Progress report

Well, I hardly know whether to say that spring break was productive. I mean … sort of?

I did take every dog to the vet for annual exams and vaccinations and whatever. That interrupted four mornings. I took two of them to the cardiologist for clearances — oh, I should add, Ish is still clear, yay! He is seven. I thought he was because my own personal vet didn’t hear anything, but it’s good to have a cardiologist confirm he is clear. I want to breed him this year, plus I want to make him available for someone I know who will be wanting to breed her girl later this year, so that was important. Anyway, that required a trip to St Louis, which was a much longer additional interruption.

Ish is soooo glamorous:

So, anyway.

Moving on to the actual projects in hand, I was really, really unenthused about correcting typos in the Death’s Lady trilogy — deeply boring, plus annoying when someone (Hi, Kim!) points out flaws that plainly do need to be fixed. So I put that off and wrote 50 pages of a story involving Tommy’s introduction to Dimilioc. That went nicely until I got to a particular scene and then thought, Hmm, not sure I like this, maybe I should take out this scene and go in a slightly different direction. So rather than pushing onward, I stopped and set that aside.

Then, having only two days of spring break left, I finally and very reluctantly opened up Death’s Lady Book 2 and corrected approximately one million typos (Thanks, Linda! Ninety percent of the typos you caught were unique) and made nearly all the alterations Kim suggested.

Then, last night, I finally had that in shape to start re-reading the whole thing one more time from the top, keeping in mind the comments Kim and Linda and Elaine all made. I’m doing quite a significant amount of line-editing, AGAIN, but I must say, this part is not nearly as deadly dull as fixing typos.

So anyway, I have read through approximately 15% of the Book 2 manuscript and hopefully will read through the rest of it in the next few days. Then I will put the new improved version back into the KDP template, create a proof copy, and hand that to my mother to read for typos while I do the same thing to Book 3.

I’m still aiming for April 15th for the release date, but if I miss that by a week … or two … I won’t agonize over it. If I figure out what I want to do with that Black Dog story in the meantime, I will drop the Death’s Lady trilogy for a couple of days and finish the story. I will feel more comfortable about the 4th Black Dog story collection when I have two novellas written and polished and ready to go. I’m sure I can hit an October release date for that with no trouble, but I would be happier if I have it ready far, far in advance of October.

Yes, the year still seems to be moving uncomfortably fast.

Also, the Yulan magnolia is blooming:

Welcome to spring!