My daughter read my short story - the one I finished last Thursday and carefully proofread before submitting – and she found a typo. Just one. Problem is, it’s the fifth word of the story.  

… has a fool for an author. Isn’t that what they say?

On account of this I’m writing a second post today.

New story, written, finished, submitted. That’s SUB-MIT-TED, past tense. Gone, via e-mail to an editor. I swear, last night it looked perfect. Now, looking at it again I see three typos.

Instead of anyway, I have any way. Okay, that one’s no biggie.

Instead of disassemble, I have dissemble. And THAT is a totally different word.

Instead of he reviewed these in his mind, I have he reviewed in his mind these.  That one comes from fooling around with the sentence a bit too much, but it sounds bad. Really bad.

That’s three in a story of barely over 4000 words. If I find another, I may have to poke out my eyes!

Is it enough for an editor to reject a story, do you think?

Editing and proofreading your own work can be hard. If you’re like me, then you see your words on the screen or on paper the way you intended to write them, and you can’t easily see the mistakes. Which means you can’t fix them.

What can be even harder is judging the literary merits of the story. Is is interesting, suspenseful, engaging? Is it original? Does it have any discernible theme? Do the characters have depth? And so on and so on. In other words, is the story any GOOD?

I usually don’t know. And where to submit the work? It can feel like throwing darts in a dark room.