Here we go again!

The elbow is not completely healed, but it is much better. I’m still not allowed to lift anything heavier than a coffee cup, but typing isn’t about lifting, so that’s all right. However, I’m planning to ease back into things – I’m going to be posting once a week, on Wednesdays, until at least the end of June. After that, we’ll see how it goes.

In other news, the four Enchanted Forest books are being reissued in September with 25th Anniversary introductions…and they will also FINALLY be available as e-books! I just finished proofreading all four of the new editions, and I will blame any remaining errors on the oxycodone they gave me for my broken elbow and the surgery.

On top of that, Pamela Dean and I have a collection of short stories coming out as an e-book – it contains the Liavek stories that we wrote for the five Liavek shared-world anthologies back in the 1980s, plus two new ones (one that didn’t make the cut the first time due to space considerations, and one that we wrote to fill a hole in the joint storyline for this anthology). It is supposed to be out in May, from Diversion Books, and will have a print-on-demand option for people who want paper copies instead of or in addition to the e-book one.

Putting together this collection was a lot more work than I think either of us quite bargained for – after all, the stories were already written; it should have been just a matter of putting them in order and sending the manuscript to the publisher to format…we thought.

Unfortunately, the 1980s were long enough ago that there were a number of problems with this scenario. Some of the stories were not in electronic format (or at least, not in any that we could find. Possibly they dropped out somewhere during the migration from one computer to another over the past thirty years. Or the floppy discs got lost…remember floppy discs?). Other stories were in electronic formats that were unreadable by a modern Windows 8 machine, and neither of us still has a DOS one, let alone the programs we were using back then. Still others had been converted to rich text or some other format that we could read, but the conversion had problems and had to be proofread carefully.

The older “new” story, the one that I wrote for the second Liavek book that was far too long, needed some significant revisions – I basically rewrote the last half so it would make more sense. The new story, which was a joint project, has a deliberately confusing non-linear format that was hard to make work as well as it does (and that will probably not work for everyone, but that’s life). And when we finally got everything in one file, there turned out to be consistency problems with things like capitalization or italicization of certain terms that were unnoticeable when the stories were in different volumes, but had to be dealt with when they were all together in a row. So the whole thing had to be carefully proofread again.

When we finally got it to a publisher, they did a copy-edit, which we had to review, and then sent electronic page proofs. All of which took just as much time as writing a brand-new-original book would have. But they gave us a lovely Liavekan cover – the city skyline silhouetted against a hot desert sky and reflected in the waters of the Sea of Luck. Did I mention that it’s supposed to be out in May? I will post the exact date it goes live when I have it.

That should bring things up to date; next week, I plan to get back to that discussion about creating plots from non-plotty ideas that we were having ages ago when my elbows were both still whole. Unless someone has something they’d rather talk about – it has been a while, and perhaps you’ve all moved on.