote yourself, you just don’t see the errors. Read the same thing six months later with fresh eyes and they’re glaring obvious.

I think what I need is an editor. Someone with a good knowledge of written English to proofread my stories before I post them. Not so much to comment on the plots, my writing style or the descriptive elements (although I’m open to suggestions and constructive criticism) but more to spot those silly little typos and repeated phrases before I post the stories. 

So if you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when they see silly typos and repetitive phrases and you’d like to get a preview of the next Ellen Shaw story before it’s posted, get in touch and maybe we can work something out. Just bear in mind that most of my stories run to 10,000 words and some are a lot longer .

Ellen x

P.S. Please remember that I write in British English - I don’t want an editor who Americanises everything 

[Dradis]

After experiencing the same problem countless times with my own works, the solution I've implemented is to add a final rewrite to my process that's 100% focused on proofreading.  I open the last draft on one side, and then I read off of it to recreate it word for word in a brand new document that's next to it.  If there are any word or character count discrepancies in any given paragraph, it'll clue me in that I need to double check my work.

Doing it this way is super tedious, but I find it uncovers a lot of the sloppiness that seeped in when I was focused more on developing the story creatively.  Reviewing the work as a large bloc also helps for identifying repetitious turns of phrases that occurred from writing piecemeal.

[EllenShaw]

I have tried something like that myself, not typing it in again word by word but dissecting it into paragraphs and reading each one in isolation, but I find that I’m still missing things. I think if I typed it in again the temptation to change things would be too strong and I’d just introduce new errors.

Based on my own experience I think what I probably need to do is finish the story and then put it away for a few months, work on some other stories, and then come back to it with fresh eyes to give it a final polish.

The only problem with that is that I set myself some goals for completing my “life sequence” and I’m currently about 6 months behind. Putting the stores on ice for another three months will definitely frustrate me, but it might be my best option.

[MikeHales67]

The leaving it for a bit method works wonders.
I get Office365 as part of mu dayjob and that's pretty good, but I've just started using a program called "Grammerly" which is free and does seems to support BRITISH English (yes I share your pain on that), I was impressed with the results

There's a good list here :
https://themeisle.com/blog/best-grammar-checker-free/#gref

[bosom-buddy]

Dear Ellen,

It would be a pleasure to check your manuscripts and edit them where necessary. I'm born and bred in Britain so should be able to spot an error accurately. If you've got a lengthy manuscript that needs checking I'm off to Majorca for two weeks tomorrow so will have plenty of time to do so.

As ever,

BB

[CoffeeMug]

*Americanizes

[EllenShaw]

Thank you all for your comments and thank you bosom-buddy for offering to help. For now I’m going to try the “park it and re-read it” approach. If I’m still unhappy I might take you up on your kind offer.

[MikeHales67]

Inspired by you I setup the Editor function on Word 365 which has some good  proofreading tools. That combined with forget-about and reread produces some really good results. Although humbling, I am constantly reminded of how incapable of writing English sentences.

If you don't have access to Word 365 you could try Libreoffice, which is an open source version of Office and is very good and FREE. It also has proofreading functions which I'm going to play with next week.