How not to troll yourself

 

It's become more difficult than ever to avoid nastiness online. Exposing yourself by way of literature seems to bring out very particular types who are incredibly critical of books and will actively post errors from well known books. Errors are more prevalent than ever given the comparatively breakneck speed books are published now. Yet even in the days of relatively meticulous editing and copy editing, and proofing, continuity errors still appeared. I'm usually fairly meticulous about these little things, but I'm sure I've likely had some before.

I found a less plausible aspect in my last book, and I wasn't meticulous about the chronology of events. While I made references to certain points in history, and mentioned some dates, I was rather vague about when certain events occurred, so the overall sequence of events might not seem logical, and allusions to conversations between two people wouldn't have been highly unlikely due to ages and events mentioned. It's not been recognised thus far, but to me now, it's very glaring, and I'm regretting not making small amendments to aspects I thought were perfectly reasonable all along. I was hoping it was least accurate in terms of spelling and grammar, that I didn't misspell or transpose or misspell character names. But my history and general sequence of events was probably messier than I'd first believed.

I've been online and interestingly discovered Hemingway and Austin were notoriously bad spellers. I liked Hemingway's rock-star attitude when his editors requested he take care of his spelling, and he abruptly, (probably drunkenly, who knows) told them that was their job. I'd never be as mean, I'd certainly lift my game. Self-publishing has forced me to do this where I was very casual about my writing in the past. Putting something to print should take time, but every second a book is in pre-production, it's a second the publisher isn't earning money. The internet turned all the processes of this industry up to ten times the speed of the past. The adage of wanting something "yesterday" is truer than ever. So we've sacrificed the craft for the sake of the coffers.

But the trolls are still waiting to pounce on any error you make online, and even more so in print. So if it's important to you, if you had it drilled into you your work should be polished to perfection before it even hits a publisher's desk, but you're seeing more evidence of all the stop signs being ignored on the road to print, it's hard to reconcile your inner troll. Some can just be happy with their success, but for others, perfectionists especially, they still strive to make their work as polished as possible and won't let themselves off the hook as quickly as their fans have.

I've been told my prose is pretty well perfect, that my self editing was actually quite impressive, but I won't rest on my laurels. Especially when own inner troll will just get on my back if I make another less than perfect piece.