Well it’s Friday, Friday, got to get down on Friday and I’m kind of spinning my wheels. Since June 8th my son has been off from school and he does not return to classes until July 2nd, so my opportunities for uninterrupted writing are minimal. On those occasions when he’s out of the house having a good time with his grandmother I’m more inclined to goof off than work, so I’ve basically written off this entire period and will not return to Grand Champ until he’s back in school.

I’ve tried not to be completely wasteful of my time, but I’d say I’ve only been partly successful. You’d think I’d spend more hours clearing off my TiVo, which is stuffed to the gills, but I haven’t. Most of my hours are spent reading things online. Where does the time go?

One thing I have done is continued to move forward on the Juárez Dance project. I have not heard back from JT Lindroos, which was probably inevitable given his busy schedule, so I have to create things to do. To that end, I’ve begun rereading the manuscript to spot any typos or storytelling errors that I missed the last three times I went through it. This is not the same as professional editing, as I’ve said before and reiterate here, but it is a necessary part of making sure a manuscript is as presentable as it should be.

As it happens, I did the exact same thing with the stuff Serpent’s Tail published. First I went through the manuscript on my own before the things even went out for submission, then I looked over them a second time while making editorial changes requested by my editor and finally I gave the manuscripts a third close read upon receiving the proofs. That’s a lot of rereading, but it’s absolutely necessary. Even a pro editor can miss things, so it’s essential that my eyes hit those words as often as they have to in order to make things perfect. There are typos in The Dead Women of Juárez that still got missed.

I continue to worry about this whole project for reasons I have articulated before. This is almost totally new to me. I’ve done editing in the past, but only on a very small scale. This thing will be going into a very large marketplace and while it will compete with a lot of junk, it’ll also have to struggle against some truly excellent work being done by other pros. And as I’ve said, I will be doing this all without the benefit of a publisher to help me out. Promotion will be entirely up to me. Price manipulation will be entirely up to me. Quality is entirely up to me.

Eventually I’m going to have to calm down and just do what needs to be done and I’m sure as things progress that will happen. It’ll take weeks for 52 Novels to lay out my ebook and it’ll take weeks for Lindroos to do my cover and that’s not even including the wait time just getting to that point. I can’t stay on tenterhooks the entire while.