Boy oh boy, today was a day that illustrated the great peril of beta readers.
About three weeks ago I received a manuscript of one of the new Lantham books from my oldest and most weather-eyed beta reader. It came in right under the publication wire, and most of the stuff she caught was the normal garden-variety continuity stuff that she’s extremely good at.
She also caught a flawed premise. A simple little thing…and it was one I’d based almost half the novel on.
As soon as I found the note, I knew I was in trouble. I decided to postpone publication and stew about whether or not I was going to listen to it. If I didn’t listen to it, I could push two books out the door very quickly–which is what we’d been planning on.
After a couple weeks of sitting on it, though, I knew I had to listen. It might only throw a tenth of the readers out of the story, but that’s a tenth of readers I might lose on Lantham forever.
So, today, I spent three shifts going over the manuscript. I thought it would take one, but this premise is embedded so deeply in the story that I am having to go through with a fine tooth comb.
It’ll probably take another full day to finish up all the changes, and then one more to print the book out, and go through it with Kitty once more with a red pencil to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
In between that, I had to deal with compliance filings for the corporation. It’s not the first corporation I’ve owned, not even the first one I’ve run, but it’s the first one where I’ve been point on the compliance stuff, and there is a learning curve involved.
So, I didn’t get to the Great Book In Question and writing until well after 3am, when I as already pretty damn fried. I didn’t get much done, but I kept my toe in.
So, here’s the damage:
Starting word count for writing: 20,883
Final word count for the day: 21,825
20,883 / 120000 words
jdsawyer
After a childhood in academia, J. Daniel Sawyer declared his independence by dropping out of high school and setting off on a series of adventures in the bowels of the film industry, the venture capital culture of silicon valley, surfing safaris, bohemians, burners, historians, theologians, adventurers, climbers, drug dealers, gangbangers, and inventors before his past finally caught up to him.
Trapped in a world bookended by one wall falling in Berlin and other walls going up around suburbia and along national borders throughout the world, he rediscovered his deep love of history and, with it, and obsession with predicting the future as it grew aggressively out of the past.
To date, this obsession has yielded over thirty books and innumerable short stories, the occasional short film, nearly a dozen podcasts stretching over a decade and a half, and a career creating novels and audiobooks exploring the world through the lens of his own peculiar madness, in the depths of his own private forest in a rural exile, where he uses the quiet to write, walk on the beach, and manage a production company that brings innovative stories to the ears of audiences across the world.
For news and free stories, sign up for his occasional newsletter. Or find his contact info, podcasts, and more on his home page at http://www.jdsawyer.net
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