The first cataract surgery was yesterday. I’m already seeing much better and I’m looking forward to not having the “itchy eye” feeling.
Only problem so far is that the eye’s internal pressure is too high. It’s not serious (yet) and I’ve got new eye drops .. that makes 4 different ones. Yikes. It also gives me a headache.
You can imagine what it’s doing for my concentration.
🙁
My webmaster reminds me to put a post up every single week.
Too frequently of late, I’ve let that reminder go begging. It’s been two months since I posted on this blog so let me catch you all up.
I’m clearing away the Gredok story — The Gangster. It was due in February and it’s taking what little effort I can apply right now to get it finished up and moved over to Dark Overlord for editing and revisions. I should be done with it this week.
So anyway. There is some good news and some bad news.
I’m nearly blind. Literally.
I have zero vision in my right eye and my left eye is about 70% occluded with cataracts. It makes it stupidly difficult and frustrating to deal with writing because I can’t find the cursor on my screen. Copy editing has been all but impossible because I can’t tell the difference between a comma and a period, between a quote and an apostrophe. Luckily I know a lot of accessibility tricks, but they’re time consuming and knowing them is a far cry from being fluent in their application. Everything — including this post — takes twice as long. At least.
I’m getting it fixed.
Last week I visited with the eye surgeon and next week I’ll have the first of two surgeries to correct my vision. He’s repairing the right eye first and we’ll go back for the left on the 20th.
That should be the end of my major medical trials. I finished up the dental issues a couple of weeks ago and, with my sight restored, I hope I’m going to get back on the production train.
At the end of the month we’ll have a house full of company visiting to celebrate my elder daughter’s graduation from high school — assuming she does, in fact, graduate. That will not be conducive to new work, but should be fine for applying the copy edits for Captain’s Share. I can sneak in a few hours of work between family hours.
It’s been a long road since November. I had high hopes that I’d be re-issuing the books within a few weeks and have the series complete by the end of the first quarter. Yeah. So much for that plan.
When I get The Gangster off my plate, I’ll be re-publishing Double Share and then releasing Captain’s Share to text for the first time. While that’s happening, I’m getting Owner’s Share through the editing process, but it’s a huge book and I have no idea how long that will take.
My goal is to get Double and Captain out by the end of May…which my calendar assures me starts tomorrow.
Yikes.
I will get Owner’s Share out just as soon as possible because you’ve been patiently waiting for the print for way too long. I’ve learned enough about editing and publishing to know that it won’t be perfect–no matter how many editors I hire or how much time I spend on it. My goal is to make it as good as I can within a reasonable time frame. If the other two books get off my desk by the end of May, I’ll be shooting for the final volume of the Trader’s Tales to be out by the end of June.
After that I have only South Coast to produce in July and that will be the last of the completed works published.
Then I’ll release all the books in epub format and get the paperbacks (and hardcovers) in production. I’m focusing on Kindle as the first pass because that’s 95% of my market in one upload.
A half-dozen or so of you have begged me to publish on B&N so I’ll also be uploading there for you folks and starting up the Kobo store to start building international sales.
I will not be uploading to Smashwords, Apple, or Google books. At least not directly. Several colleagues have recommended a service that supports some of these fringe markets. I’ll be looking at that after I’ve finished initial release of all the works that I have completed and before I start writing the new books. That will put every completed work out in all the text formats.
New books – Cape Grace and The Hermit of Lammas Wood – are on my schedule for the second half of the year.
If I can get all that done by year end, it’ll be far short of what I wanted to do, but will clear out the backlog of everything I’ve got currently on the big white board beside my desk.
Sorry for not keeping you updated more. I do post on the other blogs — Solar Clipper and Lammas Wood — and you can get an almost daily update from me at Talking on My Morning Walk. Even that has had problems lately as I wrestle with a new flare up of arthritis that prevents me from walking as often as I would like.
That’s about all the news for now. Next time you hear from me, it should be the re-release of Double Share.
Fingers crossed.
Sometimes the longest journeys are within.
Tanyth takes passage on a ship to make her way to Gertie Pinecrest. Storms and ice block her path, but her most serious enemies may be people she has never met.
As her power grows, she must come to grips with the changes within her and wrestle the fear that she is going mad.
To accomplish that she must answer Zypheria’s Call … and survive.
