Browsing Tag

status check

Bone Walker

SURRENDER THE MANUSCRIPT!

In honor of my first official Actual Writer’s Deadline, I’m cheerfully swiping that battle cry from userinfomizkit and userinforachelcaine, muaha!

Time to get down to Serious Business, people. I have to hand over Bone Walker to JoSelle on April 15th. Which means I have to write like a Crazy Writing Thing until then, because I’m still only about 32K in on this book. It is therefore now Crunch Mode time on the novel.

Which means also that I’m backing off hard on social networks until further notice. This means keeping tabs on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, LJ Friends list posts, or Dreamwidth reading list posts is just going to have to wait. If you need to get in touch with me, DM me on the network of your choice, or else just email me directly, since I will be monitoring my email.

But until you hear from me otherwise, people, I’m going to chugging through the rest of Bone Walker, as well as continuing to work with userinfosolarbird and artist Kiri in preparing Faerie Blood for printing, and in doing the last steps to submit the Kickstarter for review. I will continue to post updates as they happen, though, so watch this space for further details.

And oh yes, I did just drop 635 words on Chapter 11 of Bone Walker tonight. I mention this not because of that number, but because of what happened in the words in question: i.e., I just hit Kendis’ first occurrence of telling Christopher she loves him. I was not expecting it at this point in the story, but it felt appropriate, so there ya go!

More bulletins as events warrant!

March 22, 2012 by
Bone Walker, Faerie Blood

Plan of action for Faerie Blood, second edition

For those of you who may be wondering what the status is on my plans for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker, there are a few new developments I’d like to share!

First and foremost, I’ve been doing a bit of judicious Googling and also asking around to get a sense of whether I should use one of the services available to deploy a new version of Faerie Blood out into the wild, or whether I can save myself some money and just do it myself. The answer to this question appears to be the latter. I had a lovely little email exchange with romance novelist Courtney Milan, who kindly advised me on how she got her recent self-pubbed Unraveled out: i.e., she deployed directly to Amazon, B&N, and Apple herself, and used Smashwords to hit a couple other services like Kobo and Sony. Moving forward, I’m going to be looking with more depth into how to do these things.

Secondly, I also asked Ms. Milan if she had preferred software for creating her ebook editions. She pointed me at this excellent guide by Guido Henkel about how to do ebook formatting, with a focus on epub and mobi versions. Boil it down to its essentials, and what you get is “do a bit of tweaking to your original manuscript file, throw in some HTML and CSS, and then fling it through Calibre”. As y’all know, I’m a professional techie. HTML and CSS? Not a problem. So yeah, I can totally do this formatting myself.

(Mad, mad props both to Ms. Milan and to Mr. Henkel, by the way. If you’re a romance reader you should totally go read Ms. Milan’s Turner series, the first two books of which I have reviewed here and here! And if you’re not already familiar with the ebook creation process and you want to be, you should go read Mr. Henkel’s guide and thank him for his work!)

Third, in commencing the tweaking of Faerie Blood‘s previously released RTF file, I’m finding some things that need tweaking. After several hard rounds of editing on Lament of the Dove, my older tendency towards ellipses, which is still present in Faerie Blood, is standing out hard. So I’m going to clean those up.

Also, since this book was originally written in 2003, its ‘present day’ setting is in fact 2003, and that now reads a bit weird to 2012 eyes–especially in regards to things like my mentions of older-style cell phones and passing references to pay phones as well. I’m going to tweak these things a bit since it won’t impact the story any, just incidental details to give a better ‘present day’ feel to any new readers who may pick me up. I am aware that this will require me to adjust my perceptions on ages and timing of certain things that took place before this novel; that’s okay. None of those things are actually in released work yet, so they’re still flexible!

And! I was sad to have realized that the first edition of Faerie Blood didn’t have a proper dedication or a proper acknowledgements section. I will be correcting both of these problems, along with an Author’s Note that will mention the changes I’m describing here.

Fourth, I will definitely be pursuing working with Third Place Books (and possibly also the University Bookstore) to engage their espresso book machine to generate any print copies of Faerie Blood–about which I am more excited now that I’ve learned that these machines are not restricted to trade paperback size. So step one here is going to be to get userinfosolarbird to do a proper print layout for a PDF version, and step two will be arranging to hand that off to be printed.

Fifth, I am investigating a particular artist recommended to me by userinfotiggymalvern, and have had a hopeful initial email exchange with her, including sending her a review copy of Faerie Blood‘s Drollerie edition to see if she wants to commit to doing new cover art for me. More on this as it happens!

Last but not least, please note that all of these plans do not preclude proceeding with a Kickstarter for Bone Walker! Before I move forward with that, though, I’d really like to nail down a cover artist, since it will be important to me to have professional-looking art that can give all three books of this projected trilogy a unifying style. More on this as it happens, too!

February 18, 2012 by
Bone Walker

Status update re: plans for Bone Walker, and also, questions!

Wanted to do another post to let you guys know what I’m up to in regards to getting Faerie Blood repubbed, and getting Bone Walker finished up and ready to go out in its wake.

First and foremost–still trying to find out whether the cover artist I’m looking at can do a commission for me for art for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker both. In the event that that doesn’t work out, though, does anyone out there have recommendations for artists you like that might suit? I would prefer people who do drawn or painted art vs. photo manipulation, but I’m willing to consider people with decent photo manipulation skills as well.

Link me up with your recs, people! Bonus points if the people in question have previous experience doing cover art and a prior history of commissions.

