Day 194

Spoiler Alert! May contain planning-stage plot/character details or other spoilers!

08 May 2017

Four weeks to go in rewrites! Yikes!

So I had a great time catching up with a friend over the weekend and being almost totally unproductive. (I did cook a crazy amount of food for no real reason, do a bunch of loads of laundry, jot down some more ideas, kill a spider, and thoroughly determine that there was no point in finishing some show in my queue). But of course I didn’t actually get much done, so I’m paying for that now, lol. Couple outstanding articles with one of the content platforms that I’m really not sure when I’ll have time to get to, although yesterday would have been ideal. Polished off another audition for ACX and need to process another couple raw files to see if I can’t line something up for June when I actually have a little bit of time again. Just saw that one out of the two under-review ACX titles is now fully approved, QCd & on its way to publication after only a minor clean-up job to bring the average volume up a touch, so that’s encouraging that I won’t have to sink any more time into getting the files out, affirming that I was able to produce to the necessary quality without much trouble, and exciting that I may perhaps one day make some money off of that work!

Sent off feedback to my cover artist this morning on her first drafts; they’re pretty spectacular and so much more artistic and well-designed than my own (though that one beta readers’ edition was getting pretty good). Really clever stuff happening with the gold and silver and threads and stuff… though come to think of it, I guess I could have tried to weave some backstory in by letting the designer know using west coast, first nations and Romani/gypsy motifs was an option… oh well, that’s probably just unnecessary complexity at this point, and a hazard of designing the covers before the story’s fully edited. From an upfront costs perspective, I’d really love to spend less on editing and cover art, especially with the way the US dollar is rocketing off ahead, but… I’m also seeing the value and quality that investment in solid production brings. I see indie authors making lots of noise about how great their cheap editors and designers are, but… usually the lack of quality is there at a glance. Which, I guess the take home lesson is, just because it’s better than what you can produce on your own doesn’t mean it’s, you know, actually good on a competitive marketplace scale.

Speaking of design feedback, I was lucid dreaming this whole extended scenario this morning and woke up all disappointed that the graphic novel art was a little too rounded and youthful looking for the gritty SF-dystopia I wrote - and the urban futuristic train station setting somehow turned into a steampunk flying galleon with full 3D rendering, and I was stressing about telling the designer she got it wrong even though she did so much work and wondering if I could somehow recast the story to make it work… Man, lucid dreaming’s cool. So much more detail than I ever pick up on when I’m awake.

…and now I’m just procrastinating because I’m scared I don’t have enough time to do this round of rewrites, so of course the obvious thing to do is just put off getting started for as long as possible. My brain is coolest when asleep; awake, it makes very little sense.

Monday

Start Time: 3 pm

Location: Abbotsford; home; chair

Drinking: crappy lukewarm black tea with milk because I’ve been too lazy/cheap to go out and get some proper tea and it’s a little late for cardamom coffee and I want to sleep more than six hours a night and I don’t particularly feel like drinking at the moment…

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