Editing, Formatting, Cursing

Things are rapidly heating up in Writing World - I had a few wonderful souls come over last week to help me read through Steam on the Horizon for typos, grammatically awkward sentences, periods meandering where they shouldn't go, and all other matter of boo-boos:

Featured: my mom, my oldest brother Seth, and my friend Matt, all studiously at work. Erasmus is filling in as Editor in Chief and helping by whining a lot because he is not getting enough attention.

Because I wanted everyone to focus on sentence structure and punctuation, not plot and organization, I took my manuscript and made a spectacular mess on the floor.

Then I had everyone pick up random sheets of paper to read them out of order. I also advised them to read each page backwards, starting with the last paragraph and working up from there. My mom amused us by occasionally reading the last line of one page, then the top line of the next page she had in her stack, the resulting sentence usually comically mangled.

Once this was done, I set to work correcting all issues and making a final copy. However, there is no rest for the weary for I had to set to work at formatting the manuscript for Kindle. Kindle has a clear formatting guide and the work was tedious but not difficult: I mainly had to take out the manual indentations and replace them with automatic ones. All was going fine and dandy until I turned my attention to the table of contents: for Kindle, you need to have an active Table of Contents that is hyperlinked to each chapter heading. Kindle thoughtfully provided this Microsoft guide to making active Table of Contents, and I urge you to look at this link and see if you can pull any moiety of sense out of it. I hazily stumbled through it for almost an hour, making no progress but a lot of mistakes until in desperation I turned to this extremely helpful thread on the Kindle Publishing Community page which explained the process. Boom - about ten minutes of work and I have a correct table of content!

I am currently waiting for my graphic artist to color in the cover - here is the latest version he sent me. Pretty awesome, huh?


My goal is to have the Kindle e-book available by the end of the month! Basically, I need to get the cover finished, buy an ISBN number, finish any editing to the manuscript, then get it up on Amazon. Exciting, exciting!