Glad it’s working for you!

Thank you so much for the suggestion! I have been using it for two days and it is really helpful with covering the basics! I guess getting it correct is the first step!

Yes, separating the two jobs should help you a great deal. One other idea I might suggest for you is subscribing to a service like Grammarly to double-check your work. My adult son, who is a very good writer but also dyslexic has been using Grammarly lately and he finds it very helpful. It’s not the sort of service I’d suggest for everyone but it strikes me as helpful to people who have English as a second language (and to dyslexics.)

There’s always hope for everyone, I think. I subscribe to Carol Dweck’s theory that writing is a skill we learn, not a talent that we are born with.

We all have backseat editors and it can be hard to turn them off. I’m going to write a new post about this in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for suggesting this idea, Heather.

Very smart to save your older versions.

See my comment to you and Brad above. 🙂 Also, I think I have a hard time writing because, even though I wait to edit, I’m mentally editing and trying to decide what the BEST way to do it is. Even though I say I write a crappy first draft (and it always is crappy), I don’t think I give myself full permission to just get it down in no particular order. I think I have a “backseat editor” who is always “suggesting” I do it this way or that way, so I can never decide how to start! Do you have any blog posts to cure me of that???

Since I’ve been following your blog for a long time now, Daphne, I have learned to (mostly) keep my writing and editing as separate tasks. Brad, the last nonfiction picture book I wrote has gone (currently) through 12 edits. What I do is this: I write a crappy first draft and label it version 1. Then–and only then–do I start the editing. I do a “save as” of version 1 and label it version 2. Any edits I make to version 2 become version 3 and so on and so on. That way, if I decide to revert to an older version or add back in something from an earlier version, I have it at the ready and can do that. 🙂

That means there’s hope for me! 🙂