So, its been a busy month so far.
First, am still struggling to get The Huntress onto iTunes. There were some process changes made since 2011 (go figure) and iTunes Producer, the software used to upload books and music and everything else is not too explicit when it comes to reporting errors. It reported a successful upload after several attempts, mainly due to the new cover size requirements, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But when it didn’t appear on iBookStore I went looking and found several errors in the assets that it hadn’t directly reported. No, you have to search for errors, it can’t just say up front what they are. So far there has been no luck. Whether its due to my being too hasty and not allowing them to completely process the book before I attempt a new upload, or is it still broken, I don’t know.
Uploaded a new version of The Missing Wizard but have yet to see it go live. Suddenly, iTunes just doesn’t seem to like me anymore. Not that it did before, but other then the 2 week delay for the original release of The Missing Wizard to appear on the store, I can’t remember any other problems occurring. Very frustrating.
Then, Smashwords wanted to complain as well with my uploaded .doc file. It kept finding tabs in the document that Word just would not reveal to me. I suspect they were haunted tabs but can’t prove it. Just this morning, I finally stripped the story file down to plain text and redid the formatting from scratch. It’s the only way to get a clean file through Word, which exalts in trying to help the poor writer, but fails miserably by making the exact wrong choice, everytime! ARGH!
On the story front, A Lesson in Power is getting the last few editing passes and should be ready for release very soon now. I was going to release it today, but since it’s a sequel to The Huntress, I don’t want it to appear without readers also being able to grab the prequel (hint hint iTunes).
A Painful Blessing is nearly complete as well and I hope to send it out to my alpha-readers this week. I also have an idea for the next young Hieronymus short that I’m tentatively calling Dreams of Yesterday, and as you can see in the right most column I have already written a few words to get it started.
Next week I’ll be attending the first of two editing classes at a local writers shop where I hope to learn a thing or two about being a better editor for my own work. Right now I really suck at it. Its pretty hard to be objective when you’re editing your own work, at least it is for me when writing fiction. Give me a technical document any day and I’ll run out of red ink, but with fiction I’m lost.
That’s all for now.
