Zen Master: Blog

My latest, a novel set in Lazlo Zalezac's shared universe "Damsels in Distress", is beginning to come back from the proofreaders. Apparently it isn't as perfect as I thought. All the fixes are easy, though. Grammar, spelling, etc. I know, I'm tempting the fates by saying that. Still, I will start posting it as soon as I've heard from the last one.
-ZM

The Management has posted my essay "Why We Proofread Our Work" on the authors' resource page, at the very bottom with all the other how-to essays. Awesome!

-ZM

I have submitted a new essay "Why We Proofread" for posting here. It isn't a story. It actually belongs on the list of author's resources but I don't know how to post things there. Also, it is listed as "true story" for both genre and codes because the submission wizard insists that you select at least one.
Oh, and it probably needs a proofreader. None of my normal proofreaders wanted to touch this one, for some reason.

-ZM

Stevew - You have two blog entries asking for help. You have this site's 'internal email' turned off in your account, so we can't email you. As part of that, we can't reply to your blog posts, either.
Therefore, your first step should be to enable email and blog replies. After that, anyone who wants to help you will be able to contact you.
Failing that, you could put a 'real' email address out for others to use, but I recommend not as you would probably get a lot of spam.

-ZM

I try to privately email other authors to let them know that the lack of a proofreader is obvious, but sometimes I can't find a way to do that. We all need proofreaders. We have what we want to write in our minds, and we type what we're thinking. We cannot proofread our own work, as our minds know what words are supposed to be there and we don't notice the mistake. It takes a separate person, reading someone else's work, to notice things that have gone awry.
A spell-checker program will only point out things that aren't correctly-spelled words. The program has no way to know that the correctly-spelled word used isn't the CORRECT word. Only a human reader will realize that there's something wrong.

-ZM