“How did it get so late so soon?” Dr. Seuss

I have been doing a little research and have discovered writers in general are infrequent bloggers. Who knew that? I follow the blogs of several excellent writers in my genre and I assure you it’s true. The underlying reason has to be more than the simple fact writers are busy. Who isn’t? I wonder if it is because we so often are making things up that we find it difficult to write about our real worlds. I am not the only writer who breaks the first rule of blogging (Show up when you say you will.)  and goes for long stretches without posting. Writers who actually write their own blogs, (and the really big names usually do not) on a regular schedule are rare.

I have been busy “to-ing” and “fro-ing” and somehow December and January skipped away. I won’t bore you with the details but in addition to the usual holiday madness, we had a couple of other significant life events going on. One of which included answering the question: “On a scale of one-to-ten, what is your pain level?”

We ran into a problem with the paperback version of Francesca’s Foundlings. The issue was with the spacing of the words on the printed page. This required a page-by-page scrutiny to find any and all errors. Unfortunately this was sandwiched around everything else going on during that time and took a while to complete.

Roskerry Press was founded with the purpose of publishing my books. My husband and I are the only two permanent “employees” but we do use a professional artist to do the covers, as well as a professional editor. In addition, there are two dedicated copy editors who read the books when they are still in beta format.

The editing component of this work is not for the faint of heart. It is made even more difficult by the fact that many of the old editing rules no longer apply. The expression “Oh, that’s old school.” is true for all writing/editing today. There is also room for human error. Even the best editors are human. I recently read a novel by a well-known writer where suddenly in the second chapter, the name of one of the main characters changed. It took a second read through the previous chapter to wrap my mind around this. The editor should have caught it. But I understood how it happened. Characters may start out with one name and the writer for a variety of reasons changes it. In MacCullough’s Women, Neil Malone’s name was originally “Raymond”. I lived in terror that, despite obsessively doing a “search and replace”, I had somehow missed an occurrence in the manuscript. I did not. My fault seems to be a tendency to leave off the closing quotation marks when a character is speaking. I am pretty sure all writers are guilty of something.

The good news is, I am, indeed, back to work as requested this week by a reader on my Facebook page. The paperback version of Francesca’s Foundlings is once again being formatted. The online proof looks clean. I should have the physical proof in my hands by the end of the week. I am hoping it will be ready to go and available next week on Amazon.

The third novel in the Lynton Series, Maggie’s Girls, is a work-in-progress. I will be blogging more about that book in future posts. The novel explores the relationship between mothers and daughters, both biological and stepdaughters. When I worked in the development of technical training we had often used what we called, Subject Matter Experts or SMEs to insure the content was accurate. Having been a mother and stepmother for forty-three years, I considered myself to be an SME on this topic. I am excited about where this book is going.

My plan is to blog regularly about my books, my characters, my writing practice and The Muse, an indolent Tibetan Terrier called Arleigh Burke. I have also set myself the goal of learning how to use Scrivener described as a word-processing program and outliner designed for authors. Stay tuned. This writer is finding it a challenge.

 

The Muse