EDITING UPDATE
Well, I am just about finished with this round of edits on Yorien's Hand! Woot woot! So, what does that mean?
It means that I have done the following things:
1. I read through all of my content-editor's notes and made appropriate changes.
2. I rearranged the order of most of the scenes in the book (most of the changes occurred in the first half of the story).
3. I re-read through the entire book to make sure that the order of events still made sense, that the transitions between scenes made sense (and re-wrote where necessary), and added scenes that were missing from the story.
4. I formatted Yorien's Hand - this means that basically I put it in a Pages document and made it look all pretty as though getting it ready to upload to CreateSpace.
That last one is in a different order than I have done previously (usually I do that after getting my line-editing notes back), and is probably the most frustrating and tedious part of the editing process. You see, I wrote these books on my old Gateway computer in Microsoft Word. (Nothing against Word, it's a great program). However, since I wrote the books, I have switched over to being a Mac-User (which apparently ups my "geek" rating slightly, which doesn't bother me in the slightest), and I now use Pages for everything. Which is also a great program.
However. Something a little odd can happen to your tab indents when you switch over large documents from one program to the other, and you won't even notice that this has happened until you try to manipulate the document into a different format (e.g. different size pages, for example, or different tab-indent-settings). This means that most of the document has the tabs exactly where they are supposed to be... but parts of the document do not have tabs indented at all. I have spent hours trying to figure out a way to solve this problem quickly, but it either does not exist, or I am not geeky enough to be able to figure it out. (It has my very computer-savvy husband baffled as well).
What this means, in the end, is that I have to turn on the "invisibles" (little blue symbols that represent every space/paragraph return/indent/etc) and go through the document with a fine-tooth-comb checking to make sure that every hard paragraph return symbol is followed on the next line by an indent symbol. This is also why I am doing this before sending it to my line-editor, because another pair of eyes to see any indents that I might have missed will be a very good thing.
The good news is, that I will only have to do this for one more book. Then we move on into the realm of books that I wrote in Pages. As long as I don't switch programs again, I should not have to go through this more than one more time. Huzzah!
Even better news is that last night, my wonderful knight in shining armor, Derek, decided to take over on indent-searching duty, and went ahead and finished going through the entire document for me! :)
And it means that we're one step closer to Yorien's Hand being completed! I plan to get started on editing book #4 as soon as I send Yorien's Hand off, as I already have my content-editor's notes back on that. So, all sorts of exciting things going on around here!
Also, if you hadn't heard. KING'S WARRIOR is currently on sale in the Kindle Store at Amazon for just 99 cents! (or pence, if you're British).
The sale seems to be going fairly well so far, and I'd like to keep the momentum up... but I'm not sure how to do so without annoying everyone I know... so I've tried to be a bit more quiet about it today and yesterday. I have, however, discovered the current secret to getting lots of people to come read my blog or swing by my facebook page - want to know what it is? You can use it, too! All you have to do.... is mention "Boromir." (I'll explain that later).
The blog button up at the top of the sidebar will take you straight to it, and if you would like to share the button and this deal with your family and friends, feel free to grab the code below the button and use it wherever! Also, SECOND SON will be running this same deal starting next Tuesday, 8/12, so mark your calendars!