Tag Archives: self-publishing

Practical Editing….

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When you are done, you’re done, right?  When I post something on my blog, once I click publish, it is a done deal.  If I go back and find 10,000 typos?  Oh well, too bad.  OK, I do sometimes go back and correct things, but usually not after the first day or two.

I spent a good chunk of time the last few weeks before I published The Fireborn reading over it to catch errors and typos.  I also had two people go over it for me.  Between the two of them, they caught a dozen or so things that I had missed and had a handful of subjective ideas.  So when I clicked Publish, it was a done deal.  I had done my work.

A couple of months later I heard some complaints that there were a lot of typos.  I knew I would have to go back and fix them, but I didn’t want to.  When you are done, you’re done!  Last week I finally broke down and faced the inevitable.  I had to fix it. Continue reading →

A Question of Short Stories

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I like to write short stories.  I guess you can tell since I write quite a few of them, perhaps an average of two a week, if we count the 100 word Friday Fictioneers stories.  Sure, 90% of the stories I write and post here are very 1-dimensional “flash fiction” stories.  They are quickly written, very short and have very little meat as far as characterization, plot depth, sub-plots, etc.  That doesn’t mean I can’t take them and flesh them out.

Back at the beginning of the year I self-published my first book, Seasons of Imagination.  It is a collection of short stories.  All but 4 had been “published” in some form on my blog, but they were all also greatly revised before making it to print.  That is, what I posted on my blog was little more than a first/rough draft while I went through at least five more drafts in the nine months between the time I made the final decision on which stories to include in the book and when I clicked “publish”. (FYI – After deciding on the stories, I deleted them off of my blog)

Since the cutoff date back for stories to include in Seasons of Imagination at the beginning of April in 2016, I have written some of my favorite works of short fiction.  I think my writing has grown.  I hope so, at any rate! Continue reading →

Cover Reveal – Seasons of Imagination!

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So, what do you think?  Great, isn’t it?  This amazing cover was created by Belinda over at Idiot Writing.  She is a great artist and poet.  I couldn’t be happier with the cover she created!

Here is the full story behind this great image.  I had an idea of what I wanted.  I did a couple of quick sketches for the layout and then sat down with color pencils and made a drawing.  I thought the drawing was pretty good (I may post it some day).  I had my cover!  I showed Belinda and she said she could touch it up a bit, get it in shape for publishing.  Fine, there were a lot of little issues.  She played with it a bit, made some fixes and a few small changes, but it just wasn’t gelling.  I made a comment and we realized she had missed one of the points I was trying to make.  It was the image’s fault, not hers.  With the new knowledge in hand she made major, major changes, pretty much reworking it from scratch.  And it was marvelous.  Continue reading →