What I’ve been doing this December

I have revised and submitted Cast in Flame.

It’s going two places: the first, to my editor at HLQ. (She already has it).

The second, to Patrick Rothfuss’ Worldbuilders fundraiser.

Yes, I am sending a copy of the submission manuscript for a book that won’t see print until the end of July, 2014, to Worldbuilder’s. It’s not there yet. I had to have it printed, and then had to change the printing so it was two sides of a page so I could have it spiral bound. I will post again when the auction goes live.

I have written a bunch of Oracle words — but the book isn’t done yet.

And I have been working on The Hidden City, City of Night, and House Name for the non-North American ebook market. I promised elsewhere that I would release the next book in the series in the UK at the same time as it becomes available in North America, and since I’m doing that, I though I might as well release the rest of them. The cover designs are by Jenn Reese of Tiger Bright Studios, and I’m including the first cover below. I should have The Hidden City up at the various ebook vendors soon; I’m not sure how much time it will take to propagate.

I am doing the work in a new program: Vellum. I write in Scrivener, which I love. But while I can use Scrivener – and have – to export to epub-check compliant ebooks, I don’t find it as naturally effortless as many, many people seem to; it takes time, even for the short stories. (If I could write a book in the exact, correct format, it would be trivial to export it — but I’ve tried, and it drives me bonkers. I have two decades of looking at screen text in a very particular way, and all attempts to change it have left me increasingly frustrated by what I term “mess”).

Vellum doesn’t take that effort – and it produces an ebook that makes me very happy. The work that has to be done at this point is entirely due to the translation of .pdf to actual text I can work with. If I had a document that was properly paragraphed (.pdf translation added and removed paragraph breaks all over the place) I could format a book in fifteen minutes. Or less. And it would look far better than anything I’ve otherwise managed to produce so far.

The Vellum model is unusual: the software is free, but you have to pay to export the ebooks you want to publish. The screen shots at the web-site above are accurate. The exported ebooks reflect those screenshots, and when I’ve encountered bugs — two so far — they’ve been fixed within twenty-four hours (!).

So. That’s what I’ve been doing at the end of 2013 :).

I’m looking forward to 2014. I hope you all have a Happy New Years.