Update: Plus Ongoing Sale

Okay, so, first, if you subscribe to my newsletter (and open it), then you will be aware of this, but —

The Invictus duology is on sale right now and for a couple days yet. There’s no particular reason. I am just taking a stab at boosting this duology in KU, so I’m running a sale with the first book free and the second set to a low price. It would be nice if direct sales paid for the promotion, but with only one book that’s not free, probably it won’t. That’s a guess, but that’s what I expect. Therefore, I really am looking almost entirely at a KU boost as a potential benefit. Well, and perhaps slightly higher direct sales for a month or so as well.

Meanwhile!

I hope you’re enjoying your Labor Day weekend if you’re in the US!

We’re dying for lack of rain here, which means I don’t really get to enjoy the nice summer weather, though it’s cooled off a bit so the weather is in fact pretty nice. The problem with being aware of trees and shrubs and having a lot of young trees and shrubs is that their silent screams of anguish during a drought are so apparent. Usually our late summer drought breaks sometime in September, sometimes in October, sometimes not till November. It helps to get a hurricane somewhere that sends us rain, which sets up a peculiar feeling that goes, “Well, I’m sorry Florida is getting pounded, but yay! A hurricane!”

However, for me, the Labor Day weekend involves labor, as you probably guessed. I’m in the midst of revision for Part II of Silver Circle, and you know what I hit on Sunday? That one chapter — it’s chapter eight — where I changed my mind about something and gutted the chapter, tearing out the entire middle, leaving only the beginning and ending of the chapter intact. Then I went on because I didn’t want to bother taking time right then to splice the chapter back together.

Well, there it was. Took all of Sunday morning to put that chapter back together, properly this time. Thankfully, I think it’s the only chapter in such rough shape (in Part II, there’s at least one chapter like that in Part III as well). Anyway, I should move much more quickly now.

My mother is asking whether I can’t hand her a proofing copy of Part I.

I was going to put off the revision of Part I until I had revised part III, but you know what, I guess that was a stupid notion. I think as soon as I send Part II to early readers, I’ll do the revision for Part I and make a proofing copy for my mother. Maybe proofread it myself too. Then send it to the next round of early readers. Get it moving along well enough and maybe I can aim to release at least that part in October. (No promises!)

Meanwhile!

I’ve finished correcting all the formatting for the Griffin Mage trilogy, plus … here’s something funny … this really was kind of funny … but one of the formatting things I removed was a capital X, which was part of the page number weirdness. Only I forgot to say “Replace X with nothing, case sensitive.” I swear I thought I had. Instead, I said, “Replace X with nothing, not case sensitive,” and it’s wonderful to discover how many words have an x in them.

Exultant, example, explain, fix, fox, relax, coax, oxen, text, expel, experience, express, excellence; the list, it turns out, goes on and on.

Each time, you can say, “Replace eample with example” and fix whatever the heck it is. Every now and then, this produces some new oddity, such as rexclaim appearing half a dozen times throughout the manuscript. This is why you should put spaces around words when you do a global find and replace, and no doubt you immediately realize that if the word is followed by a comma, period, semicolon, or colon, that particular word will not be replaced, and it is all quite tedious. But in a funny way, so that’s something.

It turns out my personal taste in colon use has changed over the past 14 years, so I actually put in a few hours to do a Find for colons and removed, maybe, about, I don’t know, two hundred. Three hundred. Some remarkably large number. Though the whole trilogy is 354,000 words, so one does expect a good number of whatever in that many words. I may well take out some ellipses too. Probably not any semicolons. In fact, the number of semicolons will go up slightly, as some colons are turning into semicolons. Oh, by the way, it turns out I had put a bookmark in my own physical paper copy of the omnibus version of the trilogy, and on that bookmark I had noted down half a dozen typos. It’s satisfying that those can FINALLY be fixed.

Anyway, though I think the whole thing is now perfect from front to back, this is one more reason to re-read the entire trilogy again from the top. Which I intended to do anyway, so whatever, it’s fine.

ANYWAY, that’s moving along, and as soon as I’ve re-read the whole thing, I will create individual ebook and paperback files and by then I bet two of the three covers will be finished. That’s a guess, but I’ve seen a sketch for the first, so I know the artist is moving ahead with these covers.

So that was my weekend! Hopefully no later than this time next week, I will be sending Part II to the earliest readers — hopefully earlier.

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