I’d quite deliberately handed ATLANTIS FALLEN over to beta readers who didn’t know the world the serial numbers had been scraped off, in order to see if the worldbuilding held up! Because that was my big concern! Except I also sent it my cover artist, who did know the old world, and she emailed me in the middle of reading it and said “So how come you didn’t do X with this instead of sticking with the Y you had in place?” …well, because I didn’t think of that. God…
I went out to write today, and wrote an entire Old Races short story, 5700 words, which…pretty nearly did my brain in. I’m going to have to take a revision pass at it in a few days, because I’m not sure how coherent it is. At about 5K my brain dried up and I went to ask Twitter to cheer me on so I could finish it, and cheer they did. Good peeps, are Tweeps. :) I dropped by Chapters Bookstore, too, to see if they had MAGIC & MANNERS…
I *finally* got the proof for MAGIC & MANNERS (the freaking delivery service couldn’t find our Giant Invisible House). It’s extremely, extremely pretty, except it has precisely the error I feared it would: See that thin blue line alond the spine side? That’s the spine color, and it’s not supposed to be there. (There’s one on the back, too.) The system’s template was confusing, and the cover artist made the same error I would have. The PDF proofs showed that blue line, but it was possible it was just a…
Last night I was feeling pretty pathetic and out of ideas for the last few stories in the Old Races Short Story Project (Part One), and moaned at Ted about not knowing what to write. An hour of brainstorming later I had three story ideas for the first part and one for the second, and today I went into Dublin for the purpose of voting, but since I was going anyway, also to write, and got 4K done on a new story. It’s got another couple-three thousand words to go,…
I’m trying to keep my nose to the grindstone while also being caught in this frustrating window of hurry up and wait. I put in an order for a proof for MAGIC & MANNERS on the 6th and it still hasn’t arrived, so I went and looked up why and the damned thing says it’s still ‘pending’. I don’t understand why, unless I’m supposed to tell the system that it’s print-approved, except as far as I can tell that will propagate it into the publication system and I don’t want…