Partials and fulls

When I talked about the differences in submission guidelines between different publishers yesterday, I didn't even mention formats. Most publishers accept your partials or fulls in word.doc formats which is how your manuscript is created. But some require you to change it into rtf or pdf, or whatever else. It's not hard to do, really, so I don't really mind doing it.

But yesterday, when I changed a partial into a pdf format and was ready to attach it to my latest submission, I happened to read, (again) the pages, because they looked so different in that format. What surprised me was I caught a flaw in the writing. I found it on page 18. At the end of a scene I used the word "landscape" and then at the beginning of the very next scene, I used that very same word again. For an atypical word like landscape, you don't want to repeat it so close to each other. It was about three, maybe four sentences later when I repeated that same word.

I must have read that section of the ms about fifty times, at least, and I just don't know how I missed it all those times. Even my beta readers never caught that.

It was no problem to fix it, I changed one of them to the word "horizon," but I've sent out about a dozen partials or fulls by now, and for all I know, editors will catch it on their very first read. It only goes to show, no matter how many times you read, reread, or re-reread your manuscript, there's going to be something you missed.