It has been a little while since I posted here, so I thought I should stroke out a few words to prove that I still live and breathe. The process of preparing By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide for publication as a Kindle e-book has begun.
The first step was to listen to the current manuscript all the way through on my Kindle. It was not the first time I have listened to it. I did it the first time back in February. Listening to one's own work of novel length is an interesting experience, one I enjoyed immensely. This time through I was listening with an ear for planning a strategy to rewrite the parts I want to change. It was still enjoyable but not as much.
My New York editor, Hillary, suggested two significant changes in the storyline. The read-through was fruitful, as I was able to envision how I wanted to implement her suggestions.
She also suggested a name change for one of the key characters. Her premise was that readers might not understand the intended pronunciation from the spelling I used, so I changed the spelling. A singular change for this character was not sufficient. Her first name is Irish, as is her maiden name. Her married name was not Irish. It is now, as I decided that a good Irish first name deserved a fitting Irish last name. It seems to be fashionable to go green these days, so I did.
A very talented author from upstate New York, Chris, told me that my use of Bond as the surname of the lead male character would rub 007 fans the wrong way. Since he is just such a fan, I took his advice and changed the name.
Once I was down in the ditch with all of the names, I decided to change a few for my own reasons. There was one minor character who I originally called Betsy. I changed her name to Carrie as a nod to my mom's sister, who passed away recently, and to my paternal grandmother. Each of them had two names, and both of them primarily used their other name rather than Carrie. Regardless, they were in my heart when I made this change.
A key supporting character was originally named Calvin, Cal for short. When Kindle reads to you in text-to-speech mode and Cal's name occurs at the end of a sentence terminated with a period, Kindle says "California," mistakenly thinking that Cal-period is an abbreviation for the Golden State. Calvin/Cal has been changed to Randall/Rand. Using the find and replace functions in Word was a piece of cake for all of my other name changes. Cal was different. It required case sensitivity to avoid turning a word like magical into magirand. I started out with Cal followed by a space, but that didn't take care of everything. It was necessary to also find Cal followed by periods, commas, apostrophes, and question marks. Ultimately, I balanced back to all 138 Cal usages in the manuscript.
The reading device has some other amusing habits. For instance, if you write "mmmmm" as an expression of enjoyment of a morsel of food, Kindle likes to say, "em em em em em." There are others that are sometimes hard to avoid. The generic Ms. that can do double duty for either Miss or Mrs. reminds Kindle of milliseconds, and that brings to mind another oddity. If you refer to a woman as Miss at sentence end with a pesky period behind it, Kindle likes to talk about the Magnolia State.
All of these name changes were really the easy part. I am a little over a third of the way through the final polish and rewrite process. After that, I'll do another read of my own. Additionally, some of my original readers have volunteered to read the modified novel. I'm honored that they want to do that and will probably take some of them up on their offers.
Out there in the wings, my artist daughter, Erin, is working on sketches for my cover art. I'm looking forward to seeing what she creates for me. Her talent can only be a help to her old dad.
I'm getting excited about going public with my story and anxious to see how Kindle readers will review it. Soon. Soon. My fingers will be so crossed.
No comments:
Post a Comment