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First and third, nobody out

All right, seriously, you guys. This is getting ridiculous.

I wrote the whole first draft of The Reluctant Coroner in first person, from Fenway Stevenson's point of view (she's the title character and the sleuth in the mystery). About two-thirds of the way through, I realized the book should be in third person, not first person, and so my first edit was changing everything from "I rolled my eyes" to "Fenway rolled her eyes."

I couldn't do a global search-and-replace, because there is a ton of dialogue that has "I" and "my" and "we" and "me." But I did one painstaking manual pass and changed probably two thousand instances. Then another pass, another 200. Then five alpha readers, who caught another 500. Then another pass, where I caught 25 or so. Then two more alpha readers, who caught about 10 apiece. Then a professional edit; she caught another 20. The another pass—just 5 this time. And I just found TWO MORE INSTANCES—one is "I nodded" and the other is "Fenway drummed my fingers on the table."

I bet this would be funny if I weren't banging my head against the wall.