Snow Day!

Western MA where I live is under a winter storm warning. Yesterday is was near 50 degrees and sunny. Today the snow has arrived as f6AM. With 1-3 inches per hour predicted, a foot of snow by noon, Kelly and I have chosen to stay home on the mountain since leaving when they have not even begun to think about plowing or sanding and salting is a foolhardy venture.

Therefore, today is a writing day!

Have just completed a revision of the text of Life Skills, cleaning up some punctuation oversights, and correcting one name I got wrong in the bonus Christmas story with the same characters that's included at the end. I had given Remy and Lissa's son one of his cousin's names in error in one sentence and just noticed that with a recent reread.

I'm also going back and starting chapters lower in the page as per the suggestion of a Writer's Digest judge from last year's Self Published Novel contest. I just started self publishing in the middle of 2015 when my primary goal was just to convert all the manuscripts cluttering my house to book form. I really didn't give much thought to interior aesthetics. I was more concerned about each separate interior element, not their placement on the age, but now I can go back and standardize them. The stories themselves have been well-received, and that was my primary goal- to put some entertaining stories out there for readers to enjoy. This year, while I have a number of novels in a holding pattern on the dining room table, I will go back and fix up the interiors, moving those chapter headings down on the pages in the novels, and making the individual story titles larger, and maybe starting them a little lower on the page. That was the basic issue that was pointed out from the judges. It's already been remedied in Black King Takes White Queen and Black Knight, White Rook, and 13, my three most recent books.

Using CreateSpace, I can pull my books, make the fixes I want to make and have the books back in the marketplace within three days- a very small blip on the radar. You just can't do that with major publishers and many other self publishing platforms. I like that independence and being able to continue to do little tweaks to my work if needed.

Lots to accomplish today- so I'd better get to it!