Duane

It’s been a while since my last update, so I figured I’d make a post just to say how things are going.

I decided to not release any more books until I’ve finished the entire 2nd edition editing of the series.  It’s easier that way, and allows me to use my time better.  Plus, I can have everything out all at once when I’ve finished.  I was doing two editing passes on each book before moving on to the next one.  I finished the first pass of book 11, and I wanted to see the continuation of it in the first chapter of book 12, and I got sucked in and started editing it.  I now have one more chapter to finish on the first pass of book 12, and I’ve decided that I’m just going to go through the rest of the series, doing all the first passes, and then come back to book 11 and start on the 2nd passes.  It’ll keep things fresher for me that way, rather than going through a book I’ve just edited a second time right after I finished the first edit.

So basically, I’ll finish up with the first pass of book 12 tonight, and then start on the first pass of book 13.  That’s where I am right now.  Nothing overly interesting to report other than that, which is why I haven’t updated in a while.  I know people think authors lead this jet set lifestyle, visiting exotic locations, getting drunk on the best booze, and cavorting with the hottest women, but that’s true.  At least, I hope it’s true…someday. 😉

That’s it for now.  Back to work now.

I’ve been totally wrapped up in getting our house back together and set up now that we’re home again, so I wasn’t working on the re-edits at all.  Now that we’ve gotten a big chunk of it taken care of, I’ve gotten back to work.  I just finished the first editing pass of book 10, Encounters.  I’ll probably take a break for a day or two, and then start on the second pass.

I finished the 2nd edition edit of book 9, Resurrection.  That’s three books edited while we’ve been stuck in this stupid hotel for the last five months, but that situation is nearing an end finally.  We should be able to go back home in about two weeks, and I can’t tell you how relieved I am.  I have three books now that are fully edited, but need to be finished up as far as all the stuff I need to do before publishing.  I’m about to start work on the 2nd edition of the 10th book, Encounters.  Once I get home and get back on my real PC instead of this laptop, I’ll be able to do the finish work on the other three and get them published.  I’m really happy with the way things have been progressing, but I still have eleven books to re-edit in the series, so I’m not quite half-way there yet.  Still, work you enjoy isn’t really work now, is it? 🙂

So, we’re still stuck here in this damn hotel while they work on our house.  It’s been like four months now, and we’re totally sick of it.  We just wanna go home.

Anyway, I finished editing the 2nd edition of book 8, Ghost Worlds, and I’m now up to chapter 8 on the first pass of the 9th book, Resurrection.  By the time we get out of here and moved back into our house, I’ll probably have three books ready to do the finish work on so I can get them published.  The one saving grace is that I’ve been able to work while we’re here, rather than having to put everything on hold until we got home.  Not that I haven’t been lazy though.  I did take time off to watch the entire series of Stargate SG-1 on Netflix, and I re-read through the entire series again, just as a sort of a refresher for myself.  Man, I totally forgot about that one part of book 17.  God that was funny.  I still laugh every time I think about it. (No spoilers) 😉

Book 17 is called Travelers.  It jumped forward about 235 years after the Earth was devastated by an invasion from a race from another dimension.  It was supposed to be the start of a new series that took place in the Unseen Things universe, but as I was writing it, I realized that I didn’t really have the desire to involve myself in a new series while the main series was still ongoing, so I simply included it as a part of the main series, and worked it so that everything ended up fitting nicely.  I have a great fondness for the main characters of that book, which is why I moved them to live with the others in the following books.

Work on the book 9 re-edit is moving along nicely.  This book had a lot of fun stuff in it, but it also had one of the most deeply emotional scenes in the entire series, which is coincidently in the chapter I’m about to edit.  That one’s gonna take me a while, because it’s a very wordy scene.  Dialog is a lot faster and easier to edit than long, wordy paragraphs.  Fortunately, my books are really dialog heavy, so it makes the editing go a lot faster than it would otherwise.  Something else that helps is that I format them in block style with a space between the paragraphs.  It makes it FAR easier to read, and you don’t find yourself losing yourself on the page, constantly having to dig around for where you just were.

Ok, that’s enough for now.  I just wanted to post a little something, so people wouldn’t think I was dead.  I’m not.  I can’t die until I get this whole series re-edited into 2nd editions, and republished, so I’m gonna be around for a while yet. 😉

Whoever invented polybuteline pipe should be drawn and quartered.  We had yet another hot water leak in our house that went undetected for possibly months.  The whole underside of the house had standing water and was like a sauna.  Our house is now all torn apart while mold issues and reconstruction happens.  We’re also going to have the whole thing replumbed, which we have to pay for ourselves.  That’s not covered by the homeowner’s insurance, while the rest of the work is.

The long and the short of it is that we’re staying in a hotel right now for a month or so while all this happens.  I wasn’t able to do any work on the re-edits while we packed everything up to move out of our house, but now that we’re in a hotel, I’ve been able to get quite a bit done.  I just finished re-editing chapter 13 of book 8, and added just over 2,000 words to it.  Unfortunately, I’ll probably be removing that many words from the next chapter, because there’s a huge section in it that really serves no purpose and does nothing to advance the story.  I originally put it in there for a specific reason, but with experience, you learn that there are better ways to deal with certain things in your writing that you may not have considered the first time around when you were so eager to just get the story out.  It’s not the first time I cut a lengthy scene from one of the books, but it’s the first time I’ve cut any scenes from the 2nd edition books.  The other scenes I cut were done during the first edition edits.

Where it sits right now is that I’ll probably finish both editing passes on this one, and then prep this one and the 7th booth for publishing at the same time.  Then once that’s done, I’ll move onto the 9th book, which was a rather emotional one, and added some cool new elements to the story.  I’ve been really looking forward to getting to that one, since it brings some new characters into the story that had heretofore only been mentioned.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I haven’t done an update in a long time, so I figured it was about time I did one. 🙂

I totally forgot to unpublish Cindy’s Story when I unpublished the Unseen Things series as I work my way to re-editing everything into 2nd editions.  I’ll republish it when I get the 2nd edition done, but that won’t be until I complete the 2nd editions of the series.