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I had a hard lesson re-enforced this week and the re-enforcement made me feel like a bit of a clod. Let me begin with a story. It is a story of hard work and commitment and ultimately, stupid mistakes.
As you probably know, I have a podcast titled “Get Published”. When I first conceived the podcast I was only going to do an episode a month. That lasted until I put out a general call asking for interview subjects. The response was positive, VERY POSITIVE, and made me realize that I needed to increase the release schedule if I didn’t want to keep people waiting for months to hear their interview.
So I started releasing the podcast every two weeks.
Sunday was a release day so I got up early and began doing the final editing and mixing of the podcast. As I was working on it, I decided to try some new techniques which, I hoped, would make the episode better. Seven (yes, 7) hours later I had the finished product ready to post into the feed.
I had listened to the podcast several times over the course of the day so I felt confident that I was safe to upload it to my website. I started the upload and typed up the show notes. When everything was done, I posted the episode.
Here is where the stupid mistake comes in.
In every past episode I have taken the step of listening to the uploaded podcast. For whatever reason(s) I did not do that this time. I even remember saying to my wife “The Episode is done but I didn’t review it.” Her response “You know something will go wrong, don’t you?”
Prophetic words, indeed.
I discovered when I listened to it at work the next day that I had a 1:01 minute long space of blank air. I also found that one of the promos was wrong and I heard that one of the recording techniques was less successful than I thought. Triple whammy and I couldn’t do anything about it because work’s firewall prevents me from getting into my website to fix the problem.
Gee, do you think I should have reviewed the episode one last time?
It wasn’t until I got home (much later than usual do to a previous commitment) that I was able to fix the problem. And the stupid thing about it? I actually had a final mix that was correct. I loaded the wrong one.
GAH!
Has the lesson been absorbed? I certainly hope so! I will always do a final check before I release an episode from this moment on <crosses heart>. I will also do a final check before I submit any work of any kind (HA! You thought this only applied to podcasting, didn’t you?). That means, before I send a publisher or agent query, I’m going to reread my submission to ensure that format, spelling, address and name/title of recipient are all correct (along with any other ancilliary information too).
Maybe then I won’t have times where I look like a complete idiot.
Personal Update
Not a lot to report on. I was making good progress on the book edit until Sunday when the podcast ate my day. I’ve also had commitments all this week that are keeping me out of the house and away from my computer. On a different note, I am trying out Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/) for my edit to see if it is a tool that will help me out. So far I’m liking it.
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