A lot of people can not read past small imperfections, especially with regards to spelling. I know, this is a fact of life. Personally, I mostly care about what is being said and how that is structured. The exact spelling of words matters much, much less to me.

What matters to you tends to be reflected in the stories you write. At least, that’s something I notice with my own stories. Most of my first drafts tell a relatively original tale, have round and complicated characters, and a thought trough and working world behind the words. They have plots with fairly few plot holes. But they also tend to be riddled with spelling errors, cause well, I just don’t care enough to catch them earlier.

This makes editing and rewriting before I show my stories to others extra important. I ran into the “I should have rewritten this” snag a couple of times, recently. Where people couldn’t get past the spelling imperfections, which I know I should have caught earlier but didn’t, and never got to the story I was trying to tell.

Ah well. I’ll just have to make sure I remember this, next time. Letting people read things before I’ve triple-checked the spelling is a bad idea. I must fix the spelling first, before I can get the feedback I am looking for. Because I do need other people to track down those plot holes I missed, and to point out where the world the story is set in needs more, or often less explanations.