One more top down read/revise pass before the Team Eagle Eye hand off. Looks like Thursday or Friday is the target date, about a week behind schedule. Ah, well. One man’s delay is another’s choreographed plan.

By saving the “finicky” readers for this final pass, I hope to maximize their contributions. For instance, the less grammar glitches the gun expert encounters, the more focus he has for technical issues like weapons handling and police procedures.

However, a persistent gotcha in my writing even after all these revisions: dropped words. It’s a virtual guarantee that out of every thousand words, a crucial one exists solely in my mind — not on the page. That’s progress, though. In the early days of the manuscript the ratio was one dropped word for every one hundred, which made for interesting reading.

Dropped words are not my only problem; sometimes spelling errors take me downtown. Towards that end, here is my favorite howler from the novel:

“…and never slam ducks the big guys, then someone must be protecting them.”

There’s more to the line, but using a fragment makes the glitch more obvious. Spell Check flagged that baby AOK, as did yours truly.