A writer I follow on Twitter posted the question, “What’s the equivalent of ‘break a leg’ for an author? ‘Crack a spine’?”
I responded that the appropriate message is, “The pits of despair are not of infinite depth, don’t worry.”
To wit, yesterday, after months of revision and a ferocious last-minute scrubbing of the remaining typos that somehow clung on, I gathered my manuscript for The Stick Princess (Ways of Magic Book 3), inserted the chapter headings, formatted the whole thing, uploaded it as a Kindle book to Amazon, and promptly decided it is unreadable and has obvious flaws that I somehow missed. I have already reformatted and re-uploaded it once and will doubtless do it again at some point.
I remind myself I did not do it because the book was perfect. Instead, the book was finished, and I have proven to myself with my earlier books that the pits of despair post-publication are relatively shallow and evaporate quickly in the sun, especially if I move on to the next project fairly quickly.
I also published it because, despite it all, one purpose of telling stories is to tell them to other people. That has never been my first priority; I have always told my stories to myself, and I am my main audience.
And the last reason I published was that people kept asking me if I was ever going to write Book 3, because they liked the other books, so here you go. It’s a present.
I enjoyed reading it, so maybe you will too
Wooooo!!!! Purchased. And I’d just started re-reading Nameless Magery yesterday 🙂
Oh yay!!!! Enjoy.
Congratulations!
Thank you!!!!
The series has been favorite since they were first published and I’ve continued to re-read them since, I am overjoyed to discover a third!
Thank you! Enjoy.
Amazon finally saw fit to inform me an author I was following (a.k.a. you) released something new. I’ve been looking forward to a third book in the series for a long time and I have the first two in separate and omnibus editions. I have now bought all three on Kindle and will re-read one and two again before consuming the third. Huzzah!
Oh how nice that Amazon does that! I hope you enjoy it!
Was delighted to hear the new book was out, purchased it stat, and much enjoyed reading it. But maybe I found a few typos?
The vat glowed blue, and leaked long jabbing needles that battering at me like the stings of clouds upon clouds of giant bees [battered?]
“My dear sir, how am I be anyone but who I am? You make no sense.” [how can I be?]
Wolf did not hard enough, apparently, for the older man grabbed the light [did not hit hard enough?]
I’m glad you enjoyed it! And of COURSE there are typos. I’ve only done two line by line edits, a read-aloud edit, and the usual Word grammar checks, plus five or six re-uploads when I discovered minor punctuation errors. I’ll fix those soon and thanks for bringing them to my attention.
And I notice I made a typo in my prior reply that is HILARIOUS but I have fixed it. Serve me right for thumb typing on my phone and accepting autocorrect.