Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. I think that I excel at constructing plots and stories. There are rarely holes in the plot, though they may be from time to time holes in how well I explain my plots. And when a beta reader finds a hole I can’t simply paper over it, I have to root it out and fix it so the plot is again whole and relatively seemly.

Now, I cannot speak to what is my greatest weakness when it comes to the actual prose. I am too close to the issue and someone else will have to supply that information, but I do not outside of the words in a row aspect of writing where I need to work the hardest for improvement.

Patience.

It is no surprise to those who know me that I am impatient. There has rarely been any great sting from a rejection slip. Usually the rejected piece is back off to another market within a day and not a tear has been shed. Rejection is part of the business and it never ever goes away.

However, waiting for six, eight, twelve months or more for an answer tends to drive me batty. Now those are very long wait times, but they are also beyond my control so my annoyance in those situations would count as a minor flaw at best. The sad truth is I get terribly impatient with things I control as well, and that’s a far greater flaw.

It is not at all unusual for me to clock a thousand words of prose in an hour. When a story is cooking to flows from my heated brain down and out my fingers and into the keyboard with speed and ease. The truth of the matter is that I couldn’t slow down that aspect of the process. It is what it is.

Where speeds works devilishly against me is the proofreading pass.

You cannot do a good lob of proofing and doing it at warp speeds. I rush the process and too many error survive. (As anyone who reads my blog is well aware of.) It is also one of the reasons why I know the self-pub route is not for me, I’d go to hit that ‘publish’ way too early.

I am trying to find a system that will help me in the proofing process. Right now I am proofing a manuscript, novel length, I wrote last year. I think the process I am going to have to use it page by page having my Mac read out the text. That forces me to go slow and listen to each word, making the mistakes pop out.