Still working, but there’s been some major delays…
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. 🙂
A little update…
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. 😉
By Duane • Uncategorized