Partially because I feel like I should blog, because it's been a week and I can't neglect the blog. I've been busy writing (or trying to write), to get as many chapters of City of Secrets possible ready before the big release date. July 19th in case you forgot. One week! Yay!
Unfortunately, I won't have nearly as many ready as I thought, but that's always the case with anything involving a self-imposed deadline. I should know this by now. I'm still recovering spoons from the move. That's the thing about not having enough spoons to start with. It takes you much, much longer to get them back. Every time I get a couple back, I use them all up again because I still have so much stuff to do. My apartment's still not fully set up. I have a new desk which is sitting in a box on my office (I feel important saying office) floor. I don't know when it's getting put together, because last week I put together a small cabinet, and it kicked my butt.
But all in all I'm very excited and nervous and neurotic about City of Secrets. I'm not sure this is the right thing to do for my story. I'm putting a glorified second draft (2nd and a half draft?) online. I know that's sort of the point (it gets reviewed/critiqued online, then I self-publish it), but now I'm getting all nervous about it. I could wait until it's done-done, but now I've bought a cover and gotten all excited about it. Sure, there's really no right or wrong way to publish, because there are so many ways, and I would freak out no matter what way I chose because it's what I do.
All right. I've vented. Freak out over. I'm sticking with the current plan.
It's so not over. It's just over on my blog. But I'm still sticking with the current plan, freak out or no.
Funny story time. I had this thing with names going for my first draft. There are a lot of characters in this story, and for some reason I decided to be old-fashioned or clever or I don't even know what, and have every male have the same name as his father. Sure, that stuff happens in real life. But in your novel, if both father and son are going to be in your story, you really shouldn't do that. I'm all for being realistic, but not when it's confusing as hell. Even I was confused. When the author is confused, that's a bad thing. So, I needed to change lots of names for the second draft, and not just father/son names. I also started lots of names with the same later and that got a bit confusing too, in certain contexts.
I had to do a lot of find and replaces. In case you don't know, find and replace is very sensitive. You have to make sure to put in spaces where spaces are needed. I know this. I just forgot. I was replacing all the Toms with Henry, and forgot to put a space after the "m" in Tom. So, word replaced every instance of "tom" with "henry". Think about it. Lots of words have "tom" in it. Tomorrow. Stomach. Bottom. The character whose name I was keeping, Tommy. It was a mess. Picture it: Henryorrow. SHenryomach. BotHenry (which is somehow not getting flagged as a misspelled word). Henrymy. After I figured out what happened, cried (not really, but almost), it actually wasn't that hard to figure out what the words were supposed to be and do a spellcheck and fix it. It wasted a good half an hour though. Now that I fixed it, I can laugh about it. The reason I'm sharing it is so you guys can laugh at me too. Because it's funny.
Luckily, that's done, and I have almost six chapters ready. My super-secret thing is ready, and I just have a couple more non-writing things to do. So, one more week. Don't forget. Teasers are coming in the next day or two. Also, like my Facebook page! Pretty please!
Facebook.com/beckymunyonauthor
No comments:
Post a Comment