Secondly–I’m still planning the Kickstarter idea but I am also strongly considering BookBaby. BookBaby is a sister brand to CD Baby, and from what I’m seeing, they could potentially provide not only the ability to deploy ebooks to all the major ebook vendor sites, but ALSO printed copies. Most importantly, they claim they give 100 percent of sales back to the author. Now, since these are the same people that do CD Baby and I know of several musicians (including my very own beloved spouse) who are happy with that, I’m inclined to look on BookBaby favorably. But does anyone out there have any direct experience with using them, or know people who do? Let me know!

Right now my highest priority is finishing the last round of edits on Lament of the Dove so that I can fling that back at Carina Press, finally. I’m hoping to get that done by February 25th so that I can have it off my queue before Dara and I run off to Canada for a grand four-day weekend of awesomeness! After that, my next priority will be spending as much of March as possible finishing Bone Walker so that I can then get it edited.

More as I know it!

February 15, 2012 by
Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer

Faerie Blood and Lament of the Dove status report

As of this writing, Faerie Blood has finally vanished off of Fictionwise–and by extension, ereader.com, since Fictionwise owns that site and to the best of my knowledge, they use the same database. This means now that the novel shouldn’t be available for sale anywhere at all.

It’s a bit weird, being back to square one with this book, even if at a smaller scale than several traditionally published authors I know who’ve had a series fold out from underneath them. At the same time, though, it’s also a bit of a relief.

Faerie Blood is now in the queue at Carina Press, for all the same general reasons I was interested in them before: i.e., they’re queer-friendly, they’re digital and therefore appealing to me as a tech geek, they’re taking all genres and do a lot of ‘other genres with heavy romantic elements’ stuff in particular, they now have a solid and established track record. In this specific case, though, I’ve also noted that they’ve published at least a couple of authors who’d been previously published elsewhere–at least one author for example who was previously published through Dorchester. So I’m hoping that this’ll mean they’ll be receptive to my work.

Relatedly, I am one, count it, one single chapter away from finishing the sixth draft of Lament of the Dove. Once that happens, I will be putting out a call for beta readers. (I’m cognizant that we’re moving into the Christmas/Solstice season, though, so I will be trying to schedule around that, and targeting sending Lament off in early January.) Watch this space for further details on that, people!

December 6, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

Hiatus report

Here I am on Saturday, so I thought I’d go ahead and tell y’all about what progress I’ve made on Lament of the Dove. Short form–not as much as I would have liked. Chances are high I’m not going to be finished by tomorrow.

But, and this is the important thing: I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved. I made it into Chapter 20, only to discover that I had to rewrite pretty much 2/3rds of the entire chapter in order to accomplish one of the last remaining changes on the Carina editor’s request list: i.e., giving Faanshi a better path of development, and demonstrating to the reader that she begins to progress in getting a handle on her power.

For the last few days I’ve therefore been inching my way through rewriting Chapter 20. I’ve made substantial progress on it, and I think the result’s going to be a much more dynamic chapter overall. It’s not only aiming for the Faanshi goal I mentioned, but also to raise the stakes on her link with Kestar, as I’m trying to demonstrate that yes, it is an active danger to both of them.

This means I’m likely going to have to rewrite some of Chapter 21 as well, since that’s the next Kestar chapter, and he’ll have to react to some of this new stuff I’m writing in Chapter 20. We’ll see how far I get by tomorrow night, and if I can keep up the momentum over the next couple of weeks. I still want to get Lament squared away soon, ideally with enough time to let beta readers look over this hopefully final draft before userinfosolarbird and I take off for VCON at the end of the month.

Wish me luck, all!

September 10, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

Six chapters left

Tonight, hoping to get a head start on the Great Editpalooza next week, I did some poking at the rest of Chapter 18 of Lament of the Dove. I am pleased to report that I have actually finished the edits on that chapter, as of this post!

This means I have six, count ’em, six chapters left to do and a nine-day vacation to do them in. I can do this thing. I WILL do this thing. And if I finish before the nine days are up, I’ll shift immediate gears into resuming throwing words at Bone Walker or whatever else will take them; the Internet hiatus will still be in effect.

So get your Anna in while supplies last, people! I will not be monitoring any of the social networks at all next week, and I cannot guarantee I’ll pay attention to journal or blog comments either. I will however keep an eye on regular email.

And for the curious, Lament is currently clocking in around 107K, which is about 3,500 words added back in as of this draft–most of which have come in with the entirely new scene I’ve written to replace the beginning of Chapter 18. This is still well within the range of word count limits Carina Press’s editor asked for. It’ll be interesting to see if any further substantial word count changes occur.

Wish me luck, folks.

September 1, 2011 by
About Me, Valor of the Healer, Writing

I have a cunning plan

Which is to say, I’m going to take the entire week of Labor Day off since I have the vacation time to spare, and work on finishing my edits. To further this goal, I will be also dropping off the net for the duration of that week. I’ll still be answering email, but I won’t be monitoring Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, and for the most part I’ll only be answering email sent directly to me (as opposed to any of the mailing lists I’m on, or comments on any of my posts).

Noting this now by way of general accountability. I may post status updates during that week–again, for purposes of accountability–but I can’t guarantee I’ll answer any comments on them.

We’ll see how much I can get done before then; any little bit I can get done before does after all further the goal. And anything I can write above and beyond finishing the edits on Lament will be bonus. Christopher and Kendis are looking VERY expectant in the back of my brain, you know.

So there you have it. If you think you might want to get a hold of me during that week for whatever reason, email, text, or phone will be best! If you think you should have those means of contacting me and you don’t, let me know.

August 12, 2011 by