Revisions and New Projects

One of the friends that Donna and I visited last week in Rhode Island did a proof-reading job on A Single Step. She did this out of the goodness of her heart and probably out of reflex since she had been employed in such work years ago. She emailed her results to me this week and I have to say I was greatly impressed and greatly chagrined.

I thought Donna and I had edited the manuscript thoroughly, but our friend found a lot of errors. They were mostly typo mistakes and word omissions. I'm really bad about the latter because I'll read a manuscript so many times that my mind fills in the missing words. So I'm greatful to Stephanie for her work (and to her husband, Rocko, for his moral support) and I've incorporated her corrections into a revised manuscript that I've uploaded to Smashwords. In a couple of weeks, that "clean" revision should make it to Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. This shows me that a good editor is worth his (or her) pay.

So with A Single Step out there, I've turned my thoughts to promotion and my next projects.

Regarding promotion, I've been using Google Adwords for the last month to promote my website as well as A Single Step. While it seems to have brought some traffic to the site, it hasn't help much with the book. I've let Adwords drop and probably won't try it again for a while. My friend, Rocko, has passed the book along to a friend of his that I hope will like it and write a review. I'm also approaching another venue trying to get readers and reviews. I'll talk about that in a future journal entry if it works out.

Regarding next projects, I'm working on something for the Christmas season. This will be a revision of The Spark, which is currently on Smashwords. The story's been downloaded a lot since I put it out last December. The downloads have been pretty steady, even through the summer (though at a much slower rate than during Christmas, of course). But there are a number of wording errors in the current version that pain me, and sections of prose need to be smoothed out. I've worked on that over the last week and the result is a much better-reading manuscript.

I wanted this revision to be more than just prose corrections, however, so I decided to upgrade another Christmas short story that I wrote several years ago. It's called, My Christmas Carol, and I wrote it for a short story "competition" at my workplace. It was never published anywhere, just read at the office Christmas party. It won a free lunch for Donna and I at a local restuarant. Then I forgot about it until now.

I'll combine The Spark and My Christmas Carol into one volume that I'll put out on Smashwords as a revision to the current, The Spark. I'll time it to come out around Thanksgiving and feature it in a ALS newsletter.

Beyond The Spark project, I'm thinking of expanding Madam President into a novel, which would be a very large expansion indeed. I'll talk more about that in later journal entries.

Quick notes:

Yes, Ole Miss has lost their season-opening game to BYU by one point. They really needed a win to garner some positive momentum to carry them into a tough schedule, especially after last year's dismal performance. Still, Coach Nutt has revamped his staff and his teamed showed some promise. The young quaterback, Stoudt, seems to have some potential.

And I finally saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I went in with no expectations but it turned out to be the best of the Ape pictures, in my opinion.