Baked Summer

Xandra — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:51:20 +0000

Yes. My posting has drastically and tragically plummeted. Sadly, it’s because I don’t really have much to say–I tend to keep my uninteresting bits offline so that I’m not actively boring people as I go along. My goal is to make the world a more interesting place, not fill it up with boring crap nobody cares about. Yes, you may thank me for that.

But I did figure that the six of you who might be looking for an update of what life’s been like on Planet X(andra).

It’s been hot and muggy, and overscheduled with activities to stave off school-age boredom, spliced between moments of ten-minute writing sprints, stolen from the jaws of inactivity and enervation. Now, in between this, I have been attempting to follow the progress of the ebook/epublishing world, along with traditional publishing’s almost-certainly-imminent demise (you know, the same one that’s been predicted for almost a century, video killed the radio star and all that), and I’ve come up with some interesting observations:

Writers are still worried about the effect of ebook/digital edition piracy.
Publishers are more worried, but less inclined to look at the underlying cause, or solutions that don’t involve going head to head with end-users.
Readers are still irritated that they can’t get their reading material at the price they want to pay for it, when they want it, and in the format in which they want to read it.
It’s still a hell of a lot of work to write a book.
It’s still a hell of a lot of work to get anyone to care that you’ve written a book.
It’s still a hell of a lot of work to do anything in 140 characters or less.

Coming soon, I’ll be making an announcement about where my career is going (not that you care) and where I’m taking my writing (that, you might care a little bit more about). In the meantime, I’m writing, I’m creating, and I’m kinda melting a little. Wear your sunscreen when you go out, and always remember to keep drinking water. Much like plot points, it keeps the wheels turning.

Edits Away!

Xandra — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:36:10 +0000

Surprisingly, it took me a week to get through the copy edits of Jolly Rogered. I’m very happy to be working with the same editor I had with Alien Communion–she’s a grammatical nitpicker and I’m down with that. Plus, it gave me a chance to catch a rather glaring error I had on page one, no less (yikes!). Now, I’m one of those authors who obsesses over a manuscript before it even goes out to submission. I go over a finished manuscript with a fine-toothed comb at least three times before it gets sent out. First I read it for flow, changing stuff here and there if it sounds awkward or stumpy. Then I go through it looking for things like commas, misspellings, missing or dropped words, too many “-ly” or “just” or any other repetitive “pet words” I tend to adopt through a manuscript. Finally, I go through for formatting, removing extra spaces, making sure all my scene breaks break the same, and making sure that my chapters end with a page break and new chapters are properly pushed down the page however far they’re supposed to be pushed down. And then I give it another once-over after I’ve saved it, just to make sure the file conversions go through properly.

And I still missed half a sentence in the course of things. On the first page. Awful, huh? Then, in the course of edits, at one point, I saved and closed the file for the night. The next day, I reopened the file and found out that my straight quotes/smart quotes settings had been reversed. Cue Xandra frantically combing through the entire story looking at every single quote.

And to top that off, I just realized, I forgot to put the blurb at the top of the document. Cue Xandra’s hair falling out. Head, meet desk.

Xandra Gregory » Writing

Baked Summer

Edits Away!