The production of a final manuscript is a considerable undertaking. In addition to a great story and interesting characters, you also apparently need proper spelling, punctuation and grammar. Fortunately, I have smart, talented people to help me with such things.
One of those amazing individuals is my very own mother. She is an English teacher and a talenteded proofreader. She is also somewhat old fashioned and insisted on doing her work with pen and paper.
The edit went very quickly. She tore through the mine field of my grammatical misadventures in no time and packed up the draft to send overnight via USPS. I set aside the weekend to adopt the changes and waited anxiously for my package.
It didn’t come and day after day after day it persisted in not arriving. Weeks went by as I waited and work on the book ground to a halt, but finally, over 14 days after it was overnighted, it arrived.
Unfortunately, somewhere between Rochester, NY and Washington DC, the package had an encounter with a significant quantity of water. This water washed away nearly every not and correction my mother made. It was all gone other than a few notes like the one on the cover.
I’ll admit to being very discouraged for a week or so. It was like getting a flat tire two blocks from home, but in the end the delay helped me. I made some rewrites I wouldn’t have otherwise tackled and improved the book in the process. Now we are working on a new proof (electronically this time), and it will be better for it.