Research and finishing up a four month project

Ok I discovered yesterday that I had made a mistake in my research when I was writing Funny Ties. I swear when I googled the Canadian post office that it said they were open for a half day on Saturday's like the US Post Office. This is not true they are closed the entire weekend much to my chagrin. This meant that I spent an hour yesterday combing through 5-6 chapters making adjustments to timelines and dates.

It wouldn't have been so bad had I discovered the error before I was almost done with my 2nd draft edit as I could have easily fixed the problem as I was editing. But I was almost done and was looking forward to Tuesday when I am going to print out two copies of the manuscript. One for my wife to have a go at with a red pen and the other just for sentimental reasons, hey it's my first completed novel and I am proud of it. Now if I had to go back and start and edit all over again to fix just that one problem it would be 3 weeks before I could print again. So with the lovely help of the search function and by skimming 6 chapters I think I fixed the problem and I can still print on Tuesday.

As much as I am proud of the work I am also looking forward to walking away from it for 3-4 weeks while the wife gives me some help on the editing front. Lately I have felt the self doubt monsters trying to consume my soul and if I didn't walk away from it I could be tweaking it for the next decade because of those self doubt monsters. I have had some encouraging words from a few people that I have let read it from a critical stand point (not an editing stand point) and when you hear someone call your novel engaging it is like a knight slaying a self doubt dragon that has been running wild in your mind

So tomorrow I am going back to writing, engulfing myself in a new story and saying goodbye to Funny Ties for the next month, whew. I love the book, and hearing words like engaging makes me very happy. But my new project is going to be so different than the project I just finished and I am thinking that when I come back to it in a month it will be with fresh eyes once more. Funny Ties is a character piece, there is only one major character and his story and everyone else in the novel is just a cameo character. This meant there was little dialogue and it was almost more of an internal novel filled with the actions of my character. My next novel is not like that at all. I can already see four maybe five major characters and lots of dialogue so it is going to be a complete shifting of gears.

Next week I am thinking of posting the first couple pages of Funny Ties on here but for now I am just happy to be done for the time being.