The BARROO Report

Psyched!!

I just finished the 1st revision of Wildvine Book 5, APPRENTICE SOLAR.

The Wildvine series is a fantasy series I rough drafted at least 20 years ago, maybe more .... The first 4 titles, already turned in to my publisher, Writer's Exchange, are:
JA'HANNA
ISTORICA
FELIN-RU
OLD SOLAR'S SHOPPE

What's a Solar, and what's an apprentice Solar? Well, Solars are guardians of doorways between worlds. That's about all I'm going to tell you -- look for more information as the books start being released, maybe around the beginning of 2016. What's taking so long with APPRENTICE SOLAR is that I combined 2 books about the same character (they're sequels to OLD SOLAR'S SHOPPE, if you couldn't tell by the title -- APPRENTICE SOLAR and MASTER SOLAR) into one, trimming out wordiness and changing the timeline around and cutting out a huge chunk that I will offer as a short story in the future -- and will be a FREE short read around the time that APPRENTICE SOLAR is released.

More on that later.

Right now, I gotta gripe. Vent. Snarl a little.
I'm a freelance editor, and one of my jobs is to prepare other people's books for publication -- and unfortunately, when dealing with people who are self-publishing, a lot of them don't have the faintest idea about the general rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation. They think because they have something to say -- or at least they THINK they have something worthwhile to say -- that naturally, what spills across the computer screen is gold.  Ain't necessarily so. The ones with at least a hope of publication success opt for their publisher to have the book edited. That's where I come in. Some books are surprisingly good, and sometimes I run into treasures, which makes my job a lot of fun. However .........

What's really frustrating is when I get a book back for a second round of editing, and the moronic client UNDID all the corrections I made. Put back all the bad grammar, the bad punctuation, and switched the words back to their wrong homonyms -- that's sound-alike words that don't mean the same thing, for those who don't know what homonyms are (and were ready to accuse me of saying something that has nothing to do with editing). For instance, the book I re-edited last night: the client stated that "the Earth turns on its AXLE." I know I changed AXLE to AXIS the first time through.

*sigh* What are you going to do with these people? Besides let them waste their money and time, and then wonder why no one will buy their book, other than their family and friends and whatever cult followers they scraped together .........

Now, to end on a POSITIVE NOTE:

It's almost time for NaNoWriMo!!!
(That's National Novel Writing Month, for you uninitiated.)










I'm going to work on the next book that follows BITTER SWEET and THE WOLF THAT WAS.
At the end of WOLF, evil Queen Sorcha went to the seeress for assistance in solving a big problem: how to hold onto her husband's kingdom now that he's dead and she doesn't have an heir. The seeress turned her into an old woman and put her under a curse, and she won't get her looks and her life back until ... well, that's what we're going to figure out in the story. But if all goes well, look for THE WICKED QUEEN coming out from Mundania Press in a year or two.