Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Dio song as origin of this blog's title. I took an unannounced week off here, because I took a week off there, in work-land. I had high hopes for this week. My pool game continues to improve. I really need to start blogging about that so I can …
Continue reading It’s like broken glass, you get cut before you see it…
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I’m sorry I missed last’s weeks epistle. Very busy. I thought about posting an introduction to one of my new characters in the not at all fast fiction I am still working on starting, and then decided it just contained too much cool stuff I wasn’t ready to …
Continue reading Publication date for The Gardener and The Goddess
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have a formatted version of my book. I have to do the page by page review for widows and orphans (if you know, you unfortunately know), and last bits of tidying up, hopefully without getting sucked into perfectionism minutiae. I was looking through the text and suddenly …
Continue reading Progress, Perfectionism as a failed landmine, and Amped up Porridge
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This week finds me breaking out of one funk, and cognizant of another. First, I have been doing a close reading of the manuscript, and have been noticing the little things that need to be addressed: small fixes for flow. Read 90 pages today, found one misplaced ‘and’ …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Good news bad news this week. The good news is that despite a barrel-load of distractions hitting me, I managed to review sixty pages of copy-edited text this week, well over a fifth of the entire manuscript. The bad news is that is not proofing is it? I …
Continue reading Sifting dust for diamonds on the Long Road.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! What a pithy title, no? No. But it is a useful reduction of my recent activity, aside from decorating trees. I am now 64.7% of the way through the text of this ‘final’ editing pass. 67.8% by a different criterion. No graphic representation, as is my wont. I …
Continue reading Percentages return with find and replace minus one as their companion
Hello my friends and the occasional relative! Not the most inspiring title, eh? Fear not. While I freely admit to having failed to make the huge strides toward the completion of rewrites I would have wanted, there has been progress, and it is good. The problem is that there are some large scale projects left, …
Continue reading 44 problems, or nibbling away at progress, or forest management, you decide!
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Don’t panic. I have a towel you can borrow. I have finished my first pass through the manuscript fixing as I go, and to be honest, not even doubling the original tally is a win. I finished a bunch of the original 43 again this weekend, and added …
Hello, my friends and occasional relative! Yes, that is still the title. It remains the pithiest that fits within the format I set myself with The Thief and The Demon. I can’t lie—I will enjoy writing books without The X and The Y as a title convention! But hey, I am feeling mostly better, and …
Hi there folks! I did finally finish my vocalization of The Killer and The Dead today, and many improvements have been made, and a mere thirty two notes to self generated. You know, changes, continuity checks, questions for proofers and beta readers, that kind of thing. I’m still a few steps away from hitting the …
Roderick T. Macdonald 