Courtesy of ClkerFreeVectorImages, Pixabay, public domain

Well, another length gap from my last blog, but I have at least been doing ‘stuff’.  My separate blog post on cover design for self published books has been in preparation for weeks, and I finally published that today.

The main thing I’ve been doing, apart from working with a designer to complete my custom cover for ‘Rian’, which is now complete, is slowly but surely doing a final line edit on that MS.  I’ve been doing that under Camp NaNoWriMo this month and have met my goal of 20,000, since one hour of editing equates to 1,000 words on Camp; in fact, I’ve managed 21,000 and may even do a bit more before I have to validate.  I found one or two more glitches:  for example, if everyone who has been ‘touched by evil’ is affected in the climactic part of the book (not saying too much to avoid spoilers) then the character who has been becoming increasingly paranoid and has already made an attempt on another character’s life obviously has to be affected also.  After so many years of working on this book I’ve only just spotted that!  Never mind, it wasn’t a major problem to fix as he had previously run off in the caverns looking for someone, so I just had to amend one small section.

One thing I’m thinking of doing is submitting to the open submission period that Hodderscape are running shortly.  The nice people at Hodder won’t hang onto the MS for very long if they don’t want to publish it so it seems sensible to have a last attempt at traditional publication for this book, having got it into the best shape it’s ever been.  Just need to face the toil of getting such a huge story into a two page synopsis.

I only completed one ROW80 goal from last time, which was to get the cover done, so my goals are now:

• complete the Rian update and submit to Hodderscape
• research how to format manuscripts for self publishing on Kindle
• obtain quotes for professional editing (though they will probably work out far too expensive)

So, now for those nice people at ROW80: