November 27 – I have about half of the reviews back. I am eternally grateful to people who have spent so much time on this and given my project their very best efforts. And it’s doing the manuscript a world of good, too. They are finding everything from errors in logic, to confusing points, to typos, to differing points of view. Make the sex scenes more graphic. Make the distasteful scenes less distasteful. Use Mayan instead of Maya. Confusing solstice and equinox. More dialog. Less dialog. Illogical characters. More description of Merida. First half slower than last half. Put dates in the chapter heads. Less valium. Too much frontmatter. (I say there can never be too much frontmatter.) Too much extremely bad language. Why is this scene here at all? (And how about those gratuitous scenes? What’s wrong with them, I say?)
I’m incorporating the changes now.
Josh did the cover and it is stupendous.
Here are my thoughts. Let’s say the book is okay, not great, but not abysmal. Then you get all these smart people making suggestions and marking it up and you incorporate the ones that don’t conflict with each other, plus you slap a great graphic up for the cover, and – how bad can it be?
Right now I’m also struggling with the name. It won’t be Shit Happens. Not because I don’t want to use the S-word, but because the title is no longer descriptive of the content. It is not just shit that happens, after all, and we don’t want to trivialize the possible extinction of the human race.
I am sure that no matter how many people look at this book, or how many times I go over it, will be punctuation errors – mostly omitted quote marks. I wish there was an auto-proof for this. The price of dialog.
Back to frontmatter. Don’t you think that the readers are used to skipping over it if it doesn’t interest them? I know what I usually do is skip most of it and come back and read it after I’m done with the book.