For the last month and a half I’ve been focused on getting Destiny ready for publication. I’ve cleaned it up as much as my limited editing skills allows and I hope some of my beta readers and friends can help with the rest. While grammarly.com has an amazing product, it still misses the finer issues that my grammar experienced friend has affectionately pointed out that afflict all of my works. She corrected the first page of Flight pointing out some of these issues I commonly make, and to be honest, I simply can’t catch them with my current skillset as of this time.
It’s frustrating on one level, but at the same time I know practice makes perfect. Every time I write and then correct my mistakes my skills improve. Sadly, I have no desire to wait for my grammar perfect friend to get around to correcting the story before I release Destiny. After much though on this conundrum, I’ve decided to go ahead and go with what I have. I’ll be making a few more additional tweaks and corrections to Destiny’s overall storyline as necessary as I get additional feedback, but once that’s finished I’ll release Destiny.
The good thing is that I can update the story any time as needed. With Amazon.com I can update the Ebook in an hour, which is where 99% of my sales are. I can also do the regular book, but the process is much more time intensive. As my grammar perfect friend gets around to correcting Destiny, I can always update those results directly to the new release at that time, which allows me to share the story now instead of later. I’m still expecting a March release, but worst case scenario is that Destiny will be pushed back until April.
I’m getting a lot of good feedback. Some I’ve decided to not implement, because the story stands on its own, while other things I have included. These points have been important enough that I don’t want to release before I get back a few more reviews from my beta readers. A fan named Aharon was nice enough to give me some excellent feedback on the story. One of his suggestions was to put in a Glossary of terms and characters, which I’ve already put together and attached to the story. Also he helped me clean up the text where I was referring to High Elves as both Gray and High. While some of us geekier old D&D players know that High & Gray Elves are the same, probably most of my other readers won’t know this ahead of time, which could cause some major confusion in the storyline. To keep matters clear I ended up going with the term “High Elf” to stop the confusion. Another friend/fan, Richard helped me clean up how I structured the chapters, and let me know he really like the overall characters and storyline.
Over the next two weeks I’ll be getting the cover edited with my overview of the story and other parts of the title and author name stuff that goes on the binder of the book. To answer one of the questions about getting a cover “ready for print”, I plan to take comprehensive notes for how I turn my image into a “print ready image” needed for the final step of publishing. There are separate layouts for the eBook and the actual physical book, which takes time to get everything formatted properly. I’ll be getting both of those ready to go while I’m waiting for everyone’s feedback on the story before publishing. Once that’s completed, I’m going to see if there is any way to cleanup Flight a little bit more, since I’ll be promoting Destiny with Flight and it would be nice if the story is in as good of shape as possible and start planning out the outline for Book three.
Of course while all of this excitement is going on, I’ll be dealing with the IRL issues that we all face on a daily basis. One of those is hopefully a new job. A little less than a year ago I learned that my position was going away due to my organization consolidating their HQ’s around the world, so if I want to stay in Germany a little bit longer (which is needed due to some family situations going on) then I needed to find a new organization to work for. Due to my line of work and living in a foreign country, this job change comes with a number of unique challenges. Hopefully I’ve found a new home with a pretty cool boss. Preliminarily it looks great, but I won’t know 100% until I have the final job offer in hand. Until then keep your fingers crossed and wish me luck.
The other big issue affecting my family is that Kanchen has been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of nasal cancer. The good news is that he’s over the 90 day hump so to speak, since he’s still alive and the chemo therapy that our doctor came up with is doing surprisingly well. The bad news is that it’s expensive, but what can you do. Hopefully Destiny can help cover some of his medical costs once it’s released. Other than that I’m realizing I need to start hitting the books again to up my IT certifications. I’m going to have to work that into my writing, family and life schedule.
I’m really excited about Book three of the series and can’t wait to get down and dirty on the story creation process. I’m always looking and reading for ideas to integrate into my story and recently I ran into several interesting fight scenes from the movie Sucker Punch. I’ll add in the scene from one of my favorite fight scenes from the movie. There are actually several that I think were awesome, and it was a toss-up between the Dragon and Samurai fights. Still, the Samurai fight scene won out. I don’t know how good the overall movie is. It did get terrible reviews, but the write-up I came across to what the story was symbolizing was actually pretty interesting. Even if the overall story does suck, the battle scenes I ran across on Youtube.com were amazing!
