Saturday Musings

I've been busy getting things ready for a print version of Spiral X. Yes, you heard that correct. The wife and I talked it over and we're going to go ahead with a print version using Amazon's Createspace service. We're also going to enroll the book into the Pro Plan, which is going to allow me to set the price to the same as any other paperback out there. There's no profit in that, but the point of this endeavor is to have a print copy available to send out for reviews, as well as to give to family and friends who don't have e-readers. There's a fee involved in using the Pro Plan, but I've made enough off the sales of the e-book version to fund it. Along with the print version will be a new cover. That's still being finalized (mostly down to the back cover and spine), but it'll be the same cover as the e-book version. I uploaded that this morning so I'll update what it looks like on the side once everything propagates.

Part of this process is doing one last pass through of the manuscript to get rid of whatever issues might remain. I'm using a program I discovered through Kindleboards called Serenity Editor. I wish I had known about this thing back in October. Seriously. It's called attention to so many small things that didn't even cross my mind. Like my use of "towards" instead of "toward", which is the proper spelling. Or my misuse of hyphens and word conjunctions. I'm using the trial version right now but the more I use it the more I am inclined to buy it. If anything it'll help improve my writing, which is something any writer should strive to do. Except now I would have something of an instructor looking over my shoulder telling me what I'm doing wrong. It's not infallible, as many of the suggestions occur within the midst of dialog, and the way we speak is different from the way things are presented in the written word. I deliberately tried to mimic speech patterns and phrases we use within the dialog of the characters, so I'm ignoring the majority of those suggestions.

School started on Wednesday and I went to my first seminar with the Access course. It's going to be interesting. The writing course has something called "flex seminar", which means they give you an option between five different seminar times. I'm not a fan. Of the five times available I can make one of them. Things would have been better served by giving me the option ahead of time. I mean, seriously, what if I hadn't been able to make any of them? Oh well, I can make at least one so I guess it's not a big deal. Doesn't mean I can't disagree with the process.

I think that's enough for today. I'll stop by again tomorrow for Sample Sunday. I know you all eagerly anticipate the event and I would hate to disappoint. Later!