Two days ago, I finished the draft of my historical novel Nightingale.
I checked the document to see when I created it -- October 21, 2025. Ten weeks and 96,600 words later, I've got a complete story, about a man in the thirteenth century who unwittingly becomes involved in treachery and double-dealing between the kings of France and Scotland, ends up cornered into committing an act that leads to chaos, and undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone.
Oh, and there's a ghost and a curse and a guy who may or may not be an angel.
It was an interesting tale to tell, and for sure the fastest I've ever written a whole novel. I love the main character, Simon de Montbard, because he's complex and multi-layered, and also because he's a very unlikely hero. I'm actually sad to say goodbye to him.
I'm doubly sad, though, because this propels me into my second-least-favorite part of being a novelist, which is:
Editing.
My first-least-favorite, of course, is marketing. Most authors dislike it as well, but I have a special loathing for it, because I have a fundamental, reflexive hatred for self-promotion, coming from a childhood where I had beaten into me that Talking About Yourself Is Conceited And That's Bad. When I was little, any time I mentioned anything I had accomplished, or even was interested in, it was met with "No one wants to hear about that," with the result that even now I come close to being physiologically incapable of bringing up creative stuff I'm doing in conversation. (It's a little easier to write about it, obvs. But even the mild level of self-aggrandizement I'm doing here is kind of uncomfortable. Childhood trauma never quite goes away.)
This is why even doing stuff like posting a link on social media to my website or to one of my books on Amazon makes me immediately afterward run and hide under a blanket. Probably explaining why my sales figures are so low. It's hard to sell any books when I self-promote so seldom that it's met with "Oh, I didn't know you'd written a book!" when in fact I've written twenty-four of them.
Well, twenty-five, now.
In any case, now Nightingale goes into the editing stage of things, which is not anxiety-producing so much as it is tedious and a little maddening. As my friend, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite, put it, "Editing is difficult because it's so easy to see what you meant to write and not what you actually did write." I've had errors slip through multiple readings by multiple people -- not just simple typos or grammatical errors, but the bane of my existence, continuity errors:
Roses are red, Steve's eyes are blue
But you said they were brown back on page 52.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've caught stuff like a character opening a window that she just opened two pages earlier, or going down the stairs to the first floor when she started out in the basement. I sincerely hope I have caught all of those sorts of things, because nothing yanks a reader out of the world of the story quite as quickly as that "... wait, what?" response when there's a problem with continuity.
However, I did learn something yesterday that should be a comfort to my fellow writers who have been reading this while nodding their heads in sympathy; errors, all the way from typos to major plot snafus, aren't your fault. They're the fault of a demon named Titivillus who is in charge of making writers fuck things up. Then when they do, Titivillus keeps track of all the mistakes, and when it comes time for God to judge the writers' souls, he reads out all the errors they've made so the writers will end up in hell.
Apparently people back then honestly thought Titivillus was real. A fifteenth-century English devotional called Myroure of Oure Ladye has the lines, "I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyvyllus... I muste eche day ... brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes."
Judging by the spelling, it looks like Titivillus has already racked up a few points just on that passage alone.
I must say, though, the whole thing strikes me as unfair. If Titivillus is responsible for my errors, they're not really my fault. Maybe the logic is that I should have concentrated harder, and not listened to him whispering, "What you mean to write is 'The man pulled on his trousers, then slipped on his shit.'"
What amazes me is how tenacious some of these errors can be. As K. D. pointed out, our brains often see what we think is there and not what actually is there, with the result that we breeze right past goofs that you'd think would stand out like sore thumbs. It's why all writers need good editors; you're not going to catch everything, no matter how carefully you think you're reading. (And that's not even counting the fact that I seem to have a genetic condition that renders me incapable of using commas correctly.)
So now I need to go back through my own manuscript looking for faylynges and neglygences in syllables and wordes, before I turn it over to my actual editor, who no doubt will find plenty more. As hard as the writing process can sometimes be, at least it's creative, whereas editing seems to me to be more like doing the laundry. It's critical, and you can't get by without doing it, but hardly anyone would call it fun.
The whole thing reminds me of Dorothy Parker's quip. "If you have a young friend who wants to become a writer, the second best thing you can do for them is to give them a copy of Elements of Style. The first best, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're still happy."
Be that as it may, I still prefer editing over marketing. So I'll just end by saying "Please buy my books, there are links to some of them in the sidebar." Now y'all'll have to excuse me. I'll be hiding under a blanket.
