My to-be debut is getting closer to beta stage. At this point, I think I can state that I believe it’ll go well now. I am currently making grammar and spelling pass to be ready for the first to-be beta version and thought that I might share the most frequent mistakes that I made when my fingers struggled to stay at the same speed as my mind, one way or another.

Note: Since I am not living in an English-speaking country, my keyboard layout is slightly different, especially when it comes to non-letter keys.

• The Shift thing: At times, it feels like my finger on Shift key can get quite desynced from the rest; to the point where I either press it with bad timing and the letter is not capitalized, or hold it too long getting me to have first two letters capitalized. Annoying, really. I often have the same problem with apostrophes.
• Keys too close: sometimes, it feels like some pairs of keys must be closer to each other than they appear. The U-I-O trio is especially sneaky, more so if I am writing in the evening with less light around. It’s even more annoying when I want to have something in italics but it gets underlined instead. Ctrl-U and Ctrl-I are the worst trap for me.
• Similar words: sometimes, my hands are too fast and it gets me to make mistakes that I would laugh at if I saw them normally. Things like though/thought and such, where missing the final letter makes quite a difference, are the worst because base spellcheck won’t catch them. Each proofread I do myself, I find more of those.
• Gender pronoun swap: in a few scenes that are a dialogue of two characters of different genders, and I had decent idea where I wanted it to go, I was writing so fast that sometimes I used he/she and his/her for the opposite gender. Mostly because I was already thinking about the next line.
• Name change: this was a thing in the earlier stages where many characters had placeholder names and I rotated through several concepts before choosing a final version. The result was that when I went on with writing, I stopped to think what the current name actually is and several cases eventually had to look at a table where I had this noted. Sometimes I still used older version when my fingers struggled to keep up with my thoughts. At least that issue is mostly gone now.

So, these are some of the mistakes I made (and probably will continue making) in drafting phases. I only hope I’ll catch most of them during edits, though I realistically know it’s impossible to discover everything, no matter how much I try.

If anyone reading this wants to share their own experience, I’m always up for discussion in the comment section.