Update: fiddling with this and that, also finally reading books

Okay, so one last thing for TASMAKAT: final-final-final proofreading turned up maybe, I don’t know, five typos or so plus two lines in the hardcover that were the wrong font. For just those two lines, the “modify styles” button didn’t believe me when I told the “normal” style that it was now Garamond 10 and therefore those two lines continued sitting pretty as TNR 12. I could explain what caused that, but whatever, doesn’t matter, the point is, I skimmed through all three versions after uploading the final-final-final versions of the files and caught that and fixed it. I think (I hope) that was the only remaining formatting tweak.

ALSO!

Oops, I accidentally hit “publish” on the paperback version of TASMAKAT, and since there’s no way to take it back, I thought whatever and went ahead and hit “publish” on the hardcover version as well.

I’m not kidding, by the way. That was an accident with the paperback. There’s no button that says “preorder” for the paper editions. The only choices are “draft” and “publish.” That’s why only the ebook shows up on Amazon during the preorder period. Once you hit “publish,” you’re stuck. You have to wait for that to go through and then hit “unpublish” and who wants to deal with that, so I am usually very, very careful not to hit the “publish” button unless I mean it.

I guess the back of my brain thought Whew, it’s definitely ready to go and hit the wrong button. I meant to hit the go button this coming Wednesday, thus dropping the paper versions about the same time the ebook goes live.

Well, it’s perfectly fine to make the paper edition available a couple days early, so as “oops!” moments go, this one is not a problem. Just letting you know, odds are good that if you would like to buy a paper copy, by the time you see this post, the paper editions will be live.

Let me see, what else was going on last week?

Well, World Companion stuff, of course. That will be ongoing for the next month, I suppose. I’m proofing an updated ebook version and when I have finished that I’ll make another paper copy and start over. I tried another recipe, one that was new to me, and it worked better than I expected and was quite good! It’s the sugar dumpling recipe. I looked around for a recipe that might work for that because of course we have heard of sugar dumplings here and there in the books, and I found one that looked plausible, but I had never made it before last week. Now I have, and I revised the recipe to match my actual experience. I want to make a couple different versions and add comments about those. You know, even though I would have been really glad to get the World Companion out before TASMAKAT, I’m glad I have more time to fiddle with it.

What else?

Oh, of course! I got first comments back on INVICTUS: CAPTIVE from one reader and that was super fast and also funny and reassuring. I mean literally funny, because the overall reaction was positive in a way that made me laugh. Also let me add — I have said this before — but yes, sorry, there is a major cliffhanger at the end of the first book. Sorry! I did say I was always, always going to break up long books! This one is just about 190,000 words in final(ish) draft and that means breaking it in half and that moment is a good one for the break. I will be so interested now to see comments for the second book. I expect a certain amount of smoothing everything out to be required, but hopefully (VERY VERY HOPEFULLY) this will not involve really major revision.

OVERALL I am in something of a lull for, I guess, the first time this year, so I am digging into the TBR pile. I think I caught it just before it started collapsing into a black hole due to the gravitational pull of all those unread books. I expect I’ll be posting comments about various books in the next couple of weeks.

Yes, I am also thinking of re-reading the back half of the Black Dog series, but honestly, if I can finalize the World Companion and maybe finish final revisions to INVICTUS first, that would be really nice. And if that gives me time to read another dozen or so books, that will also be a bonus. So not totally sure what I’ll be doing in the coming week, depends on whether I get comments back for INVICTUS: CRISIS and how much more I wind up doing with the World Companion.

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