Monday, June 13, 2016

It's Late...

I updated, as in re-edited, three of the books that I published in 2011 and 2012. My first three actually. COS and DM I did a while ago (a few weeks) and reloaded the ebook versions with the corrections, mostly grammar and spelling stuff. Dialene I did Saturday night, because I was looking at it and I was like, "Oh wow, I need to fix this!" It had been a while since I'd last read it (years in fact).

So, for the last several hours, I've been taking all of the changes, first from COS, and then from Dialene, and applying them to the print versions. This can be a royal pain to do, because I have to keep the page numbers the same, otherwise the covers will need editing, and I really don't want to do that. With COS, which is like 350 pages, it was a long job. Dialene is a lot shorter, and should be easier.
So of course, it wasn't. There was some weird bug in there with the way the section breaks were formatted, and it turns out there was another problem with the headers that I'd never even noticed, not even in the paperback versions I have. That's how subtle it was.

And of course a pain, took me like 2 hours to fix it.

DM I will do the updated grammar correction upload to the print version on Tuesday most likely. Tomorrow I am pretty sure I won't have the time.

COS book 3 has been in my mind lately, because book 1 sales have lately been picking up. As I said before, if book 2 sales follow through, book 3 will get written. The thing right now that I need to do in my spare time, when I get some of it back, is to check the list of plot points from the old outline and update/finish it. The book is going to be complicated, because it will have 3 (count 'em - three) main point of view characters, and it will be told in First Person Singular. So everything you change chapters, you're going to be changing viewpoints and jumping into someone else's head.

I'm not going to even mention the minor characters whose heads you will be spending a little time in.

The thing about book 3 is that there are three different people's stories coming together in it. Raj's, Balizar/Jotun's, and Samantha's. Sam never had a book of her own, but she is a key player in the story.

In my never ending quest to put food on the table, I may be picking up a contract job here next month. I'm waiting to hear back from the job, I've worked with some of the people there before, so it looks like a good possibility. This would slow me down from my goal of publishing six books this year (and which I'm in danger of missing right now, so I need to step up the work), but it would allow me to do some of the pondering I need to do on some of the story lines. I do think aiming for six novels this year may have been a bit ambitious, but it's good to have goals when you're self-employed.

I don't have a title for the current project yet, it's a sequel to the hammer commission and I'm 25K words into it. I have to go 'back' and write the bad guy's parts tomorrow, as I have to get him all nailed down on his part of the story, then I can pick back up on the protagonist's part, as their story lines are about to cross.

The next book will be a POI book. I'm actually thinking of writing one about Nikki, then the 8th one about Will. She (Nikki) is actually a rather busy person, seeing as she works for a very busy goddess who is always wheeling and dealing and who has a lot going on. While Will is something of an idealist, and maybe even a bit of a romantic (and still a touch naive), Nikki is very pragmatic and jaded.
And a bit of a hard ass.

I still have that other shrean novel out there to finish, but honestly, I'm thinking of just putting it out under a pen name, and turning it into a shifter PNR novel. I'll tell my fans and readers about it, so they can check it out if they wish, but I think it's different enough from the other stuff I write that I should make a clearer delineation between it and my usual stories. A different byline I think would make that fairly clear.

Anyway, it's after 1am, tomorrow is a workday, and the people tearing up the street in front of the house start at 7, so I really need to get to bed.
Good night,
-John

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