Everyone has this dream of being an author. And with self-publishing, it is easier than ever.

Well, that’s the story anyway.

Been working on the final cut for the physical book of Early ReTyrement. Hired Mercedes from WriteTheWriteStuff off Elance and she’s been a good sport, dealing with a maniac obsessive perfectionist. But that’s what writers are, right? When Hemingway couldn’t have it his way, he blew his brains out.

Been through this before. Back when eBooks published Fire and Bronze, they were supposed to (by contract) give me a final pass at the proofs. Well, they did. Kinda. They gave it to me on a Tuesday at lunch and needed it back by Thursday morning. Okay, so I just looked through it randomly and within a minute or two, found a typo. Right there in the middle of the book, all after friends and family and agents and editors had been over it. How could it be there? Was going to laugh it off and read for fifteen minutes and there was another one. Oh boy.

Told the boss I’d be off until Thursday and went home, reading the book non-stop in reverse chapter order (so I wouldn’t get caught up in the story). In the end, I found nineteen dingers, things I’d missed, things the editors added. Readers have since pointed out three more, but that’s okay. A total of twenty-two flaws would have been a disaster.

So here we go again with Early ReTyrement. Mercedes is doing the best she can and we’re slowly orbiting closer to a shared agreement of what’s done, but there are still dings and doings here and there. Last night I crawled through the book and noticed that somehow an indent had been lost (saw a short line and no indent for a new paragraph following). So I had to go back and look it over dead-slow, looking for flaws. Even found a grammatical and a spelling error (actually, a wrong word). She returned it to me today and I made another 2.5 hour pass, and found maybe six things that still needed fixing.

We’re closer.

I can only imagine that first author, looking down at the clay tablets comprising his epic, Gilgamesh, and seeing an incorrect cuneiform symbol in his fire-baked clay.

“Tiamat take me! It’s wrong! And the story is to be placed beneath Babylon’s walls this very night!”