Made a mistake

Made a mistake and kissed a snake …

I’m totally dating myself here but … do you remember singing that verse when you were skipping rope in recess at elementary school? Remember those days before phones where we had to jump over a plastic line to entertain ourselves? We’d swing the thing progressively faster until it whipped to a stop on our lower legs.

With any luck, we weren’t wearing shorts that day.

Well, my friends, I made a mistake, and found it late. I was uploading ‘Jewels’ to a new print on demand service (did you know that some people don’t like buying from Amazon?!) and there it was on page—

Never mind what page it’s on. If you’ve read the book and didn’t see it, then you don’t need to worry about it. In fact, ignore this section all together. Fast forward to the end of this email.

But if you read the book and did see it, then:

Why didn’t you tell me?

I found The Mistake as I was flipping through my ‘e-proof’ before I approved it. I’ve flipped through about five different e-proofs for the exact same document to date. I’ve read my book a million times. I had a hard copy proofed before I published and yet there was THE MISTAKE laughing at me and making a face.

Rude.

I knew there was a good chance that the book would have a mistake, maybe two. Someone wrote to me to tell me that they’d found some, though they hadn’t recorded them, so I couldn’t immediately repair the damage. I figured they’d appear over time and that they were probably itty bitty, barely visible boo boos.

The one I found was pretty significant, in my humble opinion, and hugely embarrassing. A week later, I can still feel that red creeping into my face when I talk about it.

But ultimately … it is what it is (here is the part where you imagine seeing the shrug emoticon). I fixed the document, uploaded repaired versions everywhere I needed to, and carried on.

I really wish it was perfect. I did beat myself up a bit—“I should have read it one more time. I should have had another person read it. I should have been clear that when someone finds a mistake, they let me know and I can fix it right away.”

How many times are enough? How many eyes need to see it? How many readers notice these things?

I still don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I do know one thing—perfection paralyses me. It might paralyze you too. The only way I can counteract this tendency is to finish a project, perfect or not.

Done is better than perfect.

I saw that quote years ago and I have to remind myself of it frequently. The desire to do something perfectly stops me from doing many, many things.

Think of all the books I haven’t written for fear of them being imperfect. I started writing everyday when I was thirteen, but I just put out my first novel last fall. That’s a lot of books left unwritten over the years.

It’s a balance I’m working on. I require that my creations are ‘good’. Stories have to be written with care and proofed, but mistakes seem inevitable. Writers always joke that there are those errors that bypass every proofread.

At least I got one of them fixed.

Apologies, dear reader, for missing that error in the book. Consider it to be like an mis-stamped coin. There are a very limited number of books with that mistake in a tangible state. In fact, lucky you for having this piece of my history.

I guess my message to you (and what I’m trying to tell myself) is to cut yourself some slack. Create, even with their beautiful ‘mistakes’, and on to the next.