Down to the Wire

Well if you've been following this blog, you know that at the last minute, we decided to undertake a massive re-edit of the entire book, change the order of the chapters, all to accommodate a new prologue that I wrote on an impulse. 

I know...crazy right?

Well it's 11 O'clock at night, we still have about 200 pages to re-edit and double-check, and the book is supposed to be up on Kindle by tomorrow.

Will it be done?

I'm not ready to have a Scarlet O'Hara moment "AS GOD IS MY WITNESS!!" but I think...yeah, we can do it.

So hang tight.  It certainly won't be up by midnight tonight, but it will be up by tomorrow...sometime.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Update:  You notice some things when you go over the whole book in less than a 48 hr period.

1. I use ellipsis...a lot. 

I use them...or rather...I abuse them...all...the...time.  I must have a penchant for the dramatic pause.

2.  I use italics for emphasis a lot.  And I mean a lot.  No seriously.

3. My favorite adverbs are "suddenly" and "wistfully."  I must be easily surprised and often bitter.  Hmm.

Update: 9:49pm Oct. 15th

Well, we had the new revised editing done by this early afternoon, and I thought we had it licked, but we have been fighting the formatting ever since!  The old edit had embraced all the orphans and widows, but the new edit has kicked them all out again. (For those not in the know about orphans and widows click here.)  Basically it's aesthetics.  No one likes to have a line stuck all by itself at the top or the bottom of the page.  It's a minor thing but it does really affect the reading experience.  You can split a paragraph in half but having half a sentence on the next page is really annoying.  This means a long haul back through the manuscript, from the beginning, inserting forced page breaks to get all those orphans and widows back into the loving arms of their parent and husband paragraphs.  It's a huge pain, one I thought I had handled until I began the massive rejiggering just to accommodate a new prologue written on an impulse.

Oh well.  What must be done, is best done cheerfully, but it does mean that the book won't be up today.

I hate not meeting my deadlines.  This will probably push the Kindle release back to later this week at the earliest, which I am VERY unhappy about, but I've noticed that the rushed editing is causing some unforced errors.

For example, for several pages I had to touch up the commas, but I had inadvertently let the finger slip from the comma, to the "m" key.  As I am a fast typist I was twelve pages ahead before I realized what I had done. Groan.  That's the kind of error caused by haste and tiredness, and I'm certain that there are more.

It's time to breathe, slow down and do it right.

It's hard not to let this feel like a personal failure though.  In the long run, few will care if the book came out originally today, or five days from now, but I care.

Please hang in there.

I will have more chapters up soon for you reading pleasure and bear with me.  The book is coming.  I promise.