Sunday, January 20, 2019

Learn, live, learn more

January 20, 2019


The new year is off to a...

The new year has officially begun. Yippe-ki-ay. I've yet to have any fun in 2019, and I'm not very happy about that. Between work and doing the caregiver act, I've not had time. To top it off, I settled down to do some reading one chilly night, and finding nothing new that struck my fancy, I reread one of my own works. Big mistake. Huge. 

Apparently, I'm a lot pickier now than I used to be. Or maybe it's that I've learned a lot. I suppose it doesn't matter. After finding a glaring mistake, I knew I had to rework the manuscript and upload a corrected version. It looks like 2019 will be the year of Grammarly.  

I've used the free version for some time. An email came offering a substantially reduced rate for one year, and I took the Pro version. The first manuscript I ran through was Double Deuce. I paid sixty percent of the sales to a publisher to have that book "professionally" edited. Grammarly Pro found one hundred fifty-six critical issues. That's 156 for those of you who love numerals. 

I didn't love it at all. I gave up several thousand dollars to the humans, and artificial intelligence outdid them all. It doesn't make me happy to think about that.

What does make me happy is the chance to go through the old stories and update them. I'm not sure it matters to anyone else, but it matters to me. It'll be especially nice to have the current WIP be neat and tidy from the start. 

That's the thing about writing. It's a constant learning experience. It's a profession where the writer continually strives for improvement. My motto, if I have one, is "learn something new every day."

In the Year of our Lord Two Thousand Nineteen, it may be "improve something every day." I can live with that.  

KC Kendricks
Life through the eyes of Greenbrier Smokey Deuce: deucesday.blogspot.com


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