Dumbest Mistake of the Week Award

Yep, that's right, I won it...I am officially an idiot this week :) I was buzzing right along this week, making what I hope are the final round of major edits in my novel. Aside from formalizing the tone of the dialogue I also changed the background of my main character, a change that ended up being a lot more intensive than I realized since every time my character mentioned anything involving her past, I had to change it. Well, I was feeling pretty proud of myself having gotten through 130 pages of my 317 page manuscript in just 2 days.

I went to bed, tossed and turned as I usually do since my brain really takes off as soon as I try to sleep, and I finally figured out what was niggling at the back of my subconscious. While doing this new round of edits, I hadn't come across any of the new scenes from the last round of edits. How I missed this at the time, I have no idea, because the first three chapters of my book were pretty much entirely rewritten - but this is where the idiotic part comes in.

I got back up, (it was now 1am), turned the computer on, searched through my files....and figured out that I do, indeed, deserve the Dumbest Mistake of the Week Award. I had spent the last several days editing THE WRONG FILE!!!! Explaining how this happened would take longer than I have patience for at the moment :) Suffice it to say, many writers, myself included, keep a copy of every version of their manuscript that ever comes into existence. My mistake was naming two of them "Final Version." Although I thought I was safe as I have changed the name of my novel from The Courtland Necklace to Treasured Lies. Yeah...not so much :)

Nope, I opened The Courtland Necklace version (a file I haven't touched in months) and had been happily editing away, while the actual Final Version of Treasured Lies sat alone and unrevised. Now I get to go through and compare both copies (even with the help of the handy Merge tool in Word, this is going to take days) while I make sure that the correct edits are being left and the incorrect are being deleted so I end up with the version I want. :)

Thank you, thank you *she takes a bow*

Stay tuned next week....I'm sure I can top myself ;-)