Howdy howdy, squiders! How’s it going? We’re on spring break this week so all our routines are out of sync, joy of joys. (I did teach the small, mobile ones how to play ERS, Oh Hell, and Hearts, though. Essential life skills.)
Because of the break, I’m putting working on the Book 1 revision on temporary hiatus. Just for this week. But I did manage to get that new chapter I was pondering outlined. It took longer than I would have liked. Everything with this revision requires so much baggage, ugh.
As part of outlining, I went into Book 2 (which took an annoyingly long time to find) to check a couple of things, which is always a bit of a bad idea, because I tend to get caught up in the story and read more than I mean to (and sometimes I get so caught up I go through Book 3 as well, though I managed to avoid that this time). This time, everything that’s wrong with Book 2 really threw me, for some reason.
Book 2 is the oldest of the drafts–according to my notes in the document, I wrote it in 2011, which is forever ago, and so the writing in general is just old. And I’ve done two more revisions on Book 1 since then, so it’s out of date in many places, plot and characterwise.
But still, a problem for future!Kit.
This week we’re working on getting Deep and Blue ready for publication. I made a cover in January, so I’m doing the final edit and working on the book description this month. I think I’ll release it through Kindle Unlimited for now and go wide later in the year.
DnB was originally released as a serial on Turtleduck Press, so there is some clean up to be done in between the sections (unlike Across Worlds with You, I didn’t write it all at once, so there is some summary at the beginnings of the sections that needs removing) and also some weird phrasing, and I think I may have found a plot issue (easy to fix, just need to remove a mention of something, so it’s just deciding which is the right place for the remaining mention to stay).
The book description is, of course, one of the hardest parts, and despite all the years I’ve been publishing and the number of books and anthologies I have worked on, it never seems to get any easier. At some point, surely, this should be a honed skill. But it is not.
Alas.
If I can get the edit and the description done this week, the last step is doing the formatting (ebook only at this point in time, so easier than print) and uploading everything. I love formatting–it’s very relaxing, the left side of brain loves it–but I may put that off til April, because I do need to do some coordination with the rest of Turtleduck Press about publication dates and all that jazz.
Still, it’s nice to work on something else for a minute, and I do really like this story, so it’s been fun to read back through it again.
Happy Spring, squiders! See you next week!
