How Can It Be?

I have somewhat chronicled writing my book from beginning to end. Several months ago, a friend edited it, and it was much improved after she finished. She made many corrections, and I thought I was good to go. As I began to read it, however, I found a number of mistakes that she didn't catch. I fixed those, and then decided to re-read the book again. The second time through, I found an equal number of corrections. Some of them were simply re-wordings, but many were a missing word, a bad tense . . . but I knew I found them all.

Fast forward several weeks. I received the first draft of the book two weeks ago. I almost didn't read the whole thing, but decided I had better. Man, oh man. How did I miss those corrections? In several cases, the word "a" was missing; or the letter s was missing; or a tense was messed up. Again, I reworded a few things, but the picture below shows all of the post-it notes I used to mark where a correction was to be.

I feel sorry for Jim at Mennonite Press . . . he has to make all of the corrections, and then I have to check them again. Seems like a never-ending process, but I want the book as perfect as it can be! Maybe this will be done by Christmas . . . ha, ha! It had better be done by mid-October! But at the rate I am going, who knows?