The Plan

A few years ago, my son Tom met Catherine Hamlin, a most remarkable Australian doctor working in Addis Ababa. He gave me a copy of her biography Hospital by the River, and I was deeply moved both by her work and the terrible suffering of the women she served.

I’d been writing Quid and Harmony for some time, and decided to complete the novel and dedicate all the proceeds to furthering her work... [read more]

Thursday, May 24, 2007

The Plotters

My printers have just sent me a pile of 24 'plotters', little booklets that show me how the actual book will look like. This is the very last chance to make any changes.

All very exciting... and just a little worrying.

Anyway, I decided I'd better read them through just in case, and I still managed to find some typos. Arrraugh!

So I did a sum just to console myself.

QandH is 105000 words long, or about 586000 characters. Suppose there are 5 typos lurking in it still. That would mean the text is 99.999% correct! But it's still not good enough, to my mind. I want perfection. Trouble is, each error becomes exponentially harder to spot.

Esther's certain I'm developing late onset OCD.

3 comments:

Steve Isham said...

Fret not. Any remaining errors are there to keep you humble. Consider your immortal soul.

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