In Review

It's nice to be garnering the amount of reviews which my books have been getting lately. It helps that the bulk of them are positive; three tales are averaging above four on Amazon's five star ranking system while the one book below that is still 3.9, so I'm happy. And as with so many other things in life, with the results I'm getting I wish I'd taken more interest in direct promotion much earlier than this. But so it goes, and there's always a degree to which self promotion should be uncomfortable, I think.

Even some of the less stellar reviews are helpful. One person remarked that I use adverbs too often. I don't use them as frequently as she claims (adverbs are nowhere near in every paragraph I write, despite her assertion) but I do overuse them. I'll be careful about that in the future. I will readily, unceasingly, routinely avoid them.

That's an adverb joke. Seriously, though, if you want to have fun with adverbs, look up Tom Swifties. Some of them are hilarious.

The compliments I'm receiving are nice ego builders but are fraught with peril for exactly that reason. They can go to your head. I know me well enough to know that that's dangerous. I suppose the best idea is to take the positives with a grain of salt and the negatives with a reasonably thick skin.

Anyway, I'll stick to the plan and see where it leads. It's been a fun ride so far.

Editing Marty

I write. I like writing. I (generally) like what I write. But enough is enough, even of me and my own creations.

My current project is to get a book in print which has fell out of print because the company who I originally published it through has gone out of business. No, I don't think it was because of my book. But if so, woe to the one who has accepted it for republication.

Let me tell you, though, the editing process can be a chore, especially on a tome which I had considered finished. I myself, after some suggestions the company had made, offered 203 edits following the initial round of review. Some I don't think were my fault: there were issues of spacing in the proof copy they sent to me which were not in the document I send them. Still, 203 changes were far more than I expected. When I read an old copy of it as first published, I didn't find nearly that much wrong. 

Now I have another proof copy to go over which includes those alterations. In reading it I have already found 18 edits which I want to make in the first first 49 pages of a 217 page book. Some have to be made, some are more stylistic. Still, 18 more after the initial 203 seems to me an awful lot, and I still have 158 pages to go.

Then there's the fact that this makes the fifth time in three months I've had to reread my own writing. Even I'm getting sick of me, and I really like the story. The editors tell me it's a good story. But I'll have to go over it one more time after the next batch of edits are made. I'm not particularly looking forward to that.

I sure hope it sells after all this...