The dreaded Typo Virus.

What is it with those suckers? I can honestly say I’ve never worked as hard on a book as I did No Surrender. I wrote, rewrote, scrapped, reinvented, revised, started all over again, worked and reworked on that book. I honestly don’t think I could tell you how many times I’ve read it, and I thought it was pretty clean.

There was an element to the storyline that didn’t work for my editor and rather than waste her time editing scenes we both knew would be changed, I spent the last several days tweaking them. Then, to check the flow and see how those changes rippled through other scenes, I decided to reread the entire manuscript before sending it. The iPod Touch is a wonderful thing because, with Stanza, I can easily read the manuscript as an ebook (with my reader-brain). I had a legal pad at hand and when I found a typo, I’d jot the few words surrounding the typo on the paper (to facilitate searching the Word doc) and then the correction. (You can also use the bookmark feature to mark a typo, but the paper was easier this time.)

I filled an entire page of the legal pad with typos and spilled over a few lines onto a second.

I have no idea where they came from. I think if there’s even one typo left unfound, it infects the entire document and in the time it took to get from my outbox to my editor’s inbox, the virus spread.

It’s the only explanation.

And real quick: I finally got around to starting a family blog dedicated to four-wheeling: http://atvnnh.wordpress.com (my license plate is ATVN-NH). If I’ve got a cool picture or story, I’ll still share it here, but the ATV blog’s now separate. I’ll probably drop a note in my blog entries here if I think something there might be interesting, and there’s a link to it at the top of my sidebar.