Absurd Minds – Serve or Suffer, from the album of the same name. Darkwave.
In honor (and relief) of my Book 3 document issues resolving (cross fingers, knock on wood), here’s a Book 3 theme. I find it suits well from Emperor Aradys to Archmagus Enkhaelen.
I’ve already complained about this to my Day Job peeps, but oh my god. I’ve been working on the formatting improvements for the earlier books (particularly Book 1, since I lost the print-formatted version a couple years ago when my old computer died). Everything’s been going just fine…
Until I got to the Book 3 files.
Because the Book 3 print-formatted file is four pages long.
*pause for cracked, maniacal laughter*
Now, mind you, this is the book that in physical print is 648 pages long. So, uh, no.
But I had my ebook-formatted file, and it was fine, right? So I could just make a copy of that and not do the print-formatting yet, and just do my tweaks in peace and safety, right?
So I tinkered with that for a couple hours. Went to work. Went to bed. Woke up to start working on it again.
Four. Pages. Long.
Granted, all the info is in there. Packed away somewhere in the data. I can find it when I open the document in a Notepad file — with all the formatting markup there in plain text, making it the work of madness to try to copy it over to a new file like that.
So…
Well.
*pitiful whimpering*
I still have that ebook-formatted one! I can just make a new copy and–
Hold up, let’s not be a crazy person, trying the same thing again just in case there’s a different outcome. Let’s be smarter than that.
So I figure it’s the size of the file that’s the problem. (Cross fingers that’s all it is.) I’d been having formatting issues with the Book 3 print version from the beginning, because it’s a beast, so the best thing to do would be to split it into two documents and work on it at a size where my writing program won’t choke to death.
Did that for eight hours today, working on the first file.
I have now saved it, and backed up a version in another document format, and am hoping beyond hope that nothing screws up this time.
Please cross your fingers for me.
D. D. Phillips is still chugging along on the cover (post inbound within a week or so, I think!) but in the interim, when she doesn’t have access to her cover files or the energy/attention to work on all those layers, she sometimes does creatures for me!
Well, this time she did some ogre tusk tests…which morphed into something more.
She’s done a bit of ogre work for me before, as seen in the sidebar, but we never got proper finished/colorized versions together. This time though, she went researching hippos (which are the base for my ogres) and got me the tusk types below. Alas, while tiny hippo ears are almost unbearably cute, they’re a little too hippo, and I was concerned that on the more greenish-skinned ogres they’d start to look a bit….Shrek. So after the pic below, the ears get shifted larger and downward.
My good friend at Sanguine Press has just gotten the Transitions and Awakenings: No Regrets anthology out in ebook format, with paperback soon to come. Check it out!
Yes, I’ve been quiet. I think I’ll continue to be quiet-ish until the series is over — with maybe a few info posts here and there, plus teasers, etc, but nothing major until I start prepping for the collaboration I have planned with Erica Dakin or the second series I have in mind.
Meanwhile, the Book 4 cover work continues (slowly). This isn’t entirely bad, because I have figured out a few things that need tweaking in the final draft, which I’ll be fixing shortly. I am also halfway done with the rough draft of Book 5 (which is what helped me realize the need for tweaks) and just finished a hopefully-final edit of Book 1 that took into account much of the critique from readers as well as some issues that had always nagged at me. I feel that I did rush publication of Book 1 due to (over)enthusiasm, and that this current version has fixed most of the book’s problems. I hope to roll it out within a month or two, once my beta readers go through it and confirm I haven’t somehow butchered it. >__>
I plan to go through books 2 and 3 eventually, but they don’t have nearly the issues and will probably just get trimmed/error-corrected.
Anyway, that’s it for now!
Heh…good question to post on a day where I feel like a useless lump and am not likely to do anything productive.
Question 122 – Write every day. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
I agree with making an attempt at this. It’s one of the things that pushed me from only periodically hacking at my manuscript to actually making leaps and bounds of progress, and publishing three books (with two more still being worked on). I used to feel that I could only write when I was inspired to, and while that still stands for short stories (which otherwise I hate writing with every fiber of my being), with novels there’s a lot of material that’s just setup, or explanation, or rough-draft raw material that doesn’t require you to be possessed by the creative fire at the time. I’ve found myself far more capable of writing decent text even when I feel like a lump of crud; this delusion I have that I’ll forget how to write if I’m in a mood or put it off too long is, indeed, just a delusion. Most of the work in writing is the refining of the drafts anyway. What you put out from day to day isn’t the final version that everyone will see. So even if it does happen to be sludge, it’s the sludge of progress.
That being said, everyone needs their rest days, or has days when opening the document is just too much stress. Still, constant progress is a good habit to get into, as is understanding that every word doesn’t need to be perfect right as it’s first spilling out of your pen (or keyboard).
