Jeremy C Kester

The difference between being a careless writer and one who is working towards growing as a writer is precisely the latter. Until recently, I was pretty sure that I was growing. Maybe I was, but I feel now that I was more the former, rushing to get work out into the world before it was ready.

That realization came as I was running through corrections to my latest book. I was looking at putting out a revision for these fixes when I continued to find more. It wasn’t so much finding errors themselves that bothered me. I’ve found mistakes in books far better than my own. What got me was how many of these errors I found were just careless. Like “didn’t you run spell check?” bad. There was no excuse why they were there.

It proved to me that I allowed my own eagerness and fears get in the way of making a better product. I don’t believe that any of my books are bad, rather, they just could have been done better. I could have taken better care of them. But that’s in the past. I can make the fixes. I can make sure I am not as careless as before. I can learn from this. And in doing so, become a better writer.