Heather Ames's Blog - Posts Tagged "stand-alone-novel"

I came to the conclusion last week that this book, which has been a labor both of love and work while I update, cut and polish the plot, characters, technology-related plot changes and twists and anything else that with distance has given me more ability to dispassionately revise...needs more than a continuity draft to finish.

Now there's a compound, complex sentence for the agonizing decision I had to make, if I was going to get any rest and maintain some sanity!

There I was, bogged down in yet another chapter that required hours of work as I fine-tuned it and reflected back to previous chapters for additional tweaking, Here were the Holidays, coming up faster and faster. I had already flipped the calendar on my desk to add activities to November. No longer was my projected pub date the only item, and my page-count wasn't where it needed to be on this draft.

I realized late November wasn't going to happen. Yes, if I galloped along, without taking the needed time and energy, maybe I could finish, but it was looking increasingly doubtful.

I knew that insisting on keeping that goal would result in doing my readers a disservice and allowing myself to turn out a product that wasn't at the level I knew it could be.

New pub date is early 2018. Paula Johnson is updating my website to reflect that, and I'm posting the changes on Facebook. I'm shooting for mid-January as a new goal. I'll keep posting updates as I do this book the justice I feel it deserves.

I wrestled my way through the last 17 pages of the all-important final draft of NIGHT SHADOWS. Now I get to work on the continuity round. This is where I look for discrepancies, even minor ones. Although the biggest trap is always touted as mistakenly changing names, hair or eye colors of minor characters, mine are usually more of the timeline variety. Making sure I give enough time for a character to leave a house, go to 2 different locations and then get delayed, all while other characters are converging on the same timeline from 2 different directions, and for very different reasons. Plot twists can be potential minefields for misinformation, and can pull a reader right out of a story. I've been there and done that myself. And then I've had trouble re-bonding with the book, the characters and even more importantly, the author.

Or at least, It Had Better Be might conceivably be more accurate. I have 41 pages left on the continuity draft of NIGHT SHADOWS. I have fought my way through this draft, discovering those pesky issues that plague many writers--repeating the same information; oops I have the wrong name for a character or I changed a character's name only not in Chapter whatever; and did I really want so-and-so's fingerprints in this room or not? I researched info to confirm I was correct, and had done sufficient research in the first place (no, I'm not suffering from ADD or OCD) and made some changes that then required further research that led me down paths to enlightenment but took time away from the manuscript. Goal for this weekend? Finishing those 41 pages and continuing with the final read-through, started when I became too brain-scattered to pick my way through another chapter toward the end of the book.

I finished the continuity draft, then went through one more time to make sure any points I'd jotted notes on were resolved or fixed. Amazing how small things still needed tweaking, even after all the reading and the drafts. Does any writer ever feel completely confident that there isn't one word that shouldn't be there; one changed minor character's name that hasn't been changed? I even went over some of my research to make sure I had actually done enough (I had, but I learned even more about the mechanisms of lighthouses in the process.)

The paperback's cover is finished, but the Kindle edition needs some more work. The bookstore owner already contacted me about the reading/signing/book launch. The formatting process hit a small glitch (not minor for the formatter) but she's back on track after her computer's hard drive went belly-up.

I padded the pub date a little because I know how things can go wrong--Murphy's law will always come into play, regardless. I'm aiming for 2/24. I'll confirm as soon as the uploads happen.