Suddenly Bothered

I received my galley this week for my manuscript, and, of course, I was dazzled. But, hey, this is the first time I've seen one of my stories in the formatted version of how it's going to look once it's released. The copyright page really got to me. Seeing my very own ISBN number, though... wow. It was really something.

But, anyway, when my editor sent it to me, she instructed me to read through the story again, looking only for grammatical and formatting errors. The editing/revising phase was over. Except... as I started to scan through it, I "suddenly" became uber-aware of how many times I used the word "suddenly."

There's must've been a week back when I was writing the story that "suddenly" was my favorite word to type, because I found it used about five times within ten pages, and I wanted to delete every one of them. Except... the editing/revising phase is over and they can't be deleted. I'm not sure why I didn't catch them the other fifty times I went over the story. But now, they're stuck there forever and I bet they're really going to bother me every time I read my book.

In a couple other places, I found a few phrases where I thought, "Man, I wish I would've written this instead of that." Overall, I know the story is fine. But I still have my nit-picking hat on and there are things that could've been better. I just hope this is a normal reaction for authors, the worrying about minor details. I suppose it's like sending your kid off to school their first day of Kindergarten, finally releasing your baby to the world. You can only pray the other kids don't notice the scuff on their shoes or the dirt behind their ears.