Feel free to say I told you so

I unpublished Short Stories. It's my bane and Waterloo all rolled into one. I was fortunate--very fortunate, to be contacted a month or so ago by a woman looking for a review copy. I'd started to have this inkling that Shorts wasn't all I thought it was (the workshop should have given me a clue, lol)  and sent her copies of both craft books.

On one hand, I was kind of iffy about ES because it has typos. Not an overwhelming number, but enough to make me wince uncomfortably. It also has highlighters, and I'm greedy. The first time I re-read ES looking for typos, I was like..."People highlighted this??" And I got all teary. At which point I realized a kindle craft of writing truth; craft books have more typos than any other kind of writing (something I've noticed reading reviews). It's like the internal line editor checks out the minute Word turns on. But the reason craft books don't  get revised is because the people who wrote them don't want to lose their highlights.
 
Anyway, the woman was kind enough to send me a note telling me the reason Shorts wasn't doing well was because it lacked examples like ES *headdesk*

And I was like OM freaking GOD!!!

Duh.

She didn't say, btw get your structural act together and fix that too, but I am. I don't know what it says about me that it took four years to figure out the actual useable structure of a short, but at this point...it's coming in clearly. Once I upload it again (a week or so), I'll tell Amazon and it should be available for download at no additional cost.

I suspect I was too close. Feel free to say I told you so :)