THE CORRECTIONS

Specially for Owners of the First Edition Hardcopies:

After reading the final hardcopy product (first edition), I realised that there were a lot of minor, ‘(un)noticeable’ and even some major mistakes throughout the book. Although the book is “readable”, there are missing words here and there, inverted wordings and unnecessary sentences that we can do without. I must admit that I’m not entirely satisfied.

I may have made a mistake of rushing to publish it out. But then again, it did went through many rounds of review and I thought it was sufficient. However, I proved myself wrong.

Analysing the outcome, I realised there were two main mistakes I made which contributed to it:

  1. I did not review the compilation in hardcopy during the review process, all the reviews were done on the computer
  2. I pressured and rushed my editor to revert asap. Even then, if it was not for her, there would have been much more mistakes in the compilation.

If I had not made these two mistakes, I know I could have done better. These are two hard lessons I learned from my first attempt at writing (oh ya, it’s my first time, I’m bound to make mistakes. Why am I beating myself up? haha!).

I realised now that it all happened due to the clash of my two conflicting personalities.

  1. I am an impatient person who strives for fast tangible results. This habit has its pros and cons. I get things delivered, on time or ahead of time, but at times, it may not turn out to be my best product (notice how many times (again) I used the word time – LOL). In this case, it was the latter.
  2. At the same time, I realised through this experience that I am actually a “perfectionist in denial” who is never satisfied with the results I produce. While I was reading the book, I couldn’t hold myself from correcting the mistakes I found and improvising some of the sentences to make it clearer.

So I ended doing that for the past one month and after completing 3 rounds of review (this time on hard copy), I finally completed the update.

edit book

However, the update does not do justice to the hardcopies already circulated, regretfully that version would remain as such. Nevertheless, although it is an impractical effort, I have actually attempted to register all the changes I did so that readers with the first edition hardcopy could refer to it to identify the updates if they wanted to.

But half way through I stopped the attempt as it turned out to be too messy especially after the second round of review. Instead I reverted back to the traditional “track changes” method to reflect the changes. For those who are interested to look at changes, you may download it below (spoiler: it’s all over the place):

StraightFromTheHeart-Corrections

Maybe one day, I would reprint the hardcopy again but I don’t see it happening in the near future (unless there are sponsors who are willing to pump in some funding – LOL). I am considering to submit it to an actual publisher for their consideration, who knows they might be interested to commercially publish it. I haven’t decided yet.

Till next time, have fun!