Have I Got The Time?

Hell no, I don't have the time. What do you take me for, some kind octopus?

Since November 27th, I've often felt like I was an octopus, in that all kinds of issues/problems/tangents have been rearing their ugly head all at the same time. Be it work related or family related, it has demanded my attention to the point where I had to tell my muse to take five to the power of ten (that's 9,765,625 minutes or about 18 1/2 years) while I deal with whatever calamity is going on.

However, we are not going to vent on that today. Today's post will be an update on the various writing related thingys that are going in my world right now (hence, all the writing related tags that you see at the bottom of this post).

No original writing to speak of has oozed from pen since mid-October, which is directly due to my novel, Line 21, being unleashed to the general public.

That isn't to say that I haven't been doing any non-blog related writing. On the contrary and as I mentioned in a post from a few weeks ago, I have been attempting to write a synopsis for my novella "A Shadow Warrior's Redemption". However, when I finally sat down to do it, I discovered much to my annoyance that when I flipped open the novella (I have a hard copy), I still had a mixture of past and present tense, as opposed to being all present tense.

Thus, we started editing the novella, yet again. However, that came to halt this past week as I got an e-mail from my publisher stating that my book was ready to be sent to the printers and would I be kind enough to proof my PDF one last time making sure to look for errors and not to change prose and oh does the cover meet with your approval and oh do you want a pic on the back cover and oh is there anything else you might want to add to the back cover?

So to the side did my novella get flung to, and after blowing off the dust bunnies, we opened our PDF, to once again do a line-by-line edit. I say "once again" because yours truly neglected to save his notes from the last time he did this, which was in mid-October prior to the release of the book.

So we proceeded to spend the past three days line by line, excuse me, I should say, paragraph by paragraph skimming of my novel looking for small grammar/cosmetic errors that would deter from the enjoyment of the book.

Note: skimming through your book is a perfectly acceptable method of editing when you have almost every scene and plot swerve memorized to the point where if someone mentions a chapter, you can say with confidence what exactly is going on in that chapter.

When all was said and done, I was able to answer his questions with confidence by saying:

1} Found 6 grammar/cosmetic errors.
2} No pic, 'cause sometimes mystery about identity is a good thing.
3} The cover is fine as it has generated some strong comments, both positive and negative.
4} Some book review snippets would be nice.

And as an added bonus, gained a new book to read and review that the editor had written earlier (erotic thriller set in WWI).

Swiftly changing gears, we now move on to book reading/reviewing.

I did finish KC Sprayberry's wonderful YA novel Softy Say Goodbye over the Thanksgiving holiday. I left a very nice review (under my pen name) and I highly recommend it. Also this past week, I finished a nice romance novel by Christine Stovell entitled Move Over Darling, and I also thought it was pretty good. Strangely enough, the copy I have is in paperback and according to Amazon, isn't due to be published until March '13, and because of that, I wasn't able to leave a review on it.

And before you ask, "G.B., why didn't you leave it under the Kindle version?", the reason I didn't was that I'm a bit fussy when it comes to reviews. If I read an e-book, the review goes to the e-book. If I read a paperback/hardcover, the review goes to that. So in this case, I'll have to wait until March '13 to leave a lengthier review than the one I left on Facebook.

Beyond finishing those two, I have not yet found the time to start any of the now six books that I have loaded on my Nook. I do have Carl Brush's Second Vendetta as next to be read, but when that will be is anyone's guess.

So that about sums up what is going on writing-wise in my world. I'm looking to get back to editing my novella, but I have about three incomplete blog post ideas to work on and I have a tentative stop for G.B.'s Disjointed Blog Tour of 2012 in the works for this month to work on as well. And I have to work all of this in while dealing with the day-to-day bullshit that is putting a serious cramp in everything else that I want/need to do.

Yay me.