Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Bloody grammar nazis

I have weeded out 99.9% of the typos now and yes, I know that not all of my grammar is not perfect.

I have written much the way the characters would actually speak. Some may not know that military and ex-military do not speak the same as civilians. That is way 'some of the words are not used properly', to quote a reviewer. Tradesmen are the same, to a lesser degree.

Mark Twain used to do this too...

But I have made the concession of not using 'fuck' as every third word, which I would if I was being strictly accurate, along with using a 'civilianized' form of radio procedure.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Back from camping

Bugger!

I mixed two incompatible styles.

My bad.

Back to the never-ending reformat.

(editing is easy)

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Moving onward

All four are now line-edited.

Time to get back to writing the next one!

A big Milestone

5000 downloads!

The great line edit progress

I have about two days work left to finished the last of the three books.

The first two have been uploaded to Smashwords, but 'Meddlers in Time' isn't going through the Meatgrinder- it appears to, but the new download doesn't show.

'Out of the frying pan' has made it through and looks good- unless you download the RTF file, which always changes the font sizes (always has) PDF looks good, though and I will download Epub to my ebook reader tonight.

One thing I have learned the hard way. Don't trust Word to sort out your punctuation problems!

UPDATE:

'The Cockatoo River Incident' made it through and 'Meddlers in Time' went through after I stripped all the Word formatting out, buy pasting it onto notebook, then pasting that back to Word. Or so I thought- It failed the criteria for the Premium list as somehow it had tabs in the document- removed 19 of them (I don't know how they got there) and now its fingers crossed...

Saturday, March 5, 2011

The all- new Meddlers in Time

I have finally finished the line-editing and with several thousand punctuation errors, a couple of dozen typos sorted and a bit of minor tweaking to sentence structure, MIT is in the waiting list at the meatgrinder.

The software appears to have a stripped gear or a bone in the works, but no doubt the Smashwords team will get that sorted before too long.

Friday, March 4, 2011

I love reviews like this!

Meddlers in Time - or how to run wild with a time machine?

This is highly entertaining stuff! It picks up most of the niggles we all make about time travel fiction and leaves the rest of the genre far behind... bit like a stealth bomber overtaking a Robin reliant!! Just how much fun could you have if you knew how to time travel? What do you do when you get bored of just living in luxury on your lottery winnings? How about, just for starters, going to the ninth century England with a few mates, say ten of you altogether, a couple of trucks full of modern weaponry, maybe the odd piece from the future .... and face off against an invading army of Vikings!! Three and half thousand of them.
Take as long as you like on your time jaunts, you can take a year off in the time it takes your other half to make a coffee!...

The full review here

A brave new world

In the dark alleyways of publishing, an author uprising is brewing against Big Publishing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about revolution lately thanks to the events unfolding in North Africa.

My wife, Lesleyann, has friends in Egypt, and they’ve kept us up to date via email. Their dispatches alternate between fear, uncertainty, optimism and celebration.

Revolutions are an awkward and messy business. They represent the end of one paradigm and the beginning of the next. While the root causes can trace back decades, when the uprising arrives it can occur with alarming rapidity...