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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I like the new Black Dog cover you gave us a sneak peek at in your newsletter!
I really didn’t like the purple halos.
My boss just sprung a big surprise on the whole team; we’re the pilot team for moving from our own fileservers to Teams, where we won’t be allowed to go more than 3 layers deep. Even disregarding the top 4 layers, as they will provide a teams-group per department/team, the present structure is at least 8 layers deep.
And the move will happen on 14&15 September, so we’ll have to sort out and rearrange our whole fileserver structure by Friday the 13th, and preferably also archive or discard those documents and maps that aren’t archiveworthy or (immediately) relevant anymore. In less than 2 weeks, while the rest of our work goes on.
We all understand that the IT team has to be the pilot team for any such changes, but this is really short term and they’re not as clear on what the practical result is we should achieve in these few days, e.g. into which groups we have to sort things.
We’re not very happy with the haste!
Sorry, maps = folders (the Dutch word for them is map (singular), mappen (plural)).
Sometimes my language-sense makes mistakes like that when there are such similar words in both, forgetting which word goes in which language.
Wow, Hanneke. Not like I understand everything you said, but I definitely understand it’s going to be a pain in the neck! I don’t know whether this is a thing for you, but if you were in the US, everyone would be making dark jokes about anything that’s supposed to finished on Friday the 13th, because that would spell bad luck.
Covers, it turns out, are hard. But I hope these will be better and also suit the stories and most important appeal to people hesitating to hit the buy button.
I’m re-proofreading everything, re-doing the keywords, checking for spelling and capitalization consistency, re-doing all the covers, and then loading the new versions at KDP as drafts. As I put Silver Circle up for preorder, I’ll publish all the new versions AND ask Amazon to pretty please enable readers to update their copies to the new version. Which is up to them. But I will try to coax them to do it while also swearing that the changes are not so great as to require designating the books as new editions. Which they ARE NOT, so I hope Amazon believes me about “big enough for an update, not big enough for a new edition.”
I admit, I also disliked the old black dog covers with the pink-purple halos. The new one looks better.
The lesson I’m taking away from your formatting woes is to never do a global search and replace. If I ever run into a similar problem with my books (currently unpublished) I’ll do ctrl-F and do the replace one by one so I can check every instance before I replace it. Hopefully less tedious than the alternative.
Usually if you are careful, it’s safe! When you make a mistake, woe be unto you, and this teaches you to be more careful.
But! One global find and replace that is safe and useful is “find two spaces, relace with one.” There are always doubles here and there. This clears them out. I do it three times to catch the occasional triple and quadruple spaces.
I love search-and-replace error stories. I can’t remember whose this was, but I read it recently. Editing to convert a US version to a UK version. Replace “pants” with “trousers.” Leading to a book that went to print including the word “occutrousers.”
I’m laughing, but why in heaven’s name didn’t someone NOTICE? This is why you READ the thing from the top ONE MORE TIME before you hit “publish.”
My previous favorite for my own errors — which taught me to put spaces around a word before hitting “replace” — was when I changed “arrow” to “bolt” in the Death’s Lady trilogy. It was a hbolting experience.
I’ll just drop a tip regarding replacing whole words like pants and arrow: if you enable wildcards in the advanced find & replace box, you can use to indicate the beginning and/or end of the word. So searching would only find “pants”. (And bonus, you don’t have to worry about punctuation!) It is case sensitive though, so you’d need to also search for . To catch “arrows” or “arrowing” as well as the singular noun, you’d use .
I love that you wrote the typos on a bookmark *and* found it in time for proofreading. Very satisfying.
I’ll have to remember the wildcards option exists, Mona. I’ve never used it, but plainly I should!
Those typos have been bugging me for FOURTEEN YEARS, so I’m happy I can finally correct “to too” by removing the extraneous “to.” Hopefully very few readers ever noticed that or the small number of other problems…
Oh, I should have guessed that those symbols wouldn’t show up. They’re the less-than and greater-than symbols. The former for the beginning of the word and the latter for the end of the word. So pretend they’re brackets, it would look like this: [pants], [Pants], [arrow
I hope it’s useful for you! There’re all sorts of options if you search for them.