I’ve had to discipline myself not to go back and make changes after a chapter has been completed. Sometimes I’ll notice a small mistake or continuity error and think, “It won’t take me that long… I can go back and fix that.” But that way lies madness! Naturally, if there’s a glaring error that could negatively impact one’s enjoyment of the story, that’s something that may be worth fixing. But for many of the relatively small things, my policy has been to let it stand. After all, any time spent going back and fixing little mistakes is time that could be spent working on the next chapter! And besides, most of the time few if any readers will notice, and fewer still will bring it up.

This page is a good example. Do you notice anything wrong with it? Here’s a hint: I made the same mistake on the previous page as well. See it? I made a slight continuity error with the table in the background. In the very first page of the chapter it was full of the cookies that June was wrapping. On the previous page it was empty, and on this page, Ricky is there! (As well as the box of medical supplies June brought out.) I only noticed this after the chapter was completely finished, exported, and uploaded. Fixing it wouldn’t have taken too much time; I could have copy/pasted the cookies from the earlier page. But then I would have had to re-export and re-upload each affected page. And that doesn’t come for free; there’s always a tradeoff. Yes, going back and fixing it may improve the overall quality of the page by some degree. Would it have been worth the time it would take away from working on the next chapter? In this particular case I made the judgement call to let it be. The good news is I’ve still learned from it, and will be more careful of similar situations in the future!