Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Orcs? (because I forgot)

A few months ago I had a bit of an author’s nightmare. I lost a manuscript. It wasn’t just a first draft, either. It was the full shebang… a completely edited version of a story I really love. To make matters worse, it turns out I had been sending the first draft manuscript to publishers. An absolute rookie error and entirely my own fault.

Still, I couldn’t figure out where I had gone wrong. I have a lot of files and I am (usually) meticulous about saving everything. I even send emails to myself every 5k words after I hit the 50k mark. So, where the hell was this book?

I only noticed my error after a publisher sent me a (lovely) rejection letter. I had decided they were going to be my last shot at traditional publication for this story and I was really hopeful… because they were freaking awesome and I’m a daydreaming romantic. They were based in the north of England so they’d get all my jokes, they had some really great authors, they seemed totally involved in every stage of the process, and their covers were pretty bloody good. I was excited about the prospect of potentially working with them. When they opened for submissions, I sent the first 10k words, which is standard, and made sure it was as polished as polished could be. And I was absolutely thrilled when they sent a message back a few weeks later saying they loved it and wanted to read the full manuscript.

A full request is a huge deal for a little indie author like me. I was chuffed to bits.

I checked the full manuscript and sent it away and then tried not to get too excited every time my phone buzzed for the next few months.

Eventually, the rejection came. They were lovely. Genuinely lovely. It was clearly a personal email and not a form rejection, so I took the hit and chalked it up to one more nail on the wall (that’s a reference for the Stephen King fans). But I was still pretty excited for this story so decided I’d read it through again with fresh eyes and see what needed to be done for potential self-publication.

And that’s when I noticed the errors. Everything after the 10k word mark hadn’t been touched. When I ‘checked the manuscript’ I had clearly just glanced over the first few chapters. Yep, it was polished. Yep, I remember making that change. Happy days. Send it off, Alex!

It was pretty bad, hey. Some really basic issues. And not just line edits but content edits as well. I found myself making changes I was certain I’d already made. I began to doubt myself, and genuinely got pretty wound up about the whole thing. It just kept happening. I would make changes that I knew I’d made before, so I spent hours looking through my files for the ‘real’ document. To my distress, I couldn’t find it anywhere and seriously began to doubt myself.

Today, I found it.

I got the rejection about two months ago. I have spent the last two months editing the story (again). Today, I finished my edits on Word.

Now, I have a bit of process when it comes to self-publication. I use a program called Reedsy to typeset my manuscripts. I do a few versions, because I like to make my book look like a book and then do another round of edits. I find I can pick errors more easily when it is typeset like a novel. If I have the means, I’ll even print it out. So, today I uploaded Orcs to Reedsy in order to send it to my Kindle. Something I had already done… 6 months ago!

It was right there. Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Orcs? Right there on Reedsy. That’s where I edited it last. And then I set it to download as a Word document so I could reformat it and send it off to publishers. Apparently, however, I had some sort of total brain fart and just completely forgot.

I wish I could contact the publisher and explain but that would be pretty lame. “Hey, remember that story you rejected, well I accidentally sent the wrong version, would you mind having another look?” I’m a high school teacher. I know that excuse. I also know exactly how it would be received.

To say I’m gutted is an understatement, and look, I know they might have rejected the story anyway, but I didn’t give myself the best chance and that really pisses me off.

But at least you know that if I ever do self-publish this story, it will be edited to within an inch of its life (or, chances are, be the wrong bloody story!)

Thanks for reading. I figured I’d write one last post about Orcs before the whole Saint and the Shadowman thing kicks off. That one has a publisher and is due for release next month – the 22nd of July. Stay tuned for ghost post spam!

Cheers,

Al (that’s short for Alex, not Artificial Intelligence)

The art work for this post is from a story called The Three Fingered Ogre as part of Zero, Ghost Detective. It was written by Toni Blum. Pen and Ink by Dan Zolnerowich (signed Arthur Hamon Doyle). It was published in Feature Comics 32, May 1940 and is accessible here https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=74665