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Keep On Keeping On

Pam Baddeley, Writer Posted on by
Plant growing through crack in pavement

SymphonyofLove, Pixabay. Public domain

After the whole Christmas and New Year thing, it’s taking a while for energy levels to get back to normal as far as writing goes. Lots of distractions still keep appearing and I’ve only managed to edit another two chapters since Christmas. The situation is a bit like one of those old school reports which said “Must try harder”.

Hence, not a lot to report, but I am trying to get back to a regular schedule of blogging and checking in with the ROW80 motivational group of fellow writers and bloggers.

One thing I did do in the Christmas run-up was to polish a short story that I wrote a few years back, and submit it to a competition which closed on 31st December. It’s been a while since I last entered a competition – must have been in the first quarter of 2016 – and it’s an odd short story, not at all my usual sort of thing, but the competition looked appropriate.

Other than that, I’ve added another professional editor to my list of those to approach, following a recommendation from someone on the SFFC forum.

To summarise the latest goals and progress:

  1. Play the novel through on text-to-speech and make further amendments – Up to end of chapter 20 of the latest run through.
  2. Work out how to format a Kindle book including the front and end pages and what to put in those – Quite a lot accomplished. Have looked at other ebooks by self published authors I know, and they all differ. Need to sort out the graphic I was using as the title page – when I had the publisher logo with normal text it split the page text, but the graphic all-in-one wasn’t big enough either and looks silly.
  3. Once the final edit is complete, approach the various editors previously identified as possible pro editors to establish how much it would cost for this long first MS, and whether it can be done without having to spend ‘loadsamoney’.

 

ROW80 has changed its format and posts updates in a Facebook group instead of a blog ‘linky list’. You can access it here.

Comments

Keep On Keeping On — 4 Comments

  1. These sound like good goals, Pam. I don’t know what the SFFC forum us, but I’d love to be clued in! I have a front and back matter project this round, too. I read APE (Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur) a couple of years ago, and there was some great info there. I think they also have a website.

    I hope you’ll continue to ease back into a more regular schedule; until then, celebrating the little steps is a good way to inspire more. =)

  2. Hello, Pam. Good to see you working on ROW80. I’m still getting used to the Facebook connect but will persevere. Wish you would say a bit more about test-to-speech. Is this a Word feature? Something else? I do read aloud to my F2F writing group, and it amazes me always what kinds of issues can be caught by simply reading out loud. Kudos to you also for doing that research on what other self-published authors include in their prefaces and supplemental comments. Are you looking in your genre? Some writers I’ve noted use a very personal tone . . . one I’m still working on developing. I have no advice re paid editors. One issue other writers struggle with is how much editing can affect your unique voice . . . so are you going for editing or developmental editors? Have you worked with beta readers??? Overall, excellent progress. Have a great week.

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