Ravens' View

Full disclosure - it's actually the 29th, I'm late again.

There are advantages and disadvantages of being self employed. One being a certain freedom to pick when to work and when not to - to decide whether it's a weekday or a weekend. And if your job is something you really enjoy spending time on - such as being a writer - then the lines start to blur.

All to say, I finished the last(?) round of edits on my novel on Wednesday and fired the latest version off to my editor/publisher. Once he reviews it, we proceed to the Kindle/Createspace steps, get copies out to a distributor, and do a launch. Yay! In the meantime, I guess I've some time off. I've decided it's the weekend. Possibly a long one. possibly a one day long one.

I started yesterday with a long and lazy conversation over coffee on a patio with a friend, then beers at a pub, then some km's on the meter, home for dinner, open mike at a new place, open mike at an old place, a slightly wobbly walk home (6 blocks) at 3:00 a.m., then an ill-advised decision to stay up and watch episodes of The West Wing until five. 

Thursday was mostly a day of rest, although I still managed to do some reading and various publishing chores - because I love my job!

I've been editing for the past few days. I added in most of the suggested changes from the proofreader loop, then printed out one final copy and grabbed a red pen. I'm seeing a few errors still - like calling someone Scottie then Scotty, back and forth between the two. Also found some timing issues, redundancies - minor errors. However, I'm also finding phrases that 'could' be tweaked to improve them a bit. I'm trying to not do too much of that. As my publisher reminds me, this is a first novel, and at some point just have to stop and get it out there. I'm at the 3/4 mark.

This week’s challenge from Terrible Minds was another mashup. Given a list of 20 sub-genres, pick two at random and mash them together into a 1500 word story.

The list:

1. Dystopian Young Adult
2. Slasher Film
3. Weird West
4. Zombie Apocalypse
5. Paranormal Romance
6. Ancient Myth
7. Fairy Tale
8. Spy Thriller / Espionage
9. Haunted House
10. Erotic Horror
11. Low Fantasy (“Grimdark”)
12. Dieselpunk
13. Time Travel
14. Murder Mystery
15. Southern Gothic
16. Noir
17. Alternate WWII History
18. Kaiju
19. Comedic Fantasy
20. Psychological Horror

I got 3, 5 - Weird West and Paranormal Romance. Here’s my story, at just over 1400.

Yay! I got my novel back from the proofreader. She made a number of punctuation changes, but also suggested some changes in phrases and even emphasis in scenes. All with change tracking of course, so up to me to accept/reject. Publisher (and her) are following the Chicago Manual of Style, so that's what I'll be doing in the future.

At this stage I can't really make any big changes without touching a lot of text, and thus requiring another proofreading loop. Therefore, I've limited myself to tweaking it here and there - verrrry carefully. I am keeping her suggestions in mind for the next novel though. It's patiently waiting to be edited.