Mary Sisson's Blog, page 29

Progress report

1,040 words, whooo!

Progress report

Fixed a bit of what I wrote yesterday, and wrote another 1,040 words!

Progress report

I haven’t heard back from the copy editor, and I’ve been busy with some non-writing things, but they’re basically done now, so I figured I’d get going on Trials (formerly Tribulations).

1,270 words!

DONE!

Thank the Lord! Obviously I’m going to have to deal with it again after the copy editor looks it over, but he seems pretty busy right now, so hopefully I will have Time To Heal.

Progress report

I input changes on the chapters up to 25—oh my God, that was a BEAR. I fully expected to be able to proofread the last six chapters today, but no—I’m out of time and exhausted. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I dislike layouts so much, and then I have a day like today where I’m like, “That’s right! These things are a HUGE pain in the ass!"

ANYWAY it should be a really clean layout at least.

Progress report

I’m feeling a need to be more specific about my progress with the layout, since I’m tired of layouts, so more accountability is required. I have read through Chapter 25 and done the changes through Chapter 20. If I keep at it, I should be done fairly soon.

Chugging along

I re-read Trang and Trials, make notes of any details that might require bit of an adjustment to Tribulations, and now I’m going through that and inputting changes. There aren’t a lot, but layouts are just so fiddly (plus of course I have to change the manuscript, otherwise the e-book will be wrong) that it’s fairly slow going. Still, it’s happening, and I’ve found a couple of mistakes—I always feel you should get stuff as clean as possible before you pay someone to copy edit it, so that’s good.

Continuity, argh

I decided to re-read Trang, just to get myself geared up for the fourth book, and…whoopsie. Yeah. In the first book the layout of the diplomatic station isn’t especially important, and in the second book it’s only a little more important. But in the third book the station layout is HUGELY important. Meaning that I actually drew myself a detailed station layout for the first time for the third book, only to realize now that it contradicts some information in the first book.

I’m re-reading the second book now, just to see where the issue stands. I’ll give the third book another read as well. If the first and third book are the problems, then the choices are to fix either the third book or the first. The third book hasn’t gone to the copy editor yet (still waiting), so hopefully I can just take care of it easily in that book without having it mess up the plot (that will be what the additional read will be looking for). If it’s really not fixable in that book, then it’s going back to the first book, fixing that (plus the two typos I found)—but I wouldn’t bother to fix the paper version (I don’t even know if I can at this point, since I’m not using the same software), and of course anyone who got the e-book before I fixed it would still have an inconsistent copy.

Obviously this problem would have been avoided if I had done a detailed layout of the station at the outset, but I feel like that could have created problems, too. I do plan my books to an extent, but I don’t know what exactly is going to happen in each book until I write it. And this issue was caused by my being overly precise in the first book when it wasn’t essential to the plot, so that’s kind of annoying.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

I did blurbs/jacket copy for both Tribulations and A Dislocated World today—now I’m working on getting appropriate measurement for the Tribulations cover, since I know how many pages it will be. Amazon took over CreateSpace, and their tools are frankly a bit clunky and involve extra steps and more opportunities for software incompatibilities—if you just give me an online calculator, I can do the rest, thank you very much. Anyway, at this point I think everything is going to work. Fingers crossed!

Progress report

Whoo-HOO! The layout is finished! Off it will go to the copy editor! Whoooooo!!!

I’ve got a bunch of non-book stuff that needs to get done, but I am looking to start the fourth book sooner rather than later….