Lurching Back to Life

Restart with a Goal

Being an author with both a life and another full-time job makes adding the social media aspect hard. Add to that writing a series as well as working on other manuscripts, and you’ve got one overloaded human.

But I’m going to try anyway. Starting with getting a team together:

  • I’ve started looking for a social media person w/author management experience.
  • My awesome White Gold Wielders writing group sets things up for my alpha readers (for Jewish law, medical, and law enforcement double-checks) which leads into beta readers and finally a professional editor. One need only pay for one once to understand just how important they are (are you listening, Robin Seavill?).
  • Gudrun Jobst does page design and layout as well as the covers. And a dang great job she does of it.

This takes time and money, and having a paying job helps. And will help pay for the first bullet point, above.

I’ll have a post every week or so, with little tweaks and updates as I have the time.

Where Are We At, Again?

A Day at the Zoo is out and available on most all ebook platforms. It’s also available as a trade paperback from Amazon. It’s weird to have the occasional person ask that I sign their copy. What do I say, “hi, thanks for buying it?”

Too Good a Cover?

Book Two in the series, A Question of Allegiance, just went off to the editor and should be back for my edits and final cleanup in a month or so. Unlike AD@tZ, AQoA went through a more systematic editing process (all hail for learning on the job), and so I’ll need to get with Gudrun in a couple weeks to work on the next cover. I sort of outfoxed myself with the first cover as it is generic. If I could use it as the series “cover,” I would. But, alas, folks need to be able to quickly see the difference. I’ll have the blurb up shortly.

Book Three, The Property of Blood, was a very hard one to write. Authors do so ever get attached to their characters. It’s a complete draft, twice gone ’round, but now ready for alpha readers to have at it. It’s a bit longer than the second book, and might need to have some scene deletions, but, since this is being self-published instead of hewing to the ever-changing whims of the publishing industry (which seems to be imploding), I can give the readers a bit more Shmuley than otherwise dictated.

Book Four, A Measure of Mercy, about half complete, word count-wise. Which {sigh} means it’s probably only a quarter of the way done. I did more planning for this book, since as the number of books in the series gets longer, there’s more “Did Shmuley ever this place?” “How does Jethro get involved in the story line early on?” “And what about Erian???” As usual for the series, I’ve got a good view of most of the key events, but not wrapping up the loose threads into a knot — I’m not done making all the threads yet!