Holiday Writing Update

Happy Holidays, dear readers!

Since Christmas is tomorrow and I’ll probably be busy with presents and turkey and so on and so forth, I thought I’d check in tonight to A) wish every Happy Holidays, and B) do a quick little update on my current writing adventures.

Writing Adventure #1: Proofing Imminent Danger And How to Fly Straight into It

I’m now on Round #3 of proofing the shiny new edition of Imminent Danger. Originally I was just intending to do a quick run-through of the iUniverse version, add in some commas, chop out some adverbs, and then repackage it and call it a day. But once you start revising … well, let’s just say I ended up doing a bit more editing than I expected. The story is still the exact same, the scenes are the exact same, it’s just a few phrases and wordings that have shifted to enhance clarity, enhance humor, etc.

First proofing round was about checking formatting and typos. Second proofing round went to my mother (aka my editor extraordinaire) who found some extremely minor logical flaws that needed correcting — plus typos and some more wording changes.

Now I’m on the third round, which I’ve given to my little brother Jesse to read through for typos. I don’t know if he’ll actually read it, as he’s very busy playing computer games (*cough*sarcasm*cough*), so I’ll probably have to end up scanning it for typos again myself. I’ll probably employ the “read it backwards” technique to make sure I’m not distracted by the story. There’s also a weird formatting issue where the text on some pages are higher than on other pages, giving the book a lop-sided appearance — but since this only happened on this proof round, I suspect it’s an issue with the printing process. I’ve emailed Amazon, and we’ll get it sorted out before the book goes live for sale.

Writing Adventure #2: Editing Chasing Nonconformity with Linda Schneidereit

Mom and I are back into our “SHWOOP sessions”, which basically means we’re video chatting via Google Hangouts and I share my screen with her so we can edit the book page by painstaking page. It takes forever and is very frustrating (mostly because, as mentioned, it takes forever), but each page is way better once we’ve SHWOOP-ed it, so it’s definitely worth all the pain.

Hopefully we’ll get at least halfway through the book by the end of the holidays, although that might be a bit optimistic. Ah well. Fingers crossed, my friends!

Writing Adventure #3: Writing the first draft of Cerulean Bound

I started this back in November for NaNoWriMo, and got about 20k in by the end of the month. I’ve since added another 5k, and will hopefully get another 10k-20k knocked out over the holidays. I’ve got Act 1 pretty much sorted out, so that should be easy enough to finish. Once I get to Act 2, though … well, it’ll be fun to see where it goes, let’s just say that, lol.

That’s all from me! What writing adventures are you getting up to over the holidays?

Unrelated media of the day: