Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Friday, August 26, 2011

All done

"The Lyons' Den" is now officially written and proofed and is en route to the publisher to be added to the chain of upcoming events. They seem happy with my few corrections. I'm accepting this is the end of it all, and sending Daniel, Ace, Van, Tad and Carmen to face the world pretty much on their own. Not completely, mind you; I found out when HTRASG and RIHC6 got banned by Amazon that I'm still a Poppa Grizzly when it comes to my babies. But I doubt anything like that will happen to LD. Still...you never know.

Anyway, I was now able to have my celebration dinner. It's a tradition with me -- when I finish something I feast on a good meal that I normally can't afford just to mark the occasion. This one was at E. B. Green's, a steak house in downtown Buffalo. I was given a gift certificate to them about a year ago so finally decided to use it. That (and $20) paid for a glass of decent Cabernet, a salad, a Filet Mignon, baked potato, hot tea and Creme Brule...and I'll be fasting tomorrow to make up for it because I'm sure I put on 20 pounds, it was so good. Meaning no leftovers to bring home. Ah, me...the life of an author.

Next in the pipeline for me -- getting a first draft of "Place of Safety" done. I was actually making notes in-between courses at EB Green's. All about the Houston section. I have a lot of details and things I've already added in to draw from and rearrange, and the overall structure of the story is beginning to make itself known. No, not structure -- theme. What it's all about. How Brendan goes from being a boy to a man and how his life reflects the reality of the world and impacts it, in return. I've got a lot of cats to wrangle on this one, so I'll probably be rewriting it till I'm 90 before I'm ready to let go...if then.

I'm also trying to train myself to type a bit differently. When I learned, it was drilled into me that you put two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence. Nobody does that, anymore, and if I submit a manuscript with that in it, they have to go in and take out the extra space because it messes with the program or something about the soft return not lining up right when the sentence ends at the margin. So I'm trying to break the automatic habit of hitting the space bar twice at the end of each sentence...and it's proving to be hard. I went in and did it, this time, on LD and it's a pain in the butt. Yes, you can do the auto-replace and bring it down to one space, but it's not 100%. If I accidentally input 3 spaces instead of just 1, it only bring that down to 2. Or if there's quotation marks, it may not get them all. Word's irritating in that way...and probably half of it's due to my version being close to 8 years old. Time to think about upgrading...whether I want to or not.

Dammit, the life of a writer.

BTW -- a number of people really helped me with LD -- reading it and offering suggestions and pointing out errors. I'm trying to add in an acknowledgment page but can't get the publisher to answer me, so here are some of their names:

Michael Gleich
Brad Rushing
Michael Wannamaker
JP Johnston
Kevin & Molly Malloy
Lou (who goes by Kyle Cicero and whose last name I don't know)

You guys was the bestest. Thanks!

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