Writing Wibbles

Whew, I made it.

I recently finished reading a book (no, not the next review, nor the one after that) where the editing… well, there’s no easy way to put this. It started out really well, a few glitches here and there, all books have those. About halfway through, it got past the “all books” benchmark. In the last fourth of the book, the editing broke down completely. I tweeted the author about it — via direct message, no need to hang dirty laundry out in public — and she was pretty cool about the whole thing. Two people had edited it, and the author hadn’t looked it over before the final went out — heck, I’d have been inclined to think that two editors would have done the job as well. But like I said, she was pretty cool about it, and plans to roll out a corrected edition next month (hooray for eBooks!). I would probably have a very public meltdown if it happened to me; I’m anal about typos to the point where I’ll fix old blog posts if I see typos in them.

So I’m expecting lots of jitters before, and immediately after, the White Pickups release. I’ll be happy if it’s completely typo-free, but I need to keep some perspective — even if there are more than a handful, I can push out a corrected edition. I wanted to release it on Sep. 14, the day the story began, but I’d rather have it out late and right. I've probably gone through the entire thing several dozen times, no exaggeration — one advantage of serializing your work, it makes you go through it to make sure the next episode doesn’t wander off into the weeds. That’s one reason I’m going to start small (literally) with Xenocide as a short eBook. I figure I’ll learn several valuable things that I can use to make the White Pickups release go smoother.

I can’t remember, did I ever link to The Were-Traveler issue where my two drabbles appeared? My entries are #2 (Hunted), and in the middle (Unseen). If you haven’t seen them, go check them out. They’re all good.

Instead of a #FridayFlash this week, I’m participating in a bloghop. I think it will be interesting — there will be verbiage about how I use my handwritten notebooks and photos of my horrible penmanship, as well as links to other participants. (I may recycle a certain photo of Mason, just for the “the cute, it burns” factor.)