Anyway, due to everything going on, my blog has taken a backseat for the time being as IRL takes precedence. Hopefully now that my major editing of Destiny has been finished I’ll have a chance to blog more.
It’s frustrating on one level, but at the same time I know practice makes perfect. Every time I write and then correct my mistakes my skills improve. Sadly, I have no desire to wait for my grammar perfect friend to get around to correcting the story before I release Destiny. After much though on this conundrum, I’ve decided to go ahead and go with what I have. I’ll be making a few more additional tweaks and corrections to Destiny’s overall storyline as necessary as I get additional feedback, but once that’s finished I’ll release Destiny.
The good thing is that I can update the story any time as needed. With Amazon.com I can update the Ebook in an hour, which is where 99% of my sales are. I can also do the regular book, but the process is much more time intensive. As my grammar perfect friend gets around to correcting Destiny, I can always update those results directly to the new release at that time, which allows me to share the story now instead of later. I’m still expecting a March release, but worst case scenario is that Destiny will be pushed back until April.
I’m getting a lot of good feedback. Some I’ve decided to not implement, because the story stands on its own, while other things I have included. These points have been important enough that I don’t want to release before I get back a few more reviews from my beta readers. A fan named Aharon was nice enough to give me some excellent feedback on the story. One of his suggestions was to put in a Glossary of terms and characters, which I’ve already put together and attached to the story. Also he helped me clean up the text where I was referring to High Elves as both Gray and High. While some of us geekier old D&D players know that High & Gray Elves are the same, probably most of my other readers won’t know this ahead of time, which could cause some major confusion in the storyline. To keep matters clear I ended up going with the term “High Elf” to stop the confusion. Another friend/fan, Richard helped me clean up how I structured the chapters, and let me know he really like the overall characters and storyline.
Over the next two weeks I’ll be getting the cover edited with my overview of the story and other parts of the title and author name stuff that goes on the binder of the book. To answer one of the questions about getting a cover “ready for print”, I plan to take comprehensive notes for how I turn my image into a “print ready image” needed for the final step of publishing. There are separate layouts for the eBook and the actual physical book, which takes time to get everything formatted properly. I’ll be getting both of those ready to go while I’m waiting for everyone’s feedback on the story before publishing. Once that’s completed, I’m going to see if there is any way to cleanup Flight a little bit more, since I’ll be promoting Destiny with Flight and it would be nice if the story is in as good of shape as possible and start planning out the outline for Book three.
Of course while all of this excitement is going on, I’ll be dealing with the IRL issues that we all face on a daily basis. One of those is hopefully a new job. A little less than a year ago I learned that my position was going away due to my organization consolidating their HQ’s around the world, so if I want to stay in Germany a little bit longer (which is needed due to some family situations going on) then I needed to find a new organization to work for. Due to my line of work and living in a foreign country, this job change comes with a number of unique challenges. Hopefully I’ve found a new home with a pretty cool boss. Preliminarily it looks great, but I won’t know 100% until I have the final job offer in hand. Until then keep your fingers crossed and wish me luck.
The other big issue affecting my family is that Kanchen has been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of nasal cancer. The good news is that he’s over the 90 day hump so to speak, since he’s still alive and the chemo therapy that our doctor came up with is doing surprisingly well. The bad news is that it’s expensive, but what can you do. Hopefully Destiny can help cover some of his medical costs once it’s released. Other than that I’m realizing I need to start hitting the books again to up my IT certifications. I’m going to have to work that into my writing, family and life schedule.
I’m really excited about Book three of the series and can’t wait to get down and dirty on the story creation process. I’m always looking and reading for ideas to integrate into my story and recently I ran into several interesting fight scenes from the movie Sucker Punch. I’ll add in the scene from one of my favorite fight scenes from the movie. There are actually several that I think were awesome, and it was a toss-up between the Dragon and Samurai fights. Still, the Samurai fight scene won out. I don’t know how good the overall movie is. It did get terrible reviews, but the write-up I came across to what the story was symbolizing was actually pretty interesting. Even if the overall story does suck, the battle scenes I ran across on Youtube.com were amazing!
Anyway, due to everything going on, my blog has taken a backseat for the time being as IRL takes precedence. Hopefully now that my major editing of Destiny has been finished I’ll have a chance to blog more.
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