Recently a reader reported this “distracting issue” in A BRIDE FOR MARCUS”. (see on the right.)

It was a missing full stop (or period if you’re American.)

Okay it was a pretty small error, but a couple of readers had contacted me saying they’d spotted a few mistakes in that book (though they didn’t say what), so I went through the manuscript again, and found a couple more small mistakes. I fixed them and then reloaded the e-book. (I can’t change anything on the print version.) But it was easier to spot the mistakes this time as it had been a long time since I’d reread A Bride for Marcus.

Copyediting is harder than many people think, especially for authors. There are two main types of editing — developmental editing, which is editing for plot, characters, story etc. The second type is copyediting,  which is editing for grammar and spelling, typos, missed words, characters whose eyes change color, and prose that’s awkward or confusing. (I blogged about editing before, if you’re interested.)

For me it’s the second type of editing that’s the hardest. My grammar is generally good, and so is my spelling (though I have to remember not to use Australian/English spelling for my books, since my main readership is in the USA. As well, my previous publisher was American, so I’m keeping the books consistent.)

But I’m a poor typist and I often make typos. Usually I spot them and correct them, but occasionally I’ll miss one or two. My trouble is, when I’ve finished writing a book, chances are I’ve also rewritten it or parts of it numerous times, and when it gets to that point, my brain sometimes reads what it thinks I’ve written, rather than what I’ve actually typed. Of course I’ll do a spell check. And Word flags words it thinks are wrong — BUT their suggestions are often wrong , sometimes badly wrong. 

When I was traditionally published, my books passed through the eyes of an editor, a copyeditor (and then came back to me) and then a proofreader. Even so, mistakes still slipped through. The most memorable was with  The Scoundrel’s Daughter. In it, I accidentally gave the Scottish nanny three different Mc names. I missed them, my editor missed them, the copyeditor missed them, and the proofreader, in the absolute final read-through, only picked up one of the three different names. 
Luckily I’d sent the manuscript to my friend Mary Jo Putney who spotted the different names and told me, just in time for me to notify my editor — the book was to go to print the very next day!

For my self-published books, I’ve employed two different so-called copyeditors, but neither one did a good job. One even did a bad job, inserting words that were plain wrong without telling me! So I’ve had to do most of the copyediting myself, with the assistance of some friends who offered to read the books and pointed out the odd mistake — thank goodness. 

I used to run every manuscript through a voice program, which read it back to me. That’s a great editing tool, and picks up all kinds of mistakes as well as word repetition and awkward phrasing. Unfortunately in the last update, the program now only reads back a paragraph at a time, which made it impossible. So now I’m on a search for a better voice program.

So while I do my very best to make my books error free, I hope you’ll forgive any small ones, or at least let me know so I can fix the e-books.

Sorry about the lack of email last week. One only goes out if I add new material to the blog, but I came home from the Darwin Conference carrying some nasty tropical bug, which has laid me low for just over a week. But I’m on the mend now, so on to blogging as usual.

To start with I’ll share a few photos from the Romance Writers of Australia Conference, which this year was in Darwin. Darwin is in the far north of Australia, in the region known as “the top end.” The conference organizers chose the theme of  “Queens of the Desert” — which was a bit strange as the city is a tropical one, and surrounded by water. Here’s a photo from the plane as we arrived. I guess the organizers didn’t know their geography very well. <g>

As usual the conference kicked off on the Friday night with a costume cocktail party — the theme was, you guessed it, “Queens of the Desert.” The range of costumes was quite wide, and the interpretation of “queen” also varied a great deal.

I think the organizers were hoping for some”Priscilla Queen of the Desert” look-alikes, but I didn’t see many of those at all — just one, really — Melanie Milburne’s husband who always joins in the fun.<g>

There were a few Cleopatras.

And then there were costumes that were wide open to interpretation.  AmyAndrews glittered beautifully in her sparkly cloak.

Ally Blake (standing below with Annie Seaton) looked like a Thai Queen perhaps.

Savannah Blaze was, of course the Queen of Hearts.

I missed the winner of the costume of the night, but this group won the group prize. In case you don’t know Darwin is famous for crocodiles.

And finally, here am I, with author friend Penne Janu . My costume was just as obscure as some others, but there was reason to my choice: I was dressed as an Afghan Cameleer Queen of the Desert.

Quick history lesson. Did you know that Afghan cameleers (and camels) were brought to Australia from the 1830s onward to help explore and navigate Australia’s harsh desert interior. They they made a huge difference to opening up the interior of Australia to European settlement and breaking down the isolation of the outback.

They carried goods and helped build major projects like the Overland Telegraph Line, and the Transcontinental Railway — which these days is called The Ghan, (short for Afghan.) They also  established some of Australia’s first mosques, including structures in Adelaide, Perth, and Broken Hill. As they travelled they planted the stones of the dates they ate, and the palms that grew there in the desert still flourish today.  They also released some of the camels that then went wild, and years later Australia was exporting the pure-bred descendants  of these animals to various Arabian countries. Very good stock, apparently. We owe those Afghans a lot.

I’m not sure how many female cameleers there were (if any) but I wanted to honor them.  And that dress I was wearing is one I bought back in the year dot, when I was a university student — and lo! it  fitted! Which pleased me greatly as I’ve been on a long slow weight-loss journey.

I’ll post more about the conference in the next week or so, but that’s all for this week. Thanks for your patience.

This is really only relevant to people who live in or near Sydney, or will be there in mid-November.

I’ve been invited to conduct a one-day, in-person workshop on “Writing Love and Sex in Fiction” for Writing NSW in Sydney in November.

More details here. https://writingnsw.org.au/whats-on/courses/writing-love-and-sex-in-fiction-3/

I’m looking forward to it. I really enjoy meeting other writers and talking craft-of-writing.