Cover Reveal ~ Queen's Courier

I've lost count of how many times I've said this - I'm almost at the end of the final edits on Queen's Courier - but I really mean it this time. I am reading at a snail's pace and finding things to correct, which makes it worth while. This is the final read through via the Online Previewer and the cover is already loaded, won't change and so I'll put it here today.

I've been looking back over the year's KENP stats (since July 2015) and I'm happy to say that they are definitely going up. The month just closed was the highest figure I've had, and it is mostly due to The Gybford Affair. Strange to think that it sat with MuseItUp for a year or two and attracted very few readers. I think the combination of pretty but irrelevant cover pic plus a high price did the trick, but it could also have been because I did very little PR work on it. So once I get Q'sC off my hands  (ie published,) I'll concentrate on PR and see if it has any results.

It is interesting to see how the stats go in waves. A book will be read for two or three months and then there'll be a gap when it is not read at all, then off it will go again. I can only assume it is when promotion works. Maybe those alerts Amazon send out - yes, they advertise my books to me, which always amuses me - maybe they do a lot more good than I know.

Edits and family trees

"it was a long walk!"

Coming to the end of edits - the ones I hope will be Final Edits, and am astounded to note that even at this late stage (after several edits) I can still play around with the word and sentence order and make improvements. I am beginning to think that a person to go on and on improving a book for a lifetime, but I really want to get on an write another story.

It is becoming clear to me that my writing is sometimes muddled.I don't get the sentences in the right order so that the flow of words is graceful and the thought processes are clear. Sometimes, I need to change one sentence's position in the paragraph and then it is fine. Sometimes I need to move a paragraph to make the thought process clear. Another notch on the learning curve.

Side by side with this I have been investigating my family tree on my mother's side. My father's side I have, thanks to a diligent gentleman who gifted me a copy of his research and then disappeared from my life. I'm doing it via UK Census Online and find that I don't have to go back very far before my great grandparents were "making their mark" on a marriage certificate. On the other side of the family,  there were teachers - what a pity they didn't get together!

It also seems that people often didn't bother to record births and deaths, which is frustrating. The Society of Genealogists says: "The records of civil registration in England & Wales which commenced on 1 July 1837, relate to the birth, marriage and death of an individual. In Scotland records began in 1855 and in Ireland in 1864 (n.b. Irish non-Catholic marriages were recorded from 1845.)" So pre-1837 it is back to parish records, not always easy to access.

All those words

Thirty-two chapters and that's my novel complete at 106k word count. Phew! Now I'm ready for the Big Read Through, and I'm a little bit scared of it. What if all those words add up to a rubbishy story that doesn't hang together, and worst of all - bores me?

It's possible I'll feel all of these things. OTOH, it is also possible I'll fall in love with it. I hope so. So, I've been out with the dog and the exercise and fresh air have woken me up and got my brain going. I have three critique chapters to do for writerly friends, but otherwise the whole day is mine - except for another hour's walk with Time at some point around midday. I don't want any major breaks now - I need to keep the continuity going.

Wish me luck!

Final edits and Createspace

I'm up to Chapter Thirty in my "final edit" of Capture a Queen. What I've discovered on this go through is that I'm getting really good at combining two sentences into one, and doing it more elegantly than I used to. Practice does improve one's technique, if not make it quite perfect yet! I've also found that around chapter 27 I've screwed up the time line. Things happen out of sequence, so that will need a major re-shuffle. I'm going to work it out on a paper copy and then transfer the finished result to the computer. Otherwise I'd always be afraid I'd deleted something instead of transferring it.

I've put final edit in quotation marks because of course this is a major operation. First of all it's on
the computer, and I have several runs at each chapter, tweaking and pruning as I go. When I'm finally happy with it, I print it out. The pages go into a file, and I'm not going to read them until I've got to the end. Then I'll sit down and read it as I would a Rebus or any other novel. Things are bound to leap out at me, even at that stage. I shall attempt to read it aloud but have to admit to feeling silly unless I'm sure I'm alone in the house. Tim doesn't mind. I think he even likes it. He goes to sleep, anyway!

Smoothing out the time sequence among three major characters is going to be difficult, but it has to be done, otherwise it will irritate the reader. I'm thinking about Createspace this time, to give me a paperback as well as an e-book, so I'm reading up on how to do it in between bursts of editing. I suppose I have nothing to lose except my time and effort, and who knows? It might pay dividends. It seems to be the way forward at the moment, and when changes in publishing are speeding up I'd better not miss the chance.

End of Edits

Finally got to the end of edits on Friday afternoon and staggered away with a cracking headache that only a large glass of red could solve. Boy, it was hard work. I've heard of US editors who have strict rules about writing, but I haven't so far encountered one until now. I think what made the task more complicated was the fact that I didn't know the house style. If I had, I could have ensured that there were 2 spaces between sentences and no spaces at the end of a paragraph before the submission went in. I wouldn't have used exclamation marks since they prefer italics. ( ie there! becomes italics, ie there) In many cases this added very little to the sense or the story. Those simple changes led to an awful lot of balloons. If they had not been necessary, the task would have seemed less onerous.

So, I've given myself a couple of days off and today must take a deep breath and read through the complete thing to see if what I've done makes sense. The exercise has been a learning curve, and I'm glad I'm through the hard part. Like the Durham students in the pic, training is essential if you want to be good.

Edits part two

I think I'm getting the hang of it now. Chapter Seven looms today, so some progress has been made over the weekend. I certainly slept well last night!

Some of the places where I used the pronoun "it" read better when I say what the "it" is. Getting rid of the formatting balloons first helps, as I have no problem with US spellings etc. Turning sentences on their head is sometimes easy, sometimes hard. I still haven't thought of a way to show "perplexed." There are so many ways different people would exhibit the state of being perplexed - biting the lip, frowning, shaking their head, yet none of them absolutely defines the word itself. I think I'll leave it as it stands, unless some kind soul can give me a clue.

Edits are tiring, far more tiring than writing. I have the urge to go to my writing and abandon edits, but feel I must get the edits done sooner rather than later. I have scenes building in my mind, and hope I can hang on to them long enough to get them down when the edits are done. I should make notes, of course, but hey - whose perfect? Certainly not me.

Another thing to report is that doing edits is a learning curve, and helps to improve my writing, because even as I sit back in my chair saying No, no, no, I'm also thinking would doing this make the whole thing better? Putting aside pride and looking at my writing through fresh eyes is a good thing to do, and I'm benefitting from the exercise.

Watched Downton Abbey last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. ITV is doing well with this one.

Editing

After so many rainy days, yesterday was a surprise.
I had an engagement to lunch with a friend, and we
walked around the riverbank at Durham. The university
colleges all have rowing teams and this is one of the frontages
where they lower the boats into the river. The sun was so hot the wet planking steamed. It was like sitting in a sauna.

It was a lovely break, but now I must buckle down to the first round of edits I received on Wedneday from Sapphire Blue. (This is for my story Shadows, about ghosts in a French water mill.) They warned me their editing was strong, but I must admit I was shocked when I saw the first page with the host of tracking change balloons to the right hand side. There were so many they ran together!

As might be expected, all the spellings are changed to US style. That accounts for a few balloons. Then every sentence has two spaces after it. That's another set of balloons. Exclamation marks are not used - instead the word is italicised. Sorry - that should be italicized. More balloons. Semi colons are changed to commas. No spaces at the end of paragraphs.

And then the comments. Another host of balloons asking for motivation, plus internal and physical reaction. Some of the requests have me stumped. To say a heroine is perplexed is "telling." I'm asked to show her being perplexed. Maybe enlightenment will dawn on that one later, but at the moment, I'm as perplexed as she is. Still, it is a learning curve and I must get back to it.

Summer returns

Second complete edit finished last night. Phew!

123,524 words. Definitely historical mainstream,

and multiple viewpoints.

On the whole, I'm pleased with it, although I know I can make it better yet. I'm impatient -

I want to start sending it around to see if anyone will take it, so I'll need some control in the next few days. My plan is to work hard on the first three chapters and then send out, because I'm sure I can have a third edit complete before any replies will appear.

I have a suspicion my biggest weakness is the synopsis. I don't like doing them, and I don't think I do them well. Homework time is called for!

Summer is back again. The picture of the Old Vicarage at Ovingham, just across the river, was taken in the last "summer" we had a couple of weeks ago. Since them we've had the central heating on and brought out the big duvet again. As of yesterday, it's all change once more. 21 degrees and 22 forecast for tomorrow. A trip to the gym, or a bike ride in the sunshine? Difficult to decide which form my exercise should take today, but afterwards, whichever I choose, I'll be sitting down to watch the Roland Garros tennis, men's semis, on the red button!

Plum pie and Wylam

I always find myself glazing over when I read something I know so well that I can almost quote it word for word, so editing my own work is not a joy of the first order. It takes a real effort of will power to focus on each word, note a full stop out of place or a double white space where there should be only one. Necessary, I know, and most worthwhile. But not my favourite occupation.
These last few days have proved good weatherwise, and we've been out walking. Not far from us an old branch line veers off across the Tyne and now it is a walk and cycle track. We walked to Wylam (see pic) had a coffee at the teashop and walked home. On the way back we passed several apple trees apparently growing wild, so we filled our pockets and had apple and blackberry crumble for dessert. Yum.
It has been a good season for fruits and berries of all kinds. The hazel trees are shedding nuts, blackberries are here in profusion and we know where there are some wild plum trees, but they're kind of inaccessible in among the bramble patches or on a steep slope and I'm not willing to risk my neck for free plum pie! No one but us seems interested in gathering blackberries, so our freezer is stuffed full. It seems such a waste to let it all go to waste. Last week we were gathering them while the farmer was harvesting his pea crop. The combine harvester must have frightened rabbits out into the open, and the farmer's son was walking up and down the field line with a rifle. Every now and then a shot would ring out. My feelings were divided between the farmer and the rabbit, because we can see the damage the rabbits are doing a) to the pea crop, and b) their burrows are so numerous they are wrecking his hedges. No doubt he will be having rabbit pie for supper this week, and no doubt the rabbit colonies will soon make up the numbers lost.

The perfect rose

Thirty pages left to do for the edits.
I wrote this story a year ago and
even that short space of time has made a difference to my writing.
I see the curious habits and cringe.
What is it that makes me use one word and use it again in the next sentence like an echo? Perhaps I should scan this blog and see if I do it here, too.
If I've taken one shot of the roses in my garden this summer I must have taken fifty, and I rarely get a shot that is sharp and clear. Too much wind, and defective eyesight has a part to play. With contacts in, I cannot see an object close to; with glasses I can, but I can see even better with my naked eye. At three feet, everything works the opposite way. Passing twenty-five is no fun as age starts to tell, at first in such tiny things as not being able to pass a thread through the suddenly fuzzy eye of the needle. With me it was buses - the wretched things were almost past by before I could read the direction or number. I got glasses and was amazed at the things I could see. Friends told me I'd regularly ignored them for ages unless they stood right in front of me. No wonder tennis players like Del Potro win the US Open Tennis at age twenty - everything is perfect. Strength is reaching its optimum, reaction time is superb, fitness and stamina at their best; the slowest part to mature is the brain, but after years of intense training, that knows what is expected on a tennis court. Eight years on and we're all wondering about Federer as he heads towards thirty. He is considered "old."
The US Open is going to change the APT rankings, I should think. I suspect Murray will slide down as suddenly as he rose. Will Nadal stick with number two again? And where will Del Potro find himself?

The Aftermath

I hear there is a new website for romance readers put up by Mills&Boon. I have not peeked at it yet, but the link is here for anyone who is interested.

My weekend went well. No culinary disasters, which is good as I'm not exactly the world's best chef. I can think of lots of things to do that I enjoy far more than cooking, but one has to do it sometimes. I did not lose the thread of my plot while I stood there boiling, roasting and pureeing, which is a huge bonus, and my time since Sunday morning (after all the washing up and putting away) has been spent writing a new chapter to insert as Chapter 21.

It went well once I started, and of course it threw up, as this sort of edit usually does, things to tweak elsewhere in the book. I caught myself writing "dark eyes" for my hero when I know perfectly well that he has grey eyes. Now I worry how many other times I have made that same error.

I'm at the printing-out-of-the-whole-ms stage and then it will be the read through. Here's hoping I don't find many glaring errors, but even more I hope that the pacing will be improved. Someone, I cannot remember who, told me to start a book like Dick Francis - "he has good openings." Well, I checked the half dozen copies on my shelves, and he has. They are excellent openings - for a thriller. However, that sort of opening does not translate very readily to a romance. So I followed someone else's advice - "Start where thing start to go wrong." That works better for a romance.

The last picture of Newcastle - the Millenium Bridge and the Baltic Art Gallery behind it. Next time there will be pictures of lambs and daffodils, I promise.

Edits can be fun

Phew! After a whole day working on the new draft I deserve a little letting-off-steam time. Got through about twenty minutes ago, but I think I can see where I need to write a whole scene I
handled by having one character tell another- very briefly. I need that scene to give the whole a better balance. So tomorrow it is back to the drawing board and thinking caps on.

However, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed Janet Mullany's The Rules of Gentility. It's a Regency, but a Regency with a difference and a sly sense of humour. I must admit I've tried it before - only once - and put it away after the first few pages. But this time I must have been in a better mood, or a mood that matched the writing, and I loved it.

The opening lines will give you a taste of the style - after opening with the "truth universally acknowledged" line the heroine veers off into this: "I consider the pursuit of the bonnets and a husband fairly alike - I do not want to acquire an item that will wear out, or bore me after a brief acquaintance, and we must suit each other very well.....and of course, with a gentleman you cannot replace the trim from another to make the perfect object..."

I've begun Labyrinth (Kate Mosse) but I'm not sure about it as yet. It seems to take pages and pages to get at a chunk of story. Already I've begun to skip over the descriptions (endless, it seems) of food. And the little vignettes of everyday life in Caracassone. I may find they all tie in to the main storyline, but so far I doubt it. If I turned writing like this in to my critique group, I'm sure they would be wailing Too much - info dump - cut to the story. Yet because I enjoyed Sepulchre, I picked this volume up with great eagerness. Let's hope I get into the long swing of Labyrinth before too many more pages.

PS If you saw yesterday's photo, you should recognise today's close-up!

Edits and kitchens

A lone fisherman on the banks of the Tyne no doubt hoping for a spring run salmon.

After six days of reading everything I could lay my hands on, I think I have a handle on what I need to do with KT. Cut for pace as they say in the trade. I have cut. I've also improved what was there by re-writing some dialogue, sharpening up the interaction between the characters, by having the hero share info on the villain much earlier. Now when the readers meet him, they will already have expectations of him. The heroine, of course, isn't privy to the information. So, I'll let that simmer for a couple of days and then go back to it.

On other topics, I'm happy to see that Nadal has won the championship at Indian Wells in California. Murray did well to get to the final and can be happy he beat Federer on the way even if he couldn't handle both Nadal and the 40 mph wind.

On the home front we are having new counter tops installed in the kitchen as I write. The sink has been out of action since Saturday morning as hubby wanted to be sure he could isolate the water supply - which means we have water everywhere else but the kitchen sink - without any hitches. He succeeded, and I can't tell you how many times I've turned to empty coffee dregs into the sink and realised just in time that it isn't plumbed to the waste outlet any more. Grrr.

Edits

This is a duck house, photographed at Jarrow acouple of years ago. Typical of Viking and early medieval dwellings to keep the birds safe overnight. The sort of duck house my heroine Emer would have known in the story FAR FROM GOLD.

Well, the edits for FAG are done and returned. It wasn't bad at all - only two points where a sentence needed to be removed and I didn't disagree with my editors decision. Apart from that, it was mainly removing commas and semi colons. That shows how long ago I wrote the story, for I rapidly grew out of using semi colons and hardly ever use them now. The incorrect commas, I fear, are partly a legacy of my critique goup and the computer grammar rules. At one point it seemed that where I put them in, critiquers took them out. Where I omitted them, critiquers put them in, and I became so confused they were spattered anywhere! The computer butted in whenever I used "and"... and as we all know, computers are totally inflexible.

Now I'm looking forward to a pre-release version of the book for reviewers in November.

This morning I must return some books to the library, buy some cottage cheese which I forgot yesterday during the grocery shop, and then settle down to some work on Heiress's Dilemma. Critiques to check, amendments to make before it goes off as a complete ms. Meanwhile dh goes on working in the kitchen. Tomorrow the new oven and fridge arrive and then, dear friends, it will be complete except for a total clean down and re-arrangement of storage. I'll have so many cupboards I won't know what to do with them all! I expect I'll walk to the wrong cupboard for weeks until I get then hang of where I've stored everything.

Do I have time for Edits?

I received edits for FAR AFTER GOLD yesterday, and immediately set to work. By 8pm I reached Chapter Twelve and found that I was reading than checking, so I stopped. Today I was due to meet friends in Newcastle for a days shopping, which was great for friendship but bad for edits. (We devoured a white wine spritzer with Eggs Benedict in the new eatery where the old French Salon used to be in Fenwicks while Bill carried on with the kitchen re-vamp. Some days it feels as if I have all the fun!)
True to form when something important comes along - like receiving edits - I had also received a request for a full ms of Heiress's Dilemma from a publisher in America, I have a coffee date tomorrow morning, and I have just begun to play around with pictures for another YouTube video. I should also do some critiques for the group.
However, back to edits. No time to waste. When they are done, I'll get back to everything else.