Quote:
Originally Posted by E.M.DuBois
[...]Urg, at this point, I’m wondering if I’m just wasting my life with this and just make it a hobby.
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This I can really relate to. The result: I write for a hobby, I publish only those things that seem worth all the pain required for that next step. Even if you hire an editor there is still a lot of pain. And if you can barely afford a copy editor you won't be hiring a development editor, so there is a LOT you have to do anyway (and the more you can cut during development editing the less you have to copy edit
).
I'm hesitant to ask whether you've run into hyphenation issues (where the only solution to work out whether certain word pairs should be separate, hyphenated or joined is to look it up in the dictionary, because these are constantly evolving). And I ran into "in to" and "into" issues with mine ... and a whole lot more. I also used to get my "its" vs "it's" wrong a lot of the time, not because I didn't know better, but because my fingers were badly programmed from years of not caring that much.
On a more positive note: it does get better!
My first novel was a huge pain to get right. It's not like I'm going to claim it is perfect now, but I am proud of it and think it was - in retrospect, very definitely in retrospect - worth all that pain.
I was already writing my second novel while editing the first, and this immediate practise of what I was learning meant that I got better at not making (the same) mistakes again. Sure, I still made lots of mistakes, but these were new ones! - and variety is the spice of life.
It still hasn't become easy, but it does get better.