First, I want to start this post by thanking every one of you for all of the love that you poured into my pre-order for The Secret About Time. I can't wait to announce when the paperback is available, and I hope everyone who takes the time to read it falls in love with the story.

Today, I finished the sequel. It's done and ready for me to pack it up and send it away for summer camp at my editor's house. I have to tell you I love the sequel and I can't wait to share that one with you next June.

In the midst of my reread, an email popped up today from Grammarly with the subject, “Someone's been a busy bee!” My first thought was, “You’re dang right, I have!” When I clicked on the email, I knew I just had to share these numbers with you.

First, I'll start by saying I enjoy daydreaming up little stories and writing them down. Now, I get to share them with you, and I couldn't be more excited. But I'm a storyteller, not a grammar expert. Nor did I ever win the spelling bee. I admit this freely, as no one is perfect, and those that are should know that pointing it out is rude and frowned upon.

Because I am human, I bought Grammarly and have been using it for a while. I run every book and blogpost through the program before sharing it with the public. For my first book to be published, The Secret About Time, I hired a copy editor who went through my book once, and then I hired her again as a proofreader for another check with the end goal of delivering the best book possible.

As a flawed person, I am proud to present the following statistics courtesy of my Grammarly subscription.

Pretty cool, huh? I like the fact that I was more productive than 91% of other people, but that mastery level of 73% makes me cringe a little. Also, who doesn’t struggle with or debate about the comma?

Setting all these cool statistics aside, it’s just a website. While it buys me some peace of mind, my copyeditor had over three hundred track changes in an 84,000-word document, and then seventy-six more in the proofread, mainly on things I had added.

I’d love to tell you (and myself, believe me) that now it’s perfect, but my advance copy readers have found about five typos that somehow managed to fly under Grammarly’s radar and evade my copyeditor, not once but twice. That, my friends, is perseverance.

What I am proud of is that total count. I’ll be honest. I don’t know if my very first book is even counted. I wrote it well before getting Grammarly and never revisited, so that could put my lifetime count at 640,000. Either way, I’m on the downhill slide towards a million, and this is good news as that is a heck of a mile marker for the writing gods on the internet.

Would I recommend Grammarly?

It’ll catch the big stuff, and even has some neat little tools on repetitive sentence length alerts and frequent word flags, but as with anything else, it’s a computer, not a person. I’m keeping it for now, as it buys me a lot of peace of mind, but for the big things, I’ll always call in some backup.

Onward!

Kathryn