Five for Friday

My goal is to post more often, and I thought of posting earlier in the week, but of course, you can see how THAT went...so now that it has been a full week, I'm doing it first thing in the morning to be sure it gets done.

1. I didn't get to play, but I rode around with my husband and six-year old grandson in a Father's Day golf tournament last Saturday. O really enjoyed it and they came in third (out of four). He was the youngest kid there by four years. Now I am waiting for them to have a adult-kid tournament I can play in. O probably won't be as happy with that, though, because I won't get as many pars as his papa and he did.
2. I have decided to try a new way (for me) of revising. I have been having trouble jumping from my first draft and finding what I want, then putting it into my revision draft, so I shrunk the whole story, put it into columns, and now will cut it apart and rearrange it. I have read about this several times, but most recently on Kate Messner's blog.

3. I have been busy with marketing activities this week, too. Had good news from the local paper and a national magazine, who are going to do reviews of KNOWING JOSEPH between now and September. Also I have followed up on a few suggestions that Cynthia Lord has given me about bookstores that deal with only books about special needs, among other things. Thanks, Cindy. In addition, I have connected to Joanna Keating-Velasco and Julie Shore to discuss marketing strategies for books about autism...both of them have excellent books about autism that have come out recently.

4. There are a couple of rhyming poetry contests going on right now...one over at Dori Chaconis's blog about cheese, and another at Kay Pluta's blog about rabbits. Would LOVE the prizes of both, but first I need to write the poems.

5. Just found out that my daughter-in-law and two grandkids will be coming next Thursday for a week. They are here for the summer from Germany, but spending most of their time in Georgia...my son could not make the trip...he is in Iraq.

Hope you all have a good week.

Editing...and editing again

Moving right along here...grandkids were in school all day, so had time to spend on the computer. I've already gone through my KNOWING JOSEPH MS once and made some corrections...nothing major--mostly commas and such. Then I decided I should go through it again, so that is what I am working on now.

It's amazing on how easy it is to miss something when reading the same thing for the umteenth time. This time I found a missing period at the end of a sentence. I wonder how many times I have proof-read that MS and missed it. Have found many more things the second time, too. Whenever I am reading a book, I tend to find one or two errors in it, and wonder how people can publish books with such obvious errors...now I know.

Of course, there are whole sections of the book I would like to change/improve, but I guess we are beyond that now. I wonder...when we write, are we EVER finished with revisions?

Everything else is going along relatively smoothly...it was an 'at home' day today because we were waiting for the movers to come and get some of the stuff that needs to be shipped to Germany first (my son is in the military), and then shopping for birthday cake and a few other incidentals for Matthew's birthday, then off to Karate for Jay and Speech for Matthew. Only a couple of meltdowns, which we all survived.

Tomorrow is a golf day again...and hopefully the end of the editing for the second time.