So, yes, everything is going very well, in fact. I have a few blog articles I need to write (soon), but my absolute top priority now is getting my book ready for publishing. And that's what I've been doing, and why I haven't blogged for a while. (Strewth: for three weeks!)
In some ways, I've found this round of editing and revising to be harder than the last one. That surprised me. I thought it couldn't very well be more challenging than inventing a major new plot element that fit seamlessly while turning the 1st half of the story into a properly-satisfying novel in its own right - and then writing the 60k words to Make It So. Right?
But Dave at thEditors did another amazing job of critiquing the new version of the 1st-half of the story, now a book-in-itself. Once again, at every level. Which meant I needed not just a bunch of new scenes (about 30k wds, probably more than Dave intended), and having to come to grips with cutting a lot (about 18k wds, probably less than Dave intended!), too; but also addressing I guess somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 line-comments in the MS itself. Covering the range from "dead easy, a few seconds work", to "Hmm, yeah... several hours later...". Along with some major shuffling of scenes and even chapters, which left me in a tangled mess at one point, that took a whole day to straighten out.
From which I've come to suspect that each external-edit will be unique, and bring its own unique challenges. But I'm going to take that as a sign that I'm learning, actually: that I'm finding new mistakes to make, and beginning to see things that were invisible to me before - with Dave's help. (The new things, that is: not the mistakes!)
So I've taken forty minutes to post this quick update. I've addressed all Dave's comments, as best I can, though there are now a bunch of return questions for him. And I'm about 25% of the way through my first polish of all the new (first draft) scenes and snippets I've added. Then will come a day or two of proofreading/polishing, then I'll see what Dave thinks about my remaining questions.
While doing that (and reporting bugs in LibreOffice: none catastrophic), and getting the new (final) cover from Mirella (yay!), and changing my author name from "Luke J. Kendall" to "L. J. Kendall", I realised I couldn't meet my mid-November deadline. But when I sat down and roughly scheduled the next few weeks, I saw that if I aimed to publish now on the anniversary of my wife's death last year, the 11th of December, that would be nicely fitting - as well as giving me a couple of extra days just-in-case.
So that's the new plan, and I really, really don't want to miss that one. But I have a good feeling about this deadline.
Oh, and in the end, despite the more fiery cover with the more vicious dog being better artistically and probably a better choice from the marketing viewpoint, in the end I chose the truer cover which better reflects the story. After all, since I'm self-publishing, I can hardly claim "Sorry, guv'nor. That's the Marketing Department: nothing to do with me, guv'nor!"
Here they are - front:
Grr, Blogger bug? What about if I insert that in a smaller size?...
Okay, no go. How about if I upload it directly...?
and back:
Now: back to work!
