I’m working hard on The Young Sorceress, revising the part that I’ve already written. I’ve discovered something. I’ve written the kids in the story too old. They are supposed to be 5, 2, and 1 and they’re talking like frickin’ geniuses. One of those kids is going to grow up to be a college professor, and the other two have big destinies awaiting them too, but they’ve still got to be children for a while. Oh well, that’s why we have revision.
I’ve started in earnest revising Blood Trade. First up, I’m going through all the notes from alpha and beta readers. I’ve essentially got 20 copies of the book, chopped into chapter long pieces, filled with notes. I’ll make the suggested changes that I agree with and leave the rest as is. Then I’ll go through and do a close re-write. When that is done, it may be ready to start editing.
The votes are in and this is the cover chosen. Now that Women of Power is in the can, I can get on the first revision of Blood Trade. At this point I’m expecting it to take till the end of September, so you should expect a release about November 1st.
As I work on finishing Women of Power, just a bit about the revision and editing process. As I write, I solicite alpha readers (friends, family, and members of my writers’ group) to give me feedback as I go. I make major changes as I go along– adding, cutting, moving sections around. When the entire first draft is done, I have my beta readers (often but not always the same people) go back to it. At this point, I’m not editing. I’m revising. I’m looking for changes to be made in the storytelling.
Once I’ve got the manuscript the way I want it, I give it a few editing passes. Editing is much harder to do on your own manuscript because you know it. You’re very likely to skip over errors because you know what’s supposed to be there. If possible, I have my crack team of grammarians go over the manuscript again. My final pass uses the program Text2Go to read the manuscript aloud to me as I follow along in the text. I’ve caught many errors that I missed and many that editors missed.
Once all that is done and my story is ready to go out, it’s a quick trip through the formatting machine (That’s me. I format it myself.) and then it’s available to ebook lovers everywhere.
I finished the revision of His Robot Girlfriend, though I haven’t yet listened to it being read aloud. I already posted the updated version to Smashwords. The great thing about Smashwords is that you can post multiple revisions. When I finish listening, then I’ll post new versions on Feedbooks and the other sites. The main reason I went ahead and sent the half measure, is that I am getting tired of reading comments about all the typos. I found and fixed about a dozen typos, but an entire page where the quotation marks have been replaced with @– that’s not a typo. That’s a problem somewhere in the conversion process from .doc to .epub. Thankfully, Smashwords’ conversion software is much improved of late. Also I fixed something that was bothering me. I finally got all the regular (non-tilty) quotation marks replaced with smart quotation marks (the ones where the begin quote is different than then end quote). I also made a few text changes so that a few points were more clear– not many. I’d say I change, deleted, or added maybe fifty sentences. I’ll let you know when I’ve uploaded the final second edition version, should anyone out there be interested.
As I mentioned the other day, I am working on the second edition of His Robot Girlfriend. I’ve finished revising the second chapter and as soon as I’m done with all ten, I’ll start listening to it being read. Not too many changes so far– two typos, and one actual mistake, two revisions (tweaking things to make them make more sense). What I can’t believe is how comma-crazy I was. I’ve deleted about 30 commas so far and the story still has a few more than it would if I wrote it today. Oh well, learning and improving is what life is all about, right?,,,,
Here’s Steffie Sinn, the fourth musician character from Tesla’s Stepdaughters, courtesy of the Rock Band 2 game. I think my plan right now is to start the revision on this book when school ends. I’m not planning on teaching this summer, but instead devoting my time to Grad School and writing. We’ll see how long the revision takes, but you should see the ebook of Tesla’s Stepdaughters out by September.
City of Amathar 
