Here's to coming down the home stretch of updating my first self-published novel a year after its release. The process might seem pretty straightforward at first blush, but the gyrations involved sometimes bordered on the comical.

First there was finding the latest, cleanest Word doc to match up with its Scrivener counterpart to convert to an epub. Yeah, I know I should have any files at that level of importance readily available, & I do—sort of. But when faced with the prospect of a mess of previous revisions that are the result of a history of using a kitchen junk drawer approach to organizing my writing, I'm inclined to embrace the "check–double–check" technique.

Next came making the actual changes. First & foremost in this case was revising the second & third words of the novel: "Well, your honor, I really appreciate this last chance . . ." is now "Well, Your Honor, I really appreciate this last chance..."

I find that particular goof-up one of my best ever. I mean, a capitalization glitch in the intro of my first self-published novel is funny enough, but what about the irony of the actual term for capitalizing names of officials being an honorific? Just gotta laugh at that one, right?

Then there was the issue of ellipses. My original decision to go with an older style of using spaces between the periods (as in . . .) instead of going with the currently accepted style (as in...) made sense at the time. After all, I was aiming for authenticity by modeling the special testimonies from military cases I'd researched & used as the underlying format for the entire novel.

But that was a goof-up too, hindsight being 20-20 & all.

Otherwise, I only had to deal with a few minor changes here & there. (Yet another shout-out to Dreyer's English for helping me improve my copyediting skills.)

Finally it was time for compiling all the various parts—including that pesky Author's Note I mentioned in a couple previous posts—& saving the updated version as an epub. Scrivener is a powerful, quirky program that drives me crazy one moment with its limitations, then impresses the next by allowing/forcing so many workarounds.

Now that I'm done with that phase & ready to actually update the KDP version tomorrow, I can relax back into the labyrinth of revisions for my upcoming serialized companion novel. At the top of today's list is another round of thinning weeds starting with cram, stuff, push, & shove.

Who says being an indie author isn't a thrilling adventure?

Keep you posted.

Drew
Drew Faraday
Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown