Progress report

Okay! We’re halfway through April. That was fast. I’m feeling pretty happy with the month so far.

First, I’m still fiddling around with proofreading for the Death’s Lady trilogy. I’m trying something new — I’m re-reading a clean copy in paper with a pencil in my hand. This is just like going over page proofs from a traditional publisher. I’m therefore actually making a relatively large-ish number of very small changes, plus I’ve caught just a few actual mistakes. Judging form Tarashana, I ought to catch about 30 typos per 900 (Kindle adjusted) pages, or pretty close to three per 100 pages. I’ll be curious how close that is to reality. Also, I’ll be curious if you all catch any after all this. I’m hoping that your collective sharp eyes catch fewer than five for the whole trilogy, but we’ll see.

The above is going to take a little while. I’m doing it largely right before bed, instead of reading other stuff for fun. So I’ll put these books up for pre-order in a few days, but most likely I’ll select the middle of May as the actual release date. That should give me ample time to finish up proofing even though I’m also working on other things.

Second, I finished The Kids’ Story for the upcoming Black Dog collection this morning. (Beats me what the actual title will be.) I wrote 50 pages or so, and then I wasn’t sure I took the plot in quite the right direction, so I paused. I got back to it this week and finished it up at 80 pp, or about 25,000 words. That’s a good length — close to the length I prefer for these stories. The story opens practically the minute Tommy’s first story closes and covers his first 24 hours with Dimilioc. He has an eventful 24 hours, I must say, and the story sets up two plot elements that will be further developed in Silver Circle. I mean, unless I change my mind. But it’s nice to use the stories to set things up for the next novel.

I am a bit peeved that two of the stories in the 3rd collection take place after Copper Mountain. That wasn’t my intention! I prefer to have all the stories in a collection take place between the books, except for prequels that happened a long time ago. Initially, I thought I would be setting Copper Mountain some time after Shadow Twin, but that’s not how it worked out. This time, Silver Circle really should take place a good while after Copper Mountain, so there’s plenty of time for other stuff to happen. Tommy joining Dimilioc is one of those things. It wasn’t going to be an important thing, except for him, but now it kind of is because of the other stuff that happens. I have also now hinted around something that Thaddeus has been doing, so I need to decide what that was and write a story from his pov about that.

Next up, though, is taking a good look at the comments I have here about this one SF novel, working title No Foreign Sky, and seeing what I can do with that in the next couple of weeks. I’ve read the comments through twice, and this revision may be a little more extensive than I was hoping, but a lot of it involves cutting, which is (a) not fun, but (b) often not that time consuming. I will probably take a stab at this over the weekend and see how it goes.