Life, Interrupted

The dead are always with us.

Most folks don’t fully understand that. People wrap a corpse in ritual and custom, say their good-byes, and try to move on. But it doesn’t work. We carry our dead, always. Long years later, something will bring the past to mind—a child’s motion, a woman’s perfume, a man’s sputtering laugh. For a brief moment, the past is now, and our dead live again.

As long as we remember them, we are shadowed by our dead.

---KINDRED RITES by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The year turns; the dead may return.

Welcome their visit, their love, their wisdom should they give you enlightenment.

May you find good health, great creativity, and renewal in the year to come.
 

So. Good news, bad news. Bad news first.

Kindred Rites is not coming out in December. Between everyone's health connected to cover and manuscript prep, we just lost too much time. The perils of self-publishing. It is coming out in January, 2014, approximately January 21st. The stupendous Vonda N McIntyre is whipping its formatting into shape, so I hope to have a readable ARC for reviewers soon. If you got one of the first book to review, you are welcome to the second. We want reviews! We want the world to love Allie! Feel free to recommend other review sites, but they have to wait until there's a cover. Reviewers, If you want to start on it faster and do not mind some ARC weirdness/no cover, I can make a basic PDF for people.

Good News. I did hire someone to do a cover with "Magic, Menace, and the Determined Girl". (Selling my firstborn child) It is cover art by a professional using recombined things in his copious files, plus a few special touches. In other words, good stuff I could afford. I like it. You will see hints of things all the way in the third book in it! Like a New York cover, it is not an illustration--it is marketing. I hope it will attract the teens and adults not trying the book right now. I hope you like it well enough to recommend it to friends. Ebook cover for Night Calls coming soon.

Still hoping for a POD this year. Depends on how hard it is for me to learn CreateSpace. Lightning Source has changed into IngramSpark for self-pubs, unless you can convince them you must be Lightning Source. I'm sorry, but I cannot afford the terms at IngramSpark. Returns and deep discounting would kill me. So if I cannot convince them that I only care about getting acid free paper and ink from them, and hardback potential, I will have to find a small press or small packager willing to do an acid free edition. As far as I can tell, CreateSpace never guarantees acid free anything. I want that. (I am an SF writer. When the EMF strike hits, I want my books to survive.)

My artist (yes, I am being secretive for a day or so longer!) is going to get back to work on the POD cover after Thanksgiving, and start Kindred Rites ebook as soon as possible. So--progress!

If I can get the PDF proofing done tomorrow, I am ready to tackle CreateSpace. I will get a template from Book Design Templates this week, too, for the other Allie books. After all this, back to the last of Alie 3. I hope.

And here ends the progress report!

...since Alfreda is only thirteen and still playing with word choices, but this copy editor obviously knows "period" (the non-magical kind). She (I am guessing She--most copy editors I have dealt with have been Shes) changed Allie's choice of "distracted" to "to distraction." More period--but not the choice of someone who has never heard the words used in that fashion.

The problem always is, does Allie's word choice just confuse people or make them think I didn't know, as opposed to the fact that Allie didn't know at the time of the tale?

Some things, like the copy editor changing a myth, or my putting more description in about the creepy-crawlies, are important. But other things, like Allie still saying A-Rab, since that is what Bear says about his horse, are not as important.

I think.

#copyediting #NaNoWriMo