Vixen in Velvet Reaches the Finish Line

Loretta reports:

Champagne girl-001.jpg

Vixen in Velvet is done!  It flew away on electronic wings to my editor yesterday.  This is the end of Phase One.  It will return to me for tuning and tweaking (aka Revisions) but we can celebrate again when that's done.

Now I have to go to my fainting couch and call for lavender water.

 

 

Photo: "Model posed in ornate costumes: in black pressed pleats, with top hat; standing tip-toe on champagne bottle," c1904.  Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Job #483: Proofreader

I got quite a few complaints about errors in some of the digital versions of my earlier books, as mentioned previously.  This was something we tried to put in the hands of professional proofreaders.  That didn't work.  It seems you really need to be the author (and in possession of a good memory as well as a clean hard copy* of the original manuscript) to catch all the errors and not fix things that weren't wrong.

So I'm doing it myself.  And this takes forever.  And because it takes forever I can't do it all at once, or the new book I'm supposed to be writing will never get finished.  I proofread the eBooks in the evenings, after my writing hours.

Not long ago, I did complete the review of Knaves’ Wager.  Eagle-eyed readers will notice that spelling has been Americanized (the attempt at British spelling was a policy of my first, hardcover, publisher), some less-than-felicitous word choices have been corrected, and the scene breaks have been returned.  The OCR errors have all, I trust, been fixed.  Since nobody's perfect, readers may still find an error here and there, but only the normal amount.

What they will not find is a new version of the book.  Even if I had the inclination to go back and rewrite a book I wrote several hundred years ago, I don't have time.  I was proud of what I wrote then; it's impossible to write the same kind of book now that I wrote at a different stage of my life; and I think most readers would rather have the original story.

*Had it been possible to transfer the originals to my hard drive, we wouldn't have had this problem in the first place.

We're at Being Geek Chic

My blogging partner author Isabella Bradford* and I are featured on this week's Lady Geek of the Week at Being Geek Chic, "a blog for stylish geeks, sophisticated nerds, tech obsessives, literary hardcores, and those who look for the beauty in life."

Followers of Two Nerdy History Girls are well aware of where our geekdom lies.  But this will be an opportunity to get some of the secret inside info about how we came to be who and what we are.

It's also a great opportunity to discover a blog that's filled with all kinds of fascinating stuff, very much in the spirit of what we do, but about Today, where we're all about Many Yesterdays Ago.

*aka Susan Holloway Scott

Image Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Cover of Harper's Magazine, September 1893