I was talking to my friend John Godek yesterday for our biweekly chat about Starfinder and our lives, Digital Divination (which you can listen to here). There, we sometimes talk about our Starfinder actual-play podcast, Intrepid Heroes (which you can listen to here). One of the key elements of our podcast that we wanted to include was mistakes. Not that we wanted to screw things up on purpose, but we wanted to keep in the mistakes in math or rules that we make, instead of editing them out to make us look like super-gamers. We've got a ridiculous amount of gaming experience around that table, but we still need to look stuff up or realize we got stuff wrong and have to back up to "replay" it.

We do so to send a clear message to other players: this is normal, and it's fine. Don't ever think you need to get everything perfect, because even we experts get stuff wrong.

There's a bit of a lesson there for writing, too. If you agonize over getting absolutely everything perfectly correct, you'll never get done. You have to learn to tell yourself, "that's good enough" and get it to your developer, or to your editor, or into layout, or whatever. (I should note that, as a developer, if every writer were perfect, I'd be out of a job.) Mistakes will creep into products, even with several layers of review; Paizo has errors, and we have more review layers than just about anyone else in the industry. You're better off making your things awesome than worrying about making them perfect. Do your best in the time you have, then move on to the next awesome thing.

Your stuff won't be perfect. This is normal, and it's fine.