Be Awesome.

In my next book in the series I have one of my characters telling Sarah something like, "Of course the whole universe is conspired against you, it was designed to test you to the core to see what you are made of. While others may try to hide from this testing, you must embrace it and let it stretch you in ways you didn't know you could grow."

It certainly feels like whole universe is conspired against me at times, or at least the English language. I tried to think of a conspiracy between Noah Webster and Mark Twain that would explain why English is so complicated for me, but Webster studied 26 languages in an effort to make American English more uniform and straight forward. That was a lot of effort to try to better teach American children how to read and write.

However, with my novel and the roughly 650,000 symbols (letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) needed, even if I got 99.9% of all of those symbols correct that would still leave 650 errors. I now understand much better why so many books still contain errors even when the publishers have a team of editors to help clean them up, let alone indi' authors who are doing it all on their own. It only makes maters worse that when I try and read through and correct mistakes that my brain is able to easily compensate for me and make it look as if those mistakes weren't there. It takes a great deal of attention to details to find all of the errors, and with a lot of creating you have to ignore most of the details in order even get started (otherwise you get too bogged down with all of the minutia) so it's hard to do both.

The universe is definitely causing me to stretch in ways I didn't know I'd grow and, in fact, in ways I didn't actually want to grow. But I am grateful for the growth.

I'm also grateful to Kenda, who recently provided me with a number of edits that I think will clean up most of my errors. I feel like I'm perhaps 99.999% of the way there (unfortunately that might still leave about 6 errors). I think that this might be more comparable to a traditionally published book. I'm not satisfied, I'd like to have it perfect, but I am happy that it is getting closer. And I think that the more people that I can get to read it, the better it can become.

This means that there might be a number of "collector's editions" that are printed along the way. As more people buy my book, I'm hoping to be able to buy back as many of those collector's editions as I can and burn them. Mostly because every time I see all of the mistakes that I've made, I'd much rather hide them than be reminded that they're out there. Unfortunately for me this may increase their value, as hopefully they become more and more rare. So I am hoping that with your help we can make their value skyrocket.

While I do like my day job a great deal, I did have fun making these videos in order to help promote my book (Help reunite me with my family! and Keep it secret). They seemed like they would have a "youtube" sharable nature to them. But they are definitely promotional videos, and I'd much rather be awesome like the Kid President, Robby Novak, than just go viral.

Unfortunately Amazon is also conspired against me in that, if you already have my book on Kindle it's hard to get the updates so that you can see if it's good enough now to share. The only way I know how to do it is with Amazon's "contact us," by selecting Kindle eBook and asking them to send the updates. But hopefully if you're able to do that you'll see that not only have I cleaned it up a good deal more, the links to the chapters are also fixed.

I know it's a bit of a pain, and I wish I was just perfect the first time so you wouldn't need to go through the extra work. But I do thank you for all of your help. And if you'd rather not go to all that trouble, to help me be awesome, that's ok. I might need a lot of help. I'll still consider you awesome either way.