Ordinary Day

I have now written the Dedication, Acknowledgements, Author’s Notes, and About the Author sections to go into Bone Walker. And something awesome I realized as I did this last night: I can actually do a page that didn’t appear in Faerie Blood, i.e., a page of Hey Here’s Other Stuff I’ve Written!

Counting this one, I have five whole novels I can put on that list, you guys.

And I can also put a chapter of Faerie Blood in the back! And maybe, if Carina gives me permission to do so, I can also include blurbs to cross-promote the Rebels of Adalonia books! I have inquired about this through the proper channels to see if this is a thing I can do.

Meanwhile, I have also alerted Third Place Books to be on the lookout for Dara and me to come to them soon with PDFs for Bone Walker‘s first print run. Chances are decent that we’ll have the print edition ready to go before the end of the month. However, whether the print run actually then happens is up to Third Place and how booked they are when we get to them. More on this as it develops.

I have learned from Third Place, though, that they can’t get ISBNs for clients anymore. So I’ve gone ahead and bought myself a block of ten of them, along with a barcode which will be used for Bone Walker’s print edition. This is stupidly and annoyingly expensive. However, hopefully I won’t have to do this again for a while. I’ll be using some of this block of ISBNs on Bone Walker’s release, and can hoard the rest for use later.

Still to come:

• File copyright for Bone Walker
• Confirm with Carina whether I can use cover copy for my Carina books
• Put the Faerie Blood excerpt in the back
• Start allocating the ISBNs for the various editions of Bone Walker
• Set up the barcode
• Finish putting the master copy of the ebook file together and release that to proofreaders
• Once the proofread sweep is completed, give the master file to Dara for the print and PDF layout
• Convert the master copy to HTML and start setting up the styling for the epub
• Plug the cover art into the epub
• Convert the epub to mobi for Amazon release
• I’m sure I’ll think of more

This is exciting, you guys. This is starting to look like a book!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have finished my edit pass through the second draft of Bone Walker. Which now puts me SIGNIFICANTLY closer to delivering this novel to my Kickstarter backers, and then to the world at large!

All the mad props go to editor JoSelle and also to backer Susan, since their two edit passes combined to help me fix quite a few things in the manuscript. I rarely make actual typos. But I do periodically repeat words, leave words out, or replace a word I intend with some other (correctly spelled but nonetheless incorrect) word. Susan caught a whole bunch of places where I’d done things of this nature, and JoSelle caught others.

What happens next? Now I need to write the front and back matter for the book, which will include the Acknowledgements and the Author’s Notes. I’ll be adding blurbs that I’m getting in from a few folks, and I’ll put in an updated About the Author section and probably some data on my other books as well. I expect to have these things done by this coming weekend.

Once those are finished, I’ll be putting out a call for volunteers to proofread what will hopefully be the final master copy that I’ll use to start generating the official ebook. So if any of you all might be up for proofreading that, let me know!

The ebook I create will be the epub, from which I’ll also be creating a mobi to deploy to Amazon. As we did last time, however, Dara will be taking my master working file and using that to create the print layout and the PDF edition. The epub, mobi, PDF, and print masters will also need checking, so I’ll be putting out a second call for THAT.

Meanwhile, I’ll be moving forward with buying Bone Walker its own ISBNs as well as filing copyright on it, and working with Third Place to prepare them for creating the print books as well. More bulletins on all of these things as they happen!

And last but definitely not least, Dara has been moving forward with creating the artwork for the soundtrack release. As I’ve been doing my edit pass this weekend, she’s been working on the liner notes for the CD. It’s been a very busy weekend for both of us!

But Bone Walker is COMING. And I’m really excited to be about to deliver Kendis, Christopher and Elessir’s next story to you all!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

I’ve already told my Kickstarter backers this, but for the rest of you, I am delighted to announce that Dara has officially sent the soundtrack for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker off to be mastered!

We are very excited about this, as it means we’re very, very close to being able to finally deliver this long-overdue reward to my Kickstarter backers. But it also means that Dara’s also able to deploy a brand new album! We’re even doing a replication run for it, so that we’ll have physical CDs to sell at Conflikt next month.

Want to check out what Dara did? You can find the album available for preorder RIGHT NOW right over here. So many exciting things going on on this. We’ve got vocals from Leannan Sidhe and Alexander James Adams, you guys. We’ve got multiple awesomely played fiddles. And we’ve even got a bitchin’ remix of the Burke-Gilman Troll set, courtesy of nerdcore master Klopfenpop.

What’s NOT up yet on the preview are readings by yours truly! I’ve read excerpts from both Faerie Blood AND Bone Walker for this soundtrack, and I’m here to tell you, I have much more respect now for people who do audiobook narration for a living. I only did four pieces over a weekend, and my throat really felt the work. But Dara did a masterful job layering my readings in on top of the instrumental sets, and we’re both very proud of how those tracks came out!

Important note on those readings, too–the Bone Walker readings are a little spoilery, so if you aren’t one of the Kickstarter backers who’ve read the early draft of the book, be advised about that. I tried to not get TOO spoilery with the excerpts I chose, which are both very action-heavy, but there will be some things in there that will probably make you go “WUT” until you actually read the book.

And SPEAKING OF THE BOOK–I’m about to go on two weeks of vacation over the holidays, during which I plan to be editing like a mad editing thing, in order to get Bone Walker ready to ship by Conflikt. And now that we’re signed off on the release of the soundtrack, Dara will be able to step up the pace on the cover design as well as desktops, postcards, and posters for backers. I’ll be bringing postcards and posters to Conflikt, too!

VERY excited about this, and looking very much forward to getting Bone Walker to you all!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

And now, a long overdue update on Victory of the Hawk! AND Kickstarter stuff!

Have been running annoyingly behind on getting this monster done, and managed to miss most of VCON for the second year in a row working on catching up. Got to the point that now I’m within scope for getting this monster’s first draft done by the end of this week, and shortly thereafter, there will be development edits.

How fast I can charge through those will, in turn, impact how fast I can charge through line edits. If all goes well, I could conceivably be done beating on this book by the end of the month. I’d like to be done before I scamper up to Canada again in November, this time for Operation SWING!, in which there will be ridiculous amounts of De Temps Antan!

If I’m done with edits on Victory by then, I’ll be swinging around to finally working on the edits on Bone Walker. When I go up to Canada for the De Temps Antan shows, I’ll be taking the entire week off–and between the two shows, I’ll be holed up in Cumberland working on edits on whatever’s popped next off the queue.

Once I can finally actually free up enough brain for the Bone Walker edits, they should go reasonably quickly since they’re all line-level edits, and I’m not going to be making any structural changes to the book at this point.

When Bone Walker‘s edits are finished, Dara and I will work on layout and on the design of the cover. And when that happens, I’ll have a better idea of when the final ebook and print editions will be deployed. The likely timeframe for this is early 2015, at this point. I’d like to have Bone Walker out before Victory is due to drop in April 2015.

Meanwhile, Dara has been doing a hard push to finish up the Bone Walker soundtrack. She’s very close to finishing the musical bits, although she and I still need to do the recordings for the readings I’ll be doing as accompaniment to the musical tracks. My ability to musically participate in the album has had to fall to the wayside, due to my having to focus on writing actual words, about which I’m sad. But on the other hand, we’ve gotten in excellent people to work with Dara. Especially Alexander James friggin’ Adams, about which I am not sad in the slightest.

When Bone Walker is cleared off my plate, I’ll be turning my attention to finishing up the novellas in the Warder universe, also due to Kickstarter backers. All three of these are still untitled, but to refresh your all’s memories, they are:

• Origin story for Millicent Wray, who later is Millicent Merriweather, Warder of Seattle
• Story set in Providence, RI, about a psychic who must help a man solve the murder of his Warder sister
• Story of a musician who helps a Warder stop the hunt of migrating deep sea creatures

And once all THIS is done, well, we’ll see what happens next. What’s most likely to pop off the queue is the long-overdue Queen of Souls, which needs to be cleaned up so I can try to query it somewhere.

Wish me luck, folks. The rest of this year’s going to be busy, and next year promises to be more of the same!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Tonight is the first night I’ve worked on Bone Walker in ages, and one of the things I wanted to accomplish tonight was to write a proper blurb for the book. This’ll be cover copy for the back cover, as well as for the forthcoming official page on this site for the book.

Here’s my first take at the blurb!

Two months should be long enough for a girl to learn to cope when she finds out she’s half-Sidhe, or so Kendis Thompson has convinced herself. She wants nothing more than as normal a life as possible, playing her violin and pursuing her growing relationship with Christopher, Warder Second of Seattle. But when the Unseelie bard Elessir falls through a portal out of Faerie, bringing with him a ghostly peril that puts her best friend Jude’s life and sanity in danger, Kendis must test the strength of her new magic. And when the bone walker Melorite threatens all of the Emerald City, Kendis must choose between saving everyone she loves—and succumbing to the dominion of the Unseelie Court.

Pretty happy with this wording, and this’ll be a decent working draft, though the final word choices may change between now and when the book is ready to deploy. Need to think of a proper way to condense this down to a sentence, too.

What do you think, sirs? Anybody got any wording recommendations?

And oh, this is going to be fun. Let’s see if I can get this puppy edited before New Years, shall I?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.