More reviewing, revising, editing

I'm happy to report that since last week's post I've made a hell of a lot of progress on the current Work In Progress. Despite my fears I was actually able to finish the first editing pass so that I had a completed second draft. I took that and converted it to an ePub format file and sideloaded it onto my Nook, where I could read it through again, carefully, and use the Nook's highlighting/notes feature to mark up more errors as I found them.

I completed that pass Wednesday evening and then spent yesterday lunchtime editing the manuscript from those notes (hence no regular blog post yesterday) - so right now I have a third draft, again rendered as an ePub and sitting on my Nook for another pass.

For this pass I'm looking for some problems that are more general and apply in many places. For one thing I have a tendency to use too many commas and semicolons and even though I tried to be careful I'm sure there are some I've missed, so I need to mark up places where those need fixing. I've got some "cliches" in there - characters doing and saying certain things, mannerisms if you like, a little bit excessively. A couple of minor bits of foreshadowing that need to be there so that certain events later in the book don't come across as dei ex machina.

Once that pass is done I think the 'script will be about ready to be published, which is great news from my perspective because it means that (assuming that I can get it done over the next week) I'll meet my self-imposed deadline of October 1.

The only things left are the final title (I think I have it but I don't want to make a snap decision then regret it later), and the cover artwork. I did the cover for Pavonis myself, it was a bit rushed, and I know I could have done a better job. This time I'm going to try to come up with a handful of ideas and see which I like best, and then take a little more time to make the thing look as professional as I can manage. In fact I'm reasonably happy to push back publication until I'm certain that the cover looks the way I want it to.

On the subject of Pavonis, things haven't moved much. Sales have flat-lined a bit (I was told that things often go that way so I'm not terribly surprised or disappointed); every review and rating has been great (there are about six, mostly five-star, on various sites) but there haven't been any new ones for a couple of weeks now. That's the problem with self-publishing; marketing is something that you have to do yourself, and I guess I'm just not that good at it. (So here's a plug: check it out here).