S.L.Luck

November 19, 2020

The release of Redeemer last week has taken me through so many emotions. As a first-timer, the experience is quite wild. One minute you’re breathing into a paper bag because things don’t go as expected. Then you’re blasting your release everywhere you can because you have to roll with the situation. Then you’re catastrophizing the reception when you find at least 3 (My God, 3!) errors post-print and end up insomniac, over-thinking, beside your snoring husband.

Writing is therapeutic for me, so here I am, after another terrible sleep, releasing my demons.

I’m part of a 10,000-strong author’s community where we trade everything from advice to encouragement to ideas on plot and design. So I knew that mistakes would be inevitable. While this is more prevalent with self-published work, traditionally published work is absolutely not immune, even with the power behind them. Redeemer had been edited many times. It had many sets of eyes on it, with many different perspectives. And even with the eyes and even with three different writing programs and grammar checkers … I missed an “L”. (Gasp! Say it isn’t so!) I won’t tell you where this is or which word it’s in, and it is by no means the smallest mistake in the book (there is another one where I wrote the same thing twice in the same sentence), but it’s that tiny little L that made me question everything. The pitch-forked guy on my shoulder had me questioning why I ever began writing in the first place. I regretted releasing the book. I regretted telling people about the book. I regretted even starting the book. All over a little L.

While I know this is a little ridiculous, I also know that moments like these are part of the learning experience and that the newbie like me has to figure out how to move on. I am. But with Band-Aids. Overall, Redeemer is selling incredibly well so far, so I have to just sit back and wait for the reviews.

On a brighter note, I’m almost a third into another novel. If all goes well, I’ll be done writing it by March. Since it will be the second novel I’ll publish, I’m sure the process will go much more smoothly. This time, I should be able to actually get a proof copy in time and, fingers-crossed, Amazon won’t release it before I’m ready.

Stay tuned, Dear Readers. (And please ignore the L’s.)