Finally seeing the end of the tunnel. 

We can breathe, we can breathe!

I feel like I've been stuck in the weeds since The Ghost of Forlorn Lane was released last Friday,  November 20th. As I wrote about last time, something didn't go as planned, and we discovered mistakes had been made. We talked about growth, learning lessons. I was going to treat this as a humorous bump in the road... until I had to spend 48 hours of mad editing because my "clean copy" decided to disappear. I couldn't get the new edits to load up,  my WiFi was down, and days went by with virtually no changes appearing on Amazon. And every time I clicked on my reports and saw another paperback had been sold, my anxiety went up.(Because my husband and I had been offering to replace bad copies with the ones that should have gone out in the first place.) Thank heaven that the Kindle version will right itself because I should NEVER feel bad about selling a book!

While all of this was going on, I was still diligently plugging away at polishing up The Ghost of Hidden Lake, and laying down the outline of The Ghost of Chapel Hill. Yes, I know, it's a lot. 

I realize, now that I'm (almost) sure that the RIGHT version is in place, that this hiccup only lasted for 5 days in the entire lifetime of this book. But for a minute I didn't think I was going make it without losing my mind.

I also realize that while these are growing pains and each bump is a lesson learned...sometimes it takes a few knocks before things finally click. 

And the exciting thing for me is, I think that Hidden Lake will go up quicker, and smoother than my first book. I will be so glad to hit that publish button! And I hope it's fairly soon, because I'm anxious to have Jason and Avery pair up, plus they won't quit talking in the background of everything I've been doing the last few days. They have a story to tell and they aren't waiting patiently for me to get to them. They will have their day soon enough! 

Have a safe, fun, and fulfilling Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, although with it being 2020, I'm pretty sure the Alien Invasion is scheduled for tomorrow. I'm kidding. Probably.

The Ghost of Forlorn Lane

 

The Learning Curve

Everything that has lead up to the publishing of my first book has been an experience in tremendous growth, learning, and a lot of trial by error. Let me start this off right, and thank my Dear Friend, and fellow author, Jayne Townsley for all of her mentoring and the valuable hours she took away from her own projects to help me get this far. I love her so much. My life would have taken a completely different road without her. Even this blog wouldn't exist, so Thank You for being there for me for 30 years.

And with every new thing comes a bit of a learning curve, and I am still learning to climb the ropes. Even more valuable, is that I'm learning with every experience and I'm definitely growing. Let me give you a huge example: Yesterday I received a copy of my paperback, The Ghost of Forlorn Lane. My excitement of seeing my book in print for the first time lived as long as the time it took me to flip to the back page, looking for the acknowledgements. Before I could read it, I saw the last page of the last chapter- and there are I saw 2 type-O's just a few sentences apart! So I ran the manuscript through my editing program...and low and behold! 10 mistakes it hadn't caught before I hit publish!

A year ago...Oh I'd have screamed and pitched a fit. Yesterday, I laughed and chalked it up to a lesson learned. I'd had the opportunity to order a draft before the book came out. I declined to my own folly. Lesson learned! I wont be making that mistake again! Of course I hope that in the near future I will be able to afford such luxuries as paying for a professional editor,  but until that happens, I need to realize that it doesn't matter if my eyes are burnt out. One last read-through even when I think I'm ready is probably a really good idea. But it also doesn't do any good to pitch a fit, because I can't change the fact that the first 20 people who ordered my book have to live with my errors.

So today, even though I was supposed to be working on Book #3 in The J Club series, I will be editing Forlorn for the 99th time and I'm not going to grumble about it.