When you write something rarely does it remain a static creature – it evolves. So preparing Wicked Wolves of Windsor and other fairytales for Ingram Spark (for wholesale and other distribution purposes) I wanted to make sure I found and eliminated as many typos as possible. But they kept springing up like dandelions teaching me the lesson of how difficult it is to eliminate mistakes in your writing.

Yes, Wicked Wolves was proofed (actually by five different people, not including my writer’s group). I also paid for editing. The reality is typos happen even with traditionally published books. They simply are the reality of writing 60,000 plus words.

After doing some research on electronic editors, I went with the free version of Grammarly. If you use Scrivener you can find full instructions here on how to do it.

I ended up finding one word that was misspelled (more of a typo with reversal of two vowels), some commas that were needed, a few marks that were missing in the word don’t, and my arch-nemesis then/than.

There were some recommendations for hyphens which I passed on since over half of the book is based in “days gone by” and hyphens seemed a bit to modern for those stories.

I also don’t want Grammarly to coach me or track my every word so, no, I did not install it into my browser. The free version seems adequate for what I’ll be doing with it at this time.

Those bits and bobs are now corrected and the changes loaded up and approved by Amazon.

My Grammarly report

If you’ve bought the print book and want a newer version just reach out to me via my email and I will order you one on me.

Some feedback I want to address about Wicked Wolves:

1.) The Spanish used is correct for Puerto Rico. Did you know that Spanish differs by country? What you hear in Mexico isn’t what you would hear in Spain, and that isn’t what you would hear in South America. All the Spanish used in Granny Starseed was confirmed correct by a native speaker.

2.) The character of Bab in Granny Starseed does have a name change near the end of the story. No, it is not a typo on my part. It is actually an Easter Egg that many have missed and it is very much deliberate.

I think though I’m done evolving Wicked Wolves! Unless I find a typo that is! LOL.

BTW if you want to know more about editing I have a blog post here with some examples of how I edit dialogue. Also, I have switched to ProWritingAid and will have a blog post soon about using that service and comparing it to Grammarly.

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