Now Is The Time We Hate And Doubt

I had to print out my synopsis a half dozen times last night because I kept finding grammatical errors. It has to do with participles and present or past tenses and other crap that I never took classes for. Example;

Limiting modifiers, such as only, even, almost, nearly, hardly, merely, scarcely, simply, and just are frequently misplaced. Often, the misplacement suggests a meaning the writer did not intend.
For example:

Nancy almost ate the whole pizza by herself.

Manfred has nearly insulted all his co-workers.

In the first example, the placement of almost suggests that Nancy meant to eat but did not. In the second example, the placement of nearly suggests that Manfred meant to insult all his co-workers, but did not.

A limiting modifier should be placed in front of the word it modifies. For example, the sentences above should be rewritten to read:

Nancy ate almost the whole pizza by herself.

Manfred has insulted nearly all his co-workers.

Hoping that I just luck upon proper word useage feels like I'm hoping to win the lottery. Then the unsurety turned into hate for the work and doubt that it was any good at all. I started asking myself what the hell the book was actually about.

"The tragedy that lies before him will not come from discovering if he did the right thing, but in discovering the very nature of heroism itself." quoth me in my cover letter. What the hell does that even mean?!

Argh. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing.

However, like the hapless bumbling moron I've been for the last 40 years, I'm still going to deliver this mess to Fifth Avenue today, then come back across the bridge for a work appointment, then go to Staten Island tonight for another nerve-shattering exercize in leaving my shell.

Sometimes, I swear.

I need my friend Matt Atherton. I bet it would be all right then.

Edit (after showering, shaving, and self-analysis):

I changed the paragraph to;

I’ve enclosed a synopsis and the first three chapters of my 60,500-word fantasy novel, The Very Elect. It is the story of Anders Travesti, who puts his father to death for heresy against the Cardinal Law of Peridyym and is then sent on a journey to investigate his father’s conspirators. Anders will have to go through devastating loss and self-discovery to find the very nature of heroism itself. This will be my first published novel.

So I hope that's more directional than the last version.

Oy vey.