Derry, Northern Ireland

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

Friday, October 13, 2017

Down day...

I stayed in the hotel all day and worked on A65. I just didn't feel like being out and about and doing things I'd done a hundred times before. I'm flying up to Seattle, tomorrow, for the book fair so won't have a lot of time to work, after this, and I have a fridge in the room so stocked up on what I needed. Put the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door and went to work.

It was slow-going, because I was cross-referencing two versions of the story that were similar in 75% of the wordage, but I not only got it all input, I had new ideas and added little bits to make it fresher. I'm now through 92 pages, not counting the notes I have in the rest of the hard copy.

I think from this point it will move faster. I have about 50 pages of changes I lost, completely, so will dive into that portion like I'm doing it for the first time. The only real major change that I can recall losing is when I switched the descriptions of Casey's and Lando's mansions. I decided to make hers Spanish-style and his modern cubist; works a lot better for them as characters, but I lost everything I did to make Lando's even quirkier. Oh well.

I got the first rough of artwork for the cover and it's going to be nice. I had a couple of small changes to make so am waiting to hear how the artist feels about them. For LD he was pretty easy-going on adjustments I asked for. I try not to be too demanding, but if it's not right, it's not right...and I want the cover to be right.

I'm going to do a different design for the hardback version. Maybe a photo of the actual Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a shadow of Gertrude mixed in. Not sure, yet. I've been looking at new hardbacks and their covers are a lot simpler than paperbacks. I know they can get away with that largely because of publishing house advertising and sales, yet it might be better for me to emulate them than like I did with LD and OT.

I'm finding my free promotion on Kindle and BookLife got me nothing for The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. Lots of people looked and nearly 600 downloaded a free copy, but not one review, yet, nor one sale. It's like the book is dead in the water. My next hope is it gets a review from "Publisher's Weekly", for which I still await word.

I hope this doesn't happen with The Alice '65.

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