Shelby Cross, Writer

(Warning: no kink here today. Just writing stuff. You want kink? Go look at some pictures.)

So as some of you are aware, the first story of the Masters of the Hotel Bentmoore series, Michelle, is out on Amazon and B&N. Samantha has already been sent to my formatter, and should be available soon.

Here's the thing: once a story has been through formatting, there's really no way for me to make changes to it. Formatting involves a lot of html code, of which I know nothing, which is why I pay for someone else to format them, so they can look all pretty and shiny for the people who buy them. Which means that all of my editing has to be done before I send them to my formatter, or I am screwed.

This is why I almost never look at one of my stories once it's available for purchase. Because if I find a mistake, there's nothing I can do about it, save for taking it down, making the changes, asking Rob to reformat the whole damn thing, and putting it up again. I'm better off doing my best to make sure the story is polished and ready to go before I give it to him the first time, so it's the only time.

But I broke my own rule yesterday. I read Michelle on my Kindle, the same version as what's available on Amazon.
I found three grammatical errors and two places where I used the same phrase twice on one page before I stopped reading.
These mistakes kill me. Kill me. I hate them. I wish I could go back in time and just squash them out. I couldn't sleep because of those damn mistakes I found.

I know I'm only human. When I edit, I can only fix the mistakes I see. And I can re-read a story twenty times over (and I do), and I'll still miss some obvious mistakes.
What I need to do is get me some beta readers.

If you look up top on the pages bar, you'll see I added a box labeled "contests/requests." Click on that, and take a look at what I'm looking for and what prizes you can win. One of the things I'm going to ask for is beta readers. Because from now on, I don't want to have to worry about reading my own damn story and finding a single fucking grammatical